This week we’re going to take a brief break from our series on hoplites (I, II, IIIa, IIIb) to address a broader question in how we understand the mechanics of warfare with contact weapons, which is the mechanics of the concept of a ‘battle pulse.’ This notion, that front lines in contact might occasionally withdraw to catch their breath, replace wounded men at the front or simply to relieve the psychological pressure of the fighting keeps coming up in the comments and is worth addressing on its own. Because while it is an important question for understanding any kind of contact warfare (because ‘pulse’ proponents insist on the pulse as being a general feature of contact warfare, not restricted to any particular culture), it is both very relevant to understanding hoplites, but also emerged as an extension of the argument about othismos that extended into Roman warfare.
There is something of an irony that we are briefly disengaging from our discussion of hoplites to discuss if hoplites briefly disnegaged from battle.
So our question here is, “was the fighting at the point of contact between two formations of heavy infantry a continuous run of fighting or did it proceed in pulses and bursts and if the latter, of what nature might they have been?” I should note that the normal expression here is to describe the sparring at the line of contact as a ‘series of duels’ but anyone who has watched or participated in experiments in contact-line fighting will immediately recognize they are not ever a ‘series of duels’ as any given combatant on the front moving into measure is entering measure of several enemies and so may attack or be attacked by any of them (and indeed, striking the fellow to the left or right of the fellow in front of you, catching them unawares, is often useful). So the line of contact is not a series of 1-on-1s but rather a rolling series of ‘several-on-severals’ with each man having his own set of ‘several,’ depending on the length of the weapons used.
Now before we rush in, I want to make a clarification of two terms I am going to use here that might otherwise be confusing. I am going to make a distinction here between ‘measure‘ and ‘contact.’ This is not some well-established distinction, so I am bending these terms a bit to make clear a different that I think matters. When I say measure here, I mean the reach of the contact weapons the men have, how far they can actually deliver a strike. That’s going to vary a bit based on the weapons they have, but it’s going to be around 1-2 meters.1
When I say contact what I mean is a bit looser: two formations standing a few yards apart might be out of measure, but they are certainly in contact in that neither can maneuver freely and the men in the front of both must be focused on their enemies directly forward because anyone could dash into measure to strike at any time. For these units to move out of contact, I’d argue they need to back up a fair bit more, perhaps out to something like ‘javelin reach’ which with the heaviest of javelins might be around 20-25 meters. As we’re going to see, there’s a big difference between being just outside measure at perhaps 2 or 3 meters away and being at ‘javelin range’ at say, 15 meters away. But to be clear: measure here is the closer proximity, contact is the looser, more distant proximity.
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Whence the Pulse
We ought to begin with a brief history of the concept of the ‘battle pulse’ in ancient warfare and fortunately this can be quite brief.
As you will recall from our historiography on hoplites and Michael Taylor’s guest post on the book, John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) had quite an impact. It inspired Victor Davis Hanson to essentially replicate the approach in writing Western Way of War, kicking off the modern period of hoplite debates, but it also had imitators in the study of the Roman army, most notably Adrian Goldsworthy. Now I think it is worth noting that is something of an important delay here: when Adrian Goldsworthy goes to write The Roman Army at War, 100 BC – AD 200 (1997), WWoW (1989) has been out for nearly a decade and while the full-throated heterodox vision of Myths and Realities hadn’t arrived yet, it was clearly coming. By this point, in particular, Peter Krentz, writing article after article, had punched some pretty significant holes in elements of orthodoxy, including the shoving-othismos. So when Goldsworthy (and Philip Saban, working at the same time) go to apply a Keegan-style Face of Battle approach to the Romans, they are doing so downstream of the hoplite debate.
And so in a sense you want to understand Goldsworthy and Sabin (and Zhmodikov, to whom we will come shortly) as essentially the extension of hoplite heterodoxy into the Roman sphere; you can see this, I think, quite clearly in their writing (and in turn they are relied upon and cited by more recent hoplite heterodox writers). Except, of course, the scholarship on Roman warfare never had anything remotely as rigid or implausible as the ‘strong’ orthodox hoplite model, so the modifications to our understanding of Roman battle that these fellows offer are more modest.2
The starting point of this burst (dare we say ‘pulse?’) of Roman-legion-heterodoxy is P. Sabin, “The Mechanics of Battle in the Second Punic War” BICS 67 (1996), followed very rapidly be the aforementioned A. Goldsworthy The Roman Army at War, 100 BC – AD 200 (1997) and then clarified and restated with Sabin, “The Face of Roman Battle” JRS 90 (2000). Essentially Sabin raises the question first, noting that our sources often describe Roman battles in the Middle and Late Republic as lasting several hours (typically one to three) and noting that neither the number of casualties described nor the limits of human endurance would be consistent with a continuous exchange of sword blows for three hours. Hence, Sabin figures, the Romans must have moved in and out of contact, which in turn also helps him make sense of how battles in the Second Punic War seemed so often involve a formation getting ‘pushed’ backwards (not literally, of course) significant distances to create pockets or holes without collapsing. I should note that Sabin doesn’t really get into how far out of contact these movements might be.
Goldsworthy then brings to this problem the work of S.L.A. Marshall in Men against Fire (1947).3 Marshall had argued that only a small portion of soldiers in WWII had actually used their weapons, an extension of Ardant du Picq’s should-be-more-famous maxim, “Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second.”4 Goldsworthy sought to apply this insight to Roman combat and argued that likewise in the front line of a Roman legion, many men, indeed “the majority of soldiers” even in the front rank must have done essentially no meaningful fighting, mostly staying safe behind their shields.5 It seems worth noting that this insight is being applied by analogy – no one ever had a chance to study contact warfare in this way – and so while I think there is an insight here going back to Ardant du Picq, it is not clear to me that the straight-forward application of very modern evidence of combat participation with guns can be applied to combat with contact weapons without considerable hazards. Goldsworthy also imagines Roman maniples – the basic maneuver unit of the legion in battle – more as ‘clouds’ of men fighting (a kind of presaging of van Wees’ skirmishing hoplites) rather than a coherent mass with men having a specific, assigned place in the formation. Instead, braver individuals might hype up the whole group to make a big push into contact, bringing the ‘cloud’ of soldiers forward, but men were equally able to hang back in the ‘cloud’ because there isn’t much sense of an assigned place.
But how to keep that up for a few hours?
The solution was the ‘battle pulse.’ Sabin imagines Roman battle as a “natural stand-off punctuated by period and localized charges into contact.”6 In this vision entire Roman maniples might functionally withdraw to javelin range for extended periods to catch their breath, exchange some missiles and recover. This is, in theory, a separate process from the Roman triple acies having the second (principes) and third (triarii) ranks move forward to take over the fight.7
So to be clear, what is being described here when we talk about ‘battle pulses’ is an action on the front line that consists of pulses and lulls, where in the lulls, the two lines withdraw out of measure (well out of measure, by implication) to momentarily rest and reconstitute, before the ‘pulse’ when one side rushes back into contact, precipitating another round of fighting.
This vision of battle then acquired key support with A. Zhmodikov, “Roman Republican Heavy Infantrymen in Battle (IV-II Centuries B.C.)” Historia 49.1 (2000). Prior to Zhmodikov, the general model for Roman infantry combat was ‘volley-and-charge:’ the hastati and principes advanced and hurled their pila at the outset of an engagement before closing in for a decisive action with swords. Zhmodikov instead pulls together all of the evidence for javelin use and argues that pila remained in use over the whole battle. This was in the moment pretty important because it solved a problem that Goldsworthy and Sabin faced which is that our ancient sources on battles almost never describe anything resembling the extended pause between pulses: we get pushes in the sources but not very often do we hear ‘lulls’ described (in stark contrast to their frequency in sources for gunpowder warfare, I might note). When a force is described as moving backward, it is generally because they are routing or being pushed, not because they are mutually disengaging. Zhmodikov’s article thus promised to provide an evidentiary basis that the Goldsworthy-Sabin ‘pulse’ model otherwise lacked, albeit quite indirectly so (‘these guys throw lots of javelins, so there must be pauses’ is not the same as ‘the sources tell us there are pauses.’)
But note that Goldsworthy and Sabin are seeking to explain Roman combat evidence and to do that they have resorted to general arguments about human endurance and psychology because they do not have much direct source evidence for the lulls in their pulse model (by contrast, I’d argue, the pulse itself – the ‘push’ – is attested). Consequently, this is a theory developed to explain Roman warfare, which was because of the lack of direct testimony in the sources is instead posited as a general rule of combat (since the only argument available is one from human endurance and psychological capability), from where it then gets applied to hoplites and dismounted knights and Landsknechte and so on. So we have to discuss it in this Roman context, but with a key warning: Greeks are not Romans and the Roman tactical and broader institutional military systems were not very much like Greek ones. Or, as Ardant du Picq quips:
The Gaul, a fool in war, used barbarian tactics. After the first surprise, he was always beaten by the Greeks and Romans.
The Greek, a warrior, but also a politician, had tactics far superior to those of the Gauls and the Asiatics.
The Roman, a politician above all, with whom war was only a means, wanted perfect means. He had no illusions. He took into account human weakness and he discovered the legion.
But this is merely affirming what should be demonstrated.
(It is not, in fact, clear to me that ‘The Greek’ had superior tactics to ‘the Asiatics’ by which Ardant du Picq means the Persians. The Macedonians certainly did, but that’s a separate question).
What Pulse
So given that scholarship, why aren’t my discussions of hoplite tactics or, indeed, Roman tactics, full of discussions of pulses?
Because I don’t think they were full of pulses, or more correctly, I don’t think they were full of what I am going to call macro-pulses, but they did include lots of what I am going to call micro-pulses, because I think it is important to distinguish between the two.
In a micro-pulse, what we’re really describing is ‘withdrawing to measure’ – the combatants separate not a huge amount, but just a few steps outside of the reach of their weapons (striking distance here is termed ‘measure’ so moving ‘into measure’ means moving into an opponent’s striking range (to strike yourself) and so too ‘out of measure.’) I don’t think two opposing lines locked shields against each other and stayed in measure for minutes or hours on end. That doesn’t seem physically or psychologically possible. It would produce the casualty problem Sabin identifies and psychologically, as Ardant du Picq points to, men are going to want to pull out of reach of their opponents weapons and that psychological force is going to become swiftly overpowering. Anyone who watches combat sports or HEMA sparring, as an aside, can see this tendency for fighters to pull out of measure but remain ‘in contact’ (close enough to move back into measure at any moment) for themselves.
So I have no problem with the ‘micro-pulse,’ and indeed, I think they must have been continually happening down the line, with men or groups of men stepping forward into measure to deliver one or two strikes (and likely take a few in return) before backing out. And of course that pattern might also serve to conserve the men’s stamina, because the periods of really intense physical action – the throwing of blows or blocks – might be interspersed with longer periods of watching and smaller probing strikes. I admit, it would be really interesting to see how long a set of reasonable fit reenactors could keep up this kind of pulsing fight, never withdrawing much more than a few steps beyond measure. The key would be running the experiment as near to exhaustion as possible, because we ought to expect battle to push men to the very limits of endurance as they struggle to survive.8
The broader question then is the macro-pulse, where we imagine the lines truly break contact to the point where they are far enough apart that men cannot dash forward back into measure quickly. Now Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov don’t, to my reading, draw a distinction between these two sorts of pulses, so it is hard to tell which they mean, but when they talk about extended javelin exchanges late in battles or lulls long enough to switch out wounded or fatigued men I read that as a macro-pulse (or more correctly a ‘macro-lull‘). To the degree that these authors actually intend what I’ve defined above as a micro-pulse, then I don’t think I have any disagreement with them on this point. But instead what they seem to imagine is a battle that consists primarily of macro-lulls, punctuated by micro-pulses, where formations spend a lot of time at ‘javelin reach’ of each other (so separated by perhaps 10 or 20 yards instead of 10 or 20 feet).
Critically, such a large disengagement requires the whole formation to move. A micro-pulse can work by having the front ranks simply accordion into the back ranks, closing the ‘vertical’ distance between them, but a macro-pulse requires the rear ranks to really back up and critically for men to keep backing up after contact is broken and thus there is no immediate pressure from the enemy (because the macro-pulse also requires the enemy not to advance back to the edge of measure). Indeed, Sabin seems to imagine it is in the context of these macro-pulses that the Roman changing out of battle lines occurs, so we are really backing up quite a bit.
Fundamentally, the macro-pulse exists in tension then (via Zhmodikov) with a volley-and-charge model (which has no trouble incorporating the ‘micro-pulse’ – no one has ever suggested Roman soldiers did anything like a shoving-othismos). The macro-pulse model also generally asserts more flexible physical formation, approaching ‘clouds’ or ‘mobs’ of soldiers, rather than a single formation with assigned places and it isn’t hard to see how that makes sense if this formation is supposed to pulse forward and backwards; by contrast the older vision of volley-and-charge assumes a regular, somewhat rigid formation, not infinitely rigid as we’ll see, but there is at least the notion of a block of men who are intended for the most part to maintain relative position. In essence, this macro-pulse model assumes that these fellows are doing something closer to what we might call ‘dense skirmishing’ in ‘clouds’ rather than formations spending most of their time well out of measure for contact weapons. You can see how this works as a continuation of the hoplite-as-skirmisher ‘strong’ heterodox vision.
To put it bluntly, I think micro-pulses happen and are in evidence in the sources, however I think macro-pulses – situations where the two lines truly disengage for a period without either routing– seem very fairly rare and the source evidence for them as frequent occurrences is actually quite thin.
The Lull In the Pulse
And it seems like from some quarters when I express this view there is a degree of incredulity that I would ‘go against the scholarship’ on an issue that is treated as ‘solved.’ Which is odd to me because it seems clear that significant parts of the Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov thesis have been softened or even overturned.
An effort to find Goldsworthy’s pulses-and-lulls in the sources was mounted by Sam Koon, Infantry Combat in Livy’s Battle Narratives (2010).9 Koon set out to find the lulls though it is striking that the clearest example of a lull is also obviously exceptional: the two-part battle at Zama (202), where the ‘lull’ is very openly and visibly created by the recall of the hastati behind the next line and the re-ordering of the formation, rather than by a pulse-and-lull model; we’ll come back to this. And there is certainly some openness to this model. I am stuck, for instance by two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World (2013), eds. B. Campbell and Lawrence Tritle: Michael Sage’s chapter (“The Rise of Rome”) which accepts the Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov model and Brian Campbell’s chapter (“Arming Romans”) which implicitly rejects it, asserting a volley-and-charge purpose for the pilum. But problems with the macro-pulse model emerged.
For one, some of the spacing and interval problems that Sabin brushed off as unsolveable (and thus avoids having to account for even flexible-but-real intervals and formations) have been revisited by MT. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic: A Reassessment” Historia 63 (2014) and to a significant degree resolved: there is a regular formation, it has both close-order and modestly-open-order standard intervals and we can also gauge to a significant degree the intervals between maniples. The units of the army (and the army itself) were accordions, not clouds of soldiers and men could – and in the sources do – close up to receive missiles or space out to fight in close combat (typically, we’ll get to this, they do the one and then the other). Most notably, the intervals between maniples are almost certainly – at points explicitly (Sall. Jug. 49.6) – where the light infantry (like the velites, but also any slingers or archers) are, which in turn exposes a real weakness in Zhmodikov, which is a near-total failure to distinguish between heavy infantry throwing their pila and the light infantry velites throwing their lighter javelins (hasta velitaris). The heavy infantry have just two pila, but the velites carry many javelins, which as you might imagine has implications for extended missile exchanges and intended function.
But crucially, Taylor’s approach fatally undermines the notion of the maniple as a ‘cloud’ of soldiers: these men have assigned spaces and semi-standard spacing with clear intervals between them. Polybius – who we must stress describes standard spacing in this army which he was an eyewitness to (18.30.6-8) – is not making it up. Instead, Taylor’s formation is not a cloud but an ‘accordion’ – the men have assigned spaces in which they are free to move around. Each man thus has some flexibility of position, but not infinitely so. That accordion nature can accommodate ‘micro-pulses’ but for a macro-pulse you have the problem above: it requires the rear ranks to back up quite a bit.
That point about distinguishing who is throwing the javelins in turn becomes the cornerstone of J.F. Slavik, “Pilum and Telum: The Roman Infantryman’s Style of Combat in the Middle Republic” CJ 113 (2018) which argues that the velites use showers of their light javelins -to enable the changing out of hastati to principes or triarii. Zhmodikov fails to distinguish the activity of the velites and so as a result his battles of “long exchange of throwing weapons”10 functionally collapses into the action not of Roman heavy infantry, but of Rome’s dedicated light infantry skirmishers, operating in those intervals noted above. I don’t know that Slavik’s philological argument – that we can distinguish what is being thrown and thus who is throwing it by the words used – is airtight, but in the cases where we are told explicitly what kind of soldiers are doing what, his argument holds much better: heavy infantry seem to volley-and-charge, while the velites and other lights may be skirmishing on a more extended basis in the intervals and covering the line-changes.
That said, whereas the heterodox/orthodox line on hoplites has tended to be a hard division into two camps, thinking on the Roman army, has tended much more towards synthesis, in part because the individual questions (role of the pilum, the extent of skirmishing, the presence of ‘pulses,’ the rigidity of the formation) are not treated as forming a coherent orthodox/heterodox, but rather ‘sliding’ values capable of moving independently. You can see this in general treatments, e.g. K.H. Milne, Inside the Roman Legions (2024), which clearly asserts a volley-and-charge model of pilum usage (163) and a clear sense of a “static front line” implying a regular formation (159, 162) with assigned places (166) but frequent micro-pulses (164, 167), but no macro-pulses except for the changing out of lines (167), with most fighting done with swords, not pila and supporting missiles to cover these movements by velites, not heavy infantry (168). It’s a blended position. At some point it is hard to say if that is either a very softened version of volley-and-charge or a softened version of Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov, because we’ve more or less met in the middle.
So What of Battle Pulses?
So I do not think the scholarship at present requires me to adopt the complete Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov model. And, as it is clear, I don’t entirely adopt that model, though I don’t think everything about it is wrong either.
In particular, I do not think macro-pulses, as I’ve defined them, were common, as distinct from the ‘micro-pulse,’ which I think must have been continuously happening, where the lines remain loosely ‘in contact’ (within maybe a few yards of measure) or the ‘line change’ (from hastati to principes to triarii), probably covered not by pila but by velites throwing their hastae velitares.
Now I am not going to reproduce Koon’s book going in the other direction in a blog post – and in any case, one of the authors above is already working on a monograph on Roman tactics which I shall not spoil here – but I want to give a few data-points as to why I lean this way.
The first is the soldier’s oath Livy reports before Cannae (Livy 22.38.4), “that they would not go away nor drop back from their posts [ex ordine] neither for flight or fear, unless to pick up or fetch a weapon, or to strike an enemy or to save a citizen.”11 The word ordo in that sentence (ex ordine) means a row, a line, a series, a rank, an arrangement of things, but it is not a unit and it is certainly not a ‘cloud.’ It is an assigned place that the soldier is bound to. The oath, which Livy represents as customary and regular, makes no sense unless these soldiers have an assigned place in their unit to which they can swear not to leave nor even to shrink back from (non…recessuros, “not to withdraw from, shrink back from, fall back from, give ground”).
Meanwhile, we have a lot of evidence, I’d argue, as to the volley-and-charge nature of pilum use. We get lines like, “When he [the Roman commander] was leading the men-formed-up from the camp, scarcely before they cleared the rampart, the Romans threw their pila. The Spaniards ducked down against the javelins thrown by the enemies, then rose themselves to throw [their own] which when the Romans, clustered together as they are accustomed, had received with shields densely packed, then, with foot against foot and swords drawn, the matter was begun” (Livy 28.2.5-6), which is just a very clear statement of a volley-and-charge action, the throwing of pila by the Romans in the perfect (coniecerunt, ‘perfect’ meaning ‘completed’) tense: it happened (once) and then stopped.12 Further examples of volley-and-charge in Livy are not hard to come by.13 Heck, Tacitus has a Roman general lay out the sequence in an order to his men: “with pila having been thrown then with shields and swords continue the butchery and slaughter” (Tac. Ann. 14.37).14
Most striking are the incidents where the Romans don’t throw their pila at all. Livy, for instance, has one general, the dictator Aullus Cornelius Cossus, tell his men to drop their pila and then note that the enemy (the Volsci who will have fought in the same manner as the Romans), “when they shall have thrown their missiles in vain” will have to come to close quarters where he expects the Roman line will triumph (Livy 6.12.8-9). Conversely, Q. Pubilius Philo’s troops are so eager on the attack that they drop their pila to engage directly with swords (Livy 9.13.2, cf. also 7.16.5-6, this happens more than once). Likewise, Julius Caesar reports in one battle that, “Thus our men, the signal having been given sharply made an attack on the enemies and they charged the enemies so suddenly and rapidly that a space for throwing pila at the enemy was not given. So throwing away their pila, at close-quarters they fought with gladii” (Caes. BGall. 1.52.3-4). It happens in Sallust too (Sall. Cat. 61.2).
If these guys think they are regularly going to back off out of close-combat to throw javelins for a bit, why do they drop their javelins (pila) the moment they come to close quarters? Surely, if having a ‘macro-lull’ was normal, they would want to save these weapons – at least in the back ranks – to be available in that event. Instead, the expectation is clearly not that the unit will back off after it has engaged nor that men in the rear ranks are throwing pila over the heads of the men in front of them (the danger of which is noted in some ancient sources, e.g. Onasander 17).
Now for the man in the front the answer is pretty obvious that pila are quite heavy and you can’t sword-fight while carrying them and a shield and so they have to go if youa re coming to close contact. But note that these lines don’t say “and then the front rank dropped their pila” but rather clearly whole units do. Which really only makes sense if these fellows imagine that once they are going into contact, they are not going to break contact for more missile-throwing or just to sit outside of contact.
We might also consider what we know about Pydna. Now this relies a fair bit on Plutarch and Plutarch is often not the best source on battles, but on Pydna he is working from some known sources (Scipio Nasica Corculum’s writings and likely the account of Polybius) and his vignettes are instructive. By the time the general, Lucius Aemilius Paullus is on the field – this was, you will recall, an unplanned engagement – the armies are already to close combat (Plut. Aem. 18.4) and we’re given a really physical description that the sarisae of the Macedonians were fixed in the shields of the Romans (19.1) so we know he intends us to understand these units are very much in contact (though we’d say that while the Macedonians are in measure, the Romans are not). Certainly no one has backed out of contact.
Then we get two interesting passages which I think we might say are something like micro-pulses: a Paelignian chucks his unit’s standard into the enemy to compel them to make a push (20.1-5) and after taking heavy losses, they’re pushed back but evidently still to some degree in contact (perhaps pursued) because – as Michael Taylor notes in his reconstruction of the battle – they continue to hold up the Macedonian agema which would otherwise flank the legion. Meanwhile we also get Marcus Cato (son of Cato the Elder), who loses his sword and has to gather up his friends to push forward to retrieve it (21.1-5). In both cases these are units that we have to understand are in contact, not back at javelin reach, where an individual is rallying men to push forward in an effort to force the enemy back: Marcus Cato’s effort succeeds, whereas the Paelignians are thrown back (but buy essential time for the main Roman force). Both of these events have to involve units that are outside of measure, but which do not seem – note the above line about pikes touching Roman shields – to be fully out of contact.
The battle is won, as Livy (44.41.6-9) and Plutarch (20.7-10) both note, by having the Roman maniples engage separately, exploiting disruptions in the phalanx as it advanced. What I find striking here is that our sources – both relying on the (lost) Polybian account of the battle – evidently think that this ‘engage at discretion’ order needed to be given as an order (Plut. Aem. 20.7-9); dropping well back out of contact was evidently not a thing units normally were not supposed to do on their own. If engaging at discretion like this was the standard way of fighting, there would be no point in Plutarch having Aemilius order it, or Livy noting the unusual nature of many separate engagements.
We can contrast what we’re told about the Battle of Zama, which gives us a very clear macro-scale battle lull, albeit an unusual one (Polyb. 15.13-14). Both armies are drawn up (after Roman fashion) in multiple battle lines; the first lines of the two armies, the Carthaginian mercenaries and the Roman hastati engage in a fierce close-combat fight, but separation doesn’t occur as a result of a macro-battle-pulse, it occurs because the mercenary line collapses after the failure of the Carthaginian second line to move up to support it (Polyb. 15.13.3-4; the impression is psychological collapse, as Polybius is noting the cheering and encouragement of the so-far entirely unengaged Roman second line as decisive). The mercenaries collapse into the main Carthaginian line, which does not admit them, leading to a mercenary-on-Carthaginian engagement in which the fleeing mercenaries are slaughtered by their employers (Polyb. 13.5-6), which in turn now leaves the field of gore and wreckage between the Romans and their enemies (Polyb. 14.1-2). Scipio doesn’t want to advance over that so – and this is the thing – “recalling those still pursuing of the hastati by trumpet” [emphasis mine] Scipio reforms his ranks (Polyb. 14.4).
What is significant to me here is that the disengagement of the hastati is not voluntary or automatic or natural, but in fact requires a trumpet signal: Scipio has to order an army-wide ‘pause’ in order to reorganize his units (really, he is ordering the ‘change out’ of the hastati as a way to halt their pursuit), which he can do in part because the peculiar situation where Hannibal (himself seemingly mimicking Roman tactics he has by this point so much experience with) has not yet committed his main line of infantry. This thus isn’t an organic ‘macro-lull’ so much as it is both armies attempting to the classic Roman hastati to principes line change, with the Romans doing it more successfully because their fussy tactical system creates lanes, whereas Hannibal needs his mercenaries to run all the way around his second (unbroken) line to get off of the field.
I think this episode should also give us some meaningful pause when trying to apply Roman tactical thinking outside of Roman contexts. The Roman system of maintaining multiple complete lines of heavy infantry, one in contact initially and two out of contact is, if not unique, certainly unusual. Likewise, a formation with wide, relatively regular intervals to enable the front battle line to be ‘changed out’ in a regular fashion is again, if not unique, highly unusual. Efforts to mimic that flexibility without the same complex and unusual tactical system often went badly, as with Hannibal’s mercenaries at Zama or, famously, the French dispositions at Agincourt, where an advanced cavalry force disrupted the two main lines of infantry attack15 as they advanced and then those lines, with no way to interchange, stacked up on each other to their ruin.
But it is also indicative of how unusual a ‘macro-lull’ was: this one only happens because Scipio Africanus gives an order to recall his front line as the enemy’s front ranks were breaking. Once again, the reason the armies end up separated after a ‘pulse’ of violence is not because that was the normal way these armies fought but because one general had specifically and somewhat unusually ordered it.
The other example of a large-scale macro-lull is equally instructive: Appian BC 3.68. Appian is describing an engagement between two veteran Roman legions at the Forum Gallorum (43 BC). Reading the passage, I think it is obvious we should not take the engagement as anything like typical: they fight in silence, no battle cries but also cries or shouts even as men were wounded and killed. Each man who falls is instantly replaced, every blow was supposedly on target. And in this context of a literary description of inhuman mechanical precision in battle, we’re told “when they were overcome by fatigue they drew apart from each other for a brief space to take breath, as in gymnastic games, and then rushed again to the encounter.” Immediately after that, we’re told the other soldiers present were taken by amazement at the sight and sound of it. It is a description that is clearly heavily embroidered, about a battle where Appian is writing nearly two centuries after the fact, about an army that is supposed to seem superhuman in its actions through the motif of presenting the soldiers as treating the battle like gymnastic games. I do not think we can draw secure conclusions about actual battlefield practice from such a passage alone.
After this, I should note, we swiftly begin running out of examples of clear ‘macro-lulls’ in Roman battles. Plenty of units being ‘pushed’ (discussed below) or collapsing under pressure or armies being flanked experiencing crowd collapse under continuous pressure (e.g. Cannae), but almost no examples of units engaging and then backing off and then moving back to re-engage.
The Roman Face of Battle And Implications for Hoplites
Summing all of this up, what do I think a Roman maniple engaging in pitched battle combat against heavy infantry looks like, given the evidence?
The attack begins with the volley of pila and it sure seems like usually any pila not thrown at this point are discarded, given how often we hear of pila being dropped without being thrown.16 We’ve already discussed the weapon and its performance and so need not belabor the point here.
The hastati follow this with a charge to contact with swords. A few things could happen at this point. One side could collapse, leading to rout and slaughter, of course. Alternately, both sides might stand firm: the Romans are heavily armored and have big shields and many of their opponents have big shields (if generally lighter armor) too, so a lot of strikes are going to not connect, or merely graze targets. Our ancient sources assume quite a lot of non-lethal, non-disabling wounding happening in these battles and we ought to believe them, given shields, armor, and movement. If both sides stay firm then after a few blows we might expect them to ‘accordion’ out to measure as men refuse to stay inside of the ‘killing zone’ a few feet wide running along the line, a ‘micro-lull’ in which the units are still in contact, but much of their front lines are not in measure.
On either side, the soldiers now need to move up to advance into measure in order to strike, but in this model they can do so with just a step or two. Because this is a formation with a regular order, the men in the front cannot simply drop back for fear – recall, they have sworn not to do so – and the eyes of their buddies are upon them, which is one of those things that can get men to fight when they might otherwise not, though one imagines many of the blows are very tentative and a high proportion of the total time here is spent watching and waiting. Sabin is right about that: it basically must be given the relatively low casualties in these periods and the fact that they might stretch on for many minutes even to an hour or more in some cases.
The men in the front are being cheered on by their fellows behind them and at least in the case of the Romans also urged forward by their centurions and it is this context where you get the micro-pulses: individuals or more likely groups of men push forward into measure for a concerted ‘push’ on the enemy line. They’re not literally shoving, of course, but simply moving aggressively into measure to attack – in the case of the Romans they have to move well into measure because they have swords and not spears, so they are relying on their heavy armor and big shield to absorb a strike from the enemy before they can reply. On the other hand, once they get through that range, they are significantly more lethal, better able to strike over or under an enemy’s shield and pierce armor. It’s a ‘high risk, high lethality’ tactical package that the Roman soldier carries, balanced with his heavier-than-typical armor and shield.
Now the enemy can do two things: they can hold firm against this ‘push’ or – seeing friends fall and feeling the danger – they can push back out of measure on their side, backing up to get space. This isn’t a rout yet, cohesion is not broken, they’re just going to back up into the empty space between them and the next man behind them and that man will then back up too to preserve space as the formation accordions in from the front, then accordions out again on the back. This probably isn’t a huge movement – it doesn’t need to be. A quick shuffle of a yard or two is enough to clear well out of measure. At which point the Romans can press again or stop at measure to stabilize.
Now what often happened, what Hannibal is counting on at Cannae, is that this process is going to repeat over and over again, steadily pushing a line backwards without breaking it. The Roman, after all, has the shorter range weapon – he must, on some level, advance or he has to endure ‘potshots’ from longer spears forever. And he can advance, trusting his large shield and heavy armor to absorb a blow or two from his enemy while he pushes into his own, shorter but more lethal measure. So when the enemy backs up, the Romans quickly – perhaps immediately – push right back into measure. A few more foes fall, the enemy backs up again. After all, his enemy lacks that heavy armor and big shield to be so confident in very close quarters and so will want to move away from the Roman with his deadly sword, back to spear’s reach. So long as cohesion holds, each localized ‘push’ is perhaps only gaining a few meters and neither side is breaking contact, but the line is bending and moving. Roman maniples can adapt well to that shifting line; the sarisa-phalanx cannot (thus Pydna).
In this sort of back and forth, I think we need to assume that wounded men (or utterly exhausted ones) can drop back through the ranks, but there’s clearly some shame in so doing, at least for the Romans (remember that oath). But there’s plenty of space with a Roman file width of c. 135cm. Heck, even at a conjectured hoplite phalanx’s 90cm, a hurt man could squeeze back – or be pulled back – by his comrades so long as the formation is hovering at the edge of measure rather than right up on the enemy. Cycling the front rank seems to have never been systematized, however, so I suspect the expectation is that many men in the front ranks will remain there through the whole fight if they’re not wounded.17
Because the line’s movement forward and back is driven mostly by psychology, it is a visible indicator of the more confident side – the side with confidence is pushing into measure, their opponents backing out. For many armies using contact weapons, there’s not much a general can do at this stage even if they see that their line is getting the worst of it, but Roman armies are unusually complex and so the Roman general has an option here if things don’t seem to be going well: he can sound that trumpet to recall the hastati. What I suspect happens here is that the men at the front are going to – still facing the enemy with shields up – quickly shuffle backwards (getting out of measure and moving to exit contact) while the velites (present in the gaps of the formation) shower javelins to give their opponents pause and then everyone breaks for the rear, passing through the intervals of the next line. The enemy cannot charge after them or they’ll run pell-mell into the well-ordered maniples of the principes and be butchered. Surely this must have entailed the loss of some of the hastati, but not many, I’d imagine, with the velites covering (and the velites, very lightly equipped, can easily flee an enemy’s heavy battle line).
The centurions rally the hastati in the safety of the space behind the principes, who now advance and the cycle repeats.
So micro-pulses but not macro-pulses: the lines once in contact don’t break that ‘loose’ contact except to flee, but they do ‘push’ and while there is no general pause in fighting, individually soldiers are not always swinging or being swung at.
What might that mean for a Greek hoplite phalanx? Well quite a few of these elements must substantially drop away. While the Greeks certainly have light infantry, as we’ve discussed they do not have integrated light infantry, nor the retreat lanes or tactical flexibility to use them in the way the Romans do; Greeks are not Romans. Equally, while the phalanx has a bunch of organizational units, it does not have a lot of maneuver units: the whole formation is supposed to move together. So the ability to maintain cohesion moving in and out of contact is going to be significantly less. And there is no way to change out entire battle lines, both because the phalanx is not built to do so and also because there is no second battle line waiting to rotate in any case.
But the other elements, I think, largely remain. No volley of pila (at least, not after the Archaic, but we must assume that earlier Archaic throwing spear fills a similar role to a pilum, a pre-charge volley weapon), but the hoplites charge to contact (as noted last time, either to measure or to impact). But they don’t start shoving, instead accordioning back out and then, as above, the micro-pulses: localized ‘pushes’ in sections of the line. In some cases, you might get the ‘pushing’ effect we see the Romans achieve although it is notable to me that it seems like hoplite armies achieve this effect less (though certainly not never!) and I suspect this is because everyone is working with a spear’s reach and thus a spear’s measure, so no one side is compelled (as the Romans are) to advance impetuously through an opponent’s measure, nor is one side (as Macedonians might) able to relentlessly push an enemy back from beyond their measure. But I don’t think the lines frequently disengaged in the Classical period, because we’re not told that they do so in any source I can think of and because the phalanx would be even less capable of doing a ‘macro-lull‘ than a Roman legion and it seems like the Roman legions almost never did them either.
The consequence of this model – micro-pulses but no macro-lulls – is to a degree to restore the role of heavy infantry as ‘shock’ based contact troops. These men – and I think this is true of hoplites as well – fight in formation, with assigned positions (or something very close to it) that they are expected to maintain for as long as they are able. Once they advance into contact, they do not expect to break contact until one side has won or lost the fight in that part of the line. But they do not stay permanently in measure swinging potentially lethal blows for an hour straight. Instead we might imagine an open space, roughly the width of measure (so a couple of meters), with men lunging or advancing forward to strike and then backing out. Every so often a concerted group of men will push into measure collectively. And sometimes their aggression causes the enemy to back up, leading to the ‘pushing’ effect we’re told about – which happens with no shoving.
But what they are not doing is backing out to go back to skirmishing. The reason so many javelin-wielding line infantry (archaic hoplites, Roman heavy infantry, Iberian and Celtiberian infantry) carry just one or two javelins is that they expect to hurl these immediately before contact to intensify the force of their onset and then not do any more throwing. If these units break contact, it is because they are routing or – in the Roman case only – because they have been recalled to reform behind the next line of heavy infantry. But heavy contact infantry are not skirmishers and so we should not try to extrapolate their behavior entirely from watching the fighting of Dani skirmishers in Papua New Guinea. Our sources resound with assertions and descriptions that heavy infantry worked differently on the battlefield than light infantry and that the two types were not interchangeable.
Hopefully that all clarifies my views on ‘pulses’ and ‘lulls.’ Micro-pulses? Yes. Macro-lulls? Only very rarely, in unusual circumstances.
Now as I write this, I am getting ready to fly out to attend the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot to deliver a keynote on the historical grounding of Tolkien’s view of war. Next week is also the week of Christmas. So there will be no post next week (the 26th), so we’ll be wrapping up our look at hoplites in the New Year.
- Remember to keep in mind not just the length of the fellow’s weapon, but also his arm and also the amount of his weapon, especially for spears, behind his hand as a counter-balance.
- Also, credit where credit is due, Goldsworthy and Sabin are both fully aware of their debt through Keegan to Ardant du Picq. As a result, this debate, though much smaller than its hoplite equivalent, is actually somewhat more aware of its theoretical basis.
- As mentioned previously, it is a broadly known fact among military historians but perhaps not among readers that, “S.L.A. Marshall‘s work is shoddy where it isn’t outright fabrication, but he happens to be right,” though the shoddiness and fabrication was not as well known in the 1990s.
- Again, an openly admitted extension; Philip Sabin knows his Ardant du Picq.
- Goldsworthy op. cit., 222.
- “The Face of Roman Battle,” 16.
- As an aside, the idea that men to the rear are put under less psychological pressure, which Sabin and Goldsworthy argue for, works a lot better for the Romans, where those ‘men to the rear’ are in entirely seperate formations some distance behind, than it does when applied to hoplites (e.g. Konijnendijk (2018), 136) where the ‘men to the rear’ are just the back ranks of the same formation. Indeed, Ardant du Picq, from whom Sabin and Goldsworthy are borrowing this idea, is explicit that it is the great virtue of the Roman way of fighting that it removes its reserves from the psychological pressure, whereas other forms (e.g. hoplites) do not. Another good reason to read Battle Studies.
- As an aside, I will note that the assertions of the physical impossibility of carrying on this kind of fight without substantial lulls is always made without evidence in the writings here cited. Now I don’t have an experimental data either, but I’ll note that some sport activities demand quite a lot of endurance. The longest boxing match ever was seven hours long, marathons can take upwards of two hours to run for well trained athletes, and so on. I am not saying Sabin et al. is wrong about the impossibility of maintaining contact for more than thirty-or-so minutes, because I don’t have any evidence either and they may very well be right. But it is not clear to me that this argument is so obviously true that I must accept it without evidence. I would like to see it proved in an experimental context.
- Note also his chapter, “Phalanx and Legion: the “Face” of Punic War Battle” in A Companion to the Punic Wars, ed. D. Hoyos (2011).
- Zhmodikov, op. cit., 70
- fugae atque fomidinis ergo non abituros neque ex ordine recessuros nisi teli sumendi aut petendi aut hostis feriendi aut civis servandi causa.
- Latin has a way to say the Romans ‘were throwing [continuously]’ rather than ‘they threw’ and Livy is not using it here.
- Livy 7.23, 9.35, 23.29, 32.17, 38.22
- Again, Latin being Latin, there is a clarity to the tenses here. pilis emissis is a perfect passive participle in an ablative absolute, “with pila having been thrown” that is quite clear this action is completed, finished, done as the precondition for the following clause. The pila are not still being thrown, they get thrown, once, in the past and it is done when the next action happens. Can you tell I’ve been teaching Latin this semester?
- There was also a rear-guard and one wonders if the intent here was to recreate a Roman-style triplex acies; if so it was not a success.
- Sabin notes the evidence for pila being used after a charge but it is pretty thin: a specific response to a remarkably deep pike formation (Plut. Sulla 19.6), two instances of spent javelins being picked up (Livy 10.29.6 by reserves coming into contact, not men moving out of it and Sall. BJ 58, the latter a camp defense throwing back enemy missiles, hardly a strong example) and the purported pilum of Marius (Plut. Mar. 25) which we’ve already discussed does not seem to have actually existed. Compared to the far more numerous, frequent and clear evidence of pila being discarded without being used in swift charges, this is pretty thin gruel.
- Otherwise the placement of the officers of the Macedonian sarisa-phalanx in the front rank makes very little sense. And we know that the Macedonian phalanx has fixed positions in it: lochogoi at the front, ouragoi at the back.
I must admit that I’m utterly delighted that a comment thread one week leads to whole lengthy blog post the next.
I think the macro-pulse model is especially unlikely in legion vs. pike phalanx contexts, because the phalanx would have a hell of a time throwing javelins back without disrupting the array of pikes, and I find it hard to imagine them just standing there to get javelins hurled at them. I’d expect it to be difficult for officers to compel them to hold position, even.
Re: Boxing. I will say that the epic boxing matches of ye olden days were back when the rules allowed a man to take a knee as much as he wished, for as long as he wished, to recover his breadth. Back then it was much more about getting someone to quit from the accumulated pain. A lot of professional boxers will tell you that modern fights that go the distance, if really hotly contested, basically feels like dying. And those are “just” 12 rounds x 3 minutes per round, with breaks of contact within rounds and 1 minute formal rest periods in between, often within climate controlled environments.
One reason why the marathon comparison isn’t quite apt is that a lot of the drain is from the adrenaline/stress. Something that would probably feel 10x worse in a lethal combat environment. E.g. why, in stressful situations, your heart racing starts to become such an incredible weight to carry even if you’re not doing anything. So even if, potentially, marathoners are burning more calories, from an exertion standpoint the men undergoing close contact are going to be burning up really quickly.
As someone who is a (pretty decent) marathon runner and a (very mediocre) boxer, the first time I sparred in boxing I thought “I’ve got great endurance from marathon running. I can just go in swinging and the other guy will get winded well before me.”
A minute and a half later I was gasping like a fish out of water. No matter how good shape you’re in fighting will wind you INCREDIBLY quickly unless you spend a good bit of time in the defensive/circling the other guy looking for an opening as you need to be able to catch your breath.
Although the adrenaline burn is a lot less when one is used to the situation (hence why veterans outperform new units so markedly?). As an anecdote, my son’s fencing teacher – near 70 years old, was able to take six or seven fit teenagers through 15-20 minute bouts with only a few minutes break between each, leaving each teenager gasping. Because, he told me ‘I always know what’s going to happen”
It’s partly that a more skilled fighter handles the stress of combat better, but part of it is also that the more skilled fighter moves more efficiently – each individual technique is executed with far less wasted movement. That saves a lot of energy and allows a skilled fighter to outlast a less skilled opponent, even when the less skilled fighter has more endurance on paper.
To build on that, ‘making a decision’ is also a kind of effort that a person can exhaust themselves doing repeatedly. What the old teacher is describing in the quote is an ability to fight without making many actual decisions.
That fencing instructor is probably being _far_ more literal than what laypeople might expect. I’m one of the oldest people in my HEMA club and I often find myself incapable of winning exchanges just by being faster in a first-intention attack, and the tactics that have worked most consistently for me is to do something that draws a predictable response from the opponent, which I’d be prepared to deal with (whether with a parry-riposte, a single-time counterattack, or a pull-short/Nachreissen) ahead of time. That instructor is probably doing something like this at an even higher level, relying on his ability to draw expected responses from the other fencer, which _both_ allows him to move with greater physical efficiency (since he already knows _where_ he should be going next) and reduces the decision-making burden (since he already knows _what_ to do next to deal with the predictable response to his initial action). Of course there’s also the factor that he’s probably better at salami-slicing measure rather than always having to go far, fast, and hard like the young’uns did.
The longest modern fight would probably be the MMA match Gracie v Sakuraba in 2000 at 90 minutes, with 2 minute breaks every 15 minutes. The stakes were high enough that both fighters would continue until they couldn’t, and Gracie only quit when he couldn’t stand up after being kicked in the legs too many times. Sakuraba even fought a second opponent for 15 minutes later that same night.
Rugby might be a useful comparator. 80 minutes of clock time over perhaps 100 minutes of elapsed time. Frequent whole team short breaks between set pieces. Frequent individual or small group pauses when play is on the other side of the pitch. Bursts of running. Bursts of wrestling. Lots of physical contact, often forceful contact.
I think this micro-pulse focus also makes sense of generals (and especially monarchs) leading from the front. You’ve discussed before the limits of historical generalship, and the importance of being seen to act in the way your soldiers expect of you, but it also seems to me that having the general and (and possibly his more elite troops depending on the setting) right at the front would both put more pressure on the average soldier to do the most they could in micro-pulses (the same as the throwing of the standard might inspire such a micro-pulse) but also if the general can lead such a pulse (again, especially if they can do so with less risk due to their better armour, more well trained retainers, etc) then that would inspire confidence, and like you say, that confidence is reflected in more pulses, which by themselves put more pressure on the enemy and lead to a greater chance of victory.
I am curious, do we have more information about the fighting and possible micro vs macro pulses for the medieval era? Or even early modern?
There are not many detailed descriptions or depiction of infantry combat from the early middle ages, and most of them are after the year 900 and heavily influenced by the Latin Classics and Roman art. Most of the Sagas of the Icelanders were written down in the 1200s or later. So a lot of work on for example Iron Age Germanic warfare leaned on books like Hanson’s Western Way of War for a model. Its actually unusual that Roman historians felt confident enough to create their own model but Romans have more to say on the subject than say Babylonians.
Later in the middle ages we have much better sources but I’m not as familiar with the research on how battles worked.
There’s a very interesting bit in the Orkneyina Saga on this – not exactly the most reliable source as it is tied up with a magical standard that grants victory to the side that follows it but death to the man who carries it – but there is a moment where the Earl’s retainers have gotten wind of what is going on and are all refusing to touch the thing, so Earl Sigurd eventually has to rip it from the pole and wrap it around his waist, leading to his own death. But it to my memory quite nicely describes a micro-lull followed by a final, fatal ‘pulse’ forwards by the Earl.
Likewise the poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ ends (the manuscript is incomplete) with Byrhtnoth’s retainers, also in a lull, deciding to go down fighting after the man’s death in the last ‘pulse’.
These are of course literary examples crafted to give space for emotionally impactful character beats rather than accurate descriptions, but I’m not sure they would make much sense other than if the audience expected battles to lull and crescendo repeatedly.
Is there any concrete evidence for the Roman principii retreating to let the hastati have another go? It seems like it should be very beneficial if they did, and you do note the hastati reorganized at the back, so presumably it was to do that?
This feels a bit too binary, between moving just barely out of measure (1-2 meters) and moving out of contact (20-25 meters). Surely “contact” is a spectrum, because “can/can’t hit us with javelins” and “can/can’t catch us with a charge if we let our guard down” are themselves spectrums. Even at 30 meters a commander probably isn’t going to want to have his entire unit turn their backs to the enemy to go flank a different group of enemies or whatever.
Plus, when we hear of one side getting “pushed back”, I often get the impression the ones getting pushed have retreated a pretty good distance without the formation completely collapsing.
Absolutely this is a binary schematic of what must have been a spectrum of being out of measure. I just don’t think the two lines generally disengaged completely.
As for being ‘pushed back’ I think repeatedly pushing the other side out of measure could cause the lines to move very quickly, with one side shuffling forward and the other side shuffling backwards almost continuously without breaking cohesion. That would, obviously, be quite bad, but it isn’t outside the model under the right circumstances.
I mean, to the extent the enemy is close enough that soldiers feel the need to be formed in battle lines at all, as opposed to marching formation or setting up camp, the presence of the enemy is constraining their behavior, and you can argue they aren’t “completely disengaged”. But as you move apart you are going to get more and more freedom to deal with your wounded, rotate lines, or even just catch your breath, even if you still need to keep one eye on the enemy.
I do agree the idea of guys carrying only one or two javelins purposely backing up *for the purpose of skirmishing* is silly.
This is where morale and cohesion come into play. The Carthaginian line and Cannae was able to give ground and bend back without breaking, bolstered by veterans and Hannibal’s presence.
How exactly would this model work with a Roman legion fighting spear-armed infantry over a long period of time? So the two lines collide, then accordion back away to be just out of measure, but now there’s a distance of a few feet where the spearmen can attack the Romans but the Romans are still too far away to use their swords. What stops the front line of the spears from stepping forward just enough to strike the Romans while staying out of sword range? Then the Romans have to either:
-Charge forwards into contact, which is fine but in turn doesn’t square with the hours-long battle model
-Sit at the very edge of spear range, where the distance and heavy armor might keep the spears from being too dangerous but there would be huge psychological pressure from standing around getting hit by the enemy while being unable to strike back
-Continuously move backwards to stay out of range, which would almost certainly lead to a rout in short order
I think the answer is what we see the Romans do against spear and pike formations: drawing courage from large shields and heavy armor, they try to push in, forcing the enemy back and often breaking them. I think the Roman sword-first system is probably a specific effort to produce this behavior and capitalize on the intense tactical and psychological strain it places the enemy under.
Also, fighting a man with a spear when you have a sword is a bit like fighting a man who is taller than you with matched weapons.
From experience as a shorter fencer, you generally *want* a taller opponent to commit to an attack against you that draws him forward – so long as you’re confident you can make it fail – so that you can hit him before he withdraws. Otherwise, an opponent with more reach will usually want to retreat in the face of your attacks to keep you in the “donut of death” where you are in his measure but he is out of yours.
I think a spear-armed infantryman that stepped forward to try to strike a Roman infantryman would probably have a bad time.
I’m almost always on the tall end of the exchange, but my experience is that this is very true in both shorter reach because you’re smaller and shorter reach because you’re using a shorter weapon. The longer weapons, even things which wouldn’t seem like it, like longswords, have a “too close” range which someone with a shorter weapon not only can exploit but often needs to exploit in order to land a strike on the one with the longer weapon.
It’s also mostly not relevant here, but it’s interesting that once that dynamic is in play, having an almost-as-long weapon gets remarkably less useful, to the point that half-swording a longsword (almost making it a very short spear) is more successful at fighting against a spear because it’s easier to block strikes that way on the way through the threat zone than to do it while holding it like a sword. (Leverage works against you trying to parry a spear like it’s a sword thrust, especially if it’s held in two hands.)
We categorically never see the Romans do this.
We see the Romans fail to do this, repeatedly, but not one account ever suggests that a Roman legion could or did win out against a phalanx by simply pushing harder. Instead the accounts routinely describe the Romans giving ground — retreating out of pike range — and turning back on the enemy after the latter lose their order in pursuit.
Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paulus chapter 19 has the Macedonians planting their pikes in the Roman shields, but at Magnesia a few years earlier (or later depending on how you reconstruct the chronology) the Roman infantry did not even dare to approach that close until the phalanx was breaking up under a hail of missiles and its own panicked elephants. The battle of Magnesia was not a glorious day for Roman arms even though they won.
We do see shades of this problem with the Legion vs. Sarissa-Phalanx matches, where the difference in measure and the amount of opponents that can stab you in that measure are both larger.
At Cynoscephalae especially we see Romans have trouble making headway against the formation (until rescued from the rear), because running the gauntlet of spears *uphill* was too hard. Similarly, at Magnesia the action stalls out for a while when everyone except the phalanx is cleared from the field but the Romans have trouble breaking up that phalanx square.
In both cases the Romans don’t rout, which I think comes down to the psychology of the micro-pulses: The Roman tactical system has a more flexible formation than the sarissa-phalanx, where each man can move farther out of their assigned position without disrupting the formation as a whole. That is, each legionary can dash further out as part of a pulse and thus gain more distance when the opponent shuffles back than a pikeman can. This explains why the Romans can keep losing ground without routing – even if they shuffle constantly back out of measure, as long as they keep in formation, the pikemen can’t really take advantage of it with audacious lunges forward.
I need to think on this some more, but now that you’ve laid out your micro-pulse theory in greater detail, I disagree with it far less than I did in the last post. I might even agree with it once I mull it over some more. I’m very glad you’ve laid it all out!
A friend of mine, who’s had about three decades experience in SCA, has repeatedly talked to me about his theory of “minimum comfortable distance” which maps well with your micro-pulse theory. The idea being that most of the time, fighters naturally are at the extreme range of measure, occasionally probing with glancing blows, to feel like they’re Doing Something (TM), and need to either work up courage or be ordered/inspired by officers to move into effective measure. His theory goes that the primary advantage of the Macedonians was that pikes allowed them to push hoplites out of position, keeping the phalangites in a psychologically comfortable distance while putting the hoplites in measure.
And then the Romans just close in and kill people.
Enjoy the podcast trip and the break. I have the article by Slavik but have not yet seen the book by Koon. I agree that “a series of duels” is a better metaphor for something like storming a redoubt in Russia in 1812 than modern riot police or line-fighting games.
Re: extended missile exchanges and javelin-wielding line infantry, one thing I would mention is that as far as I can tell, nobody east of Italy carried more than two staff weapons from the start of the Iron Age until the Roman army reforms of the third century CE. Illyrians, Thracians, Macedonians, Dorians, etc. carried one spear or two spears if they didn’t have a sling or a bow. Egyptians and Assyrians had just the one spear although they sometimes loaded more on their chariots or war wagons. I have never seen a painting or a sculpture with anything like a Julio-Claudian cavalryman’s case of javelins or a Late Roman’s plumbatae. Even the Hjortspring army had just two or three spears per man. So if we think Thracians fought like those Bagobo warriors in the comments of hoplite wars part IIIa they did it with just two or so javelins apiece.(1)
(1) eg. “Men go to war armed with a wooden shield, a steel battle-ax, and one to three steel or wooden spears. It is a man’s agility and skill in keeping his shield between himself and the enemy that preserves his life. Their battles are full of quick, incessant springing motion. There are sudden rushes and retreats, sneaking flank movements to cut an enemy off. The body is always in hand, always in motion, that it may respond instantly to every necessity. Spears are thrown with greatest accuracy and fatality up to 30 feet, and after the spears are discharged the contest, if continued, is at arms’ length with the battle-axes. In such warfare no attitude or position can safely be maintained except for the shortest possible time.” I think our ethnographer is implying that after throwing their spears Bagobo men close in to use their axes or knives only if they think they have the advantage, if they don’t they probably dash back and look for something else to throw and let someone else have a go.
One thing I’ve noticed is that (for people used to a modern sense of logistics and ammunition consumption) armies often carried a LOT less projectiles than you’d expect. This makes sense for muskets with their low rate of fire, but it also seems to apply to archers to some extent (I believe there are examples of carrying a dozen arrows or so)
Compare the effective range of a bow to the running speed of even an average person and you start to see why. If someone is closing on you you just don’t get that many shots off before they’re on you.
My understanding is that real warbow archery tires your arm out damn quick, so you’re probably not firing an entire quiver without taking a break where you can go restock.
At Carrhae, when the horse archers planned to keep up an indefinite arrow bombardment, they had a ton of camels carrying reloads.
Well, for Rome the individual personal status where you are a rich guy who is involved in politics at a high level is highest for people on horses, even if they’re commanding the infantry. The infantry is the primary arm, but the highest-status individuals are on horses. I suspect this mostly holds for Greece as well, though generals are on foot because the culture is that generals lead from the front, it’s easiest to command from there because everyone is looking forwards, and you don’t want to be on a horse in the middle of a phalanx fight.
As for Indian elephantry, there’s the question as to whether they’re cost-effective, but the guys on elephant-back are certainly the most effective on an individual basis. It would be totally insane to dismount three hundred elephant riders and have them fight as infantry. Meanwhile a Roman army wouldn’t want to have no cavalry, but once they’ve got enough for scouting and screening they could reasonably want more heavy infantry instead of more cavalry.
It sounds like the Roman army had better weapons, better discipline (or at least equals), and better battle formations than any of its enemies. Is there an ACOUP article on how the Romans developed all of these advantages?
The Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph series https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/ is probably your best bet.
Thanks! That’s a mere ten more posts to read… 😊
Well, more good weapons. Remember that the roman kit was largely copied from the celts and (celt)iberians, sword and mail alike. But the celts could only afford that kind of kit for the social elite, the bogstandard warrior got his shield, his spear, and a nice shirt with his bethrothed’s well wishes on it.
Rome took these designs and started to mass produce them. And it could mass produce them because it had a significantly greater population density and productivity than its neighbours.
As for discipline… it’s by an amateur, but I found it quite interesting and it does cite its sources (many of which also appear here): https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-disobedient-roman-soldier.837769/
While probably more disciplined than the gauls or (celt)iberians, they look to be emphatically in the pre-gunpowder era of discipline (what with being pre-gunpowder), which basically means a murderous mob that keeps arguing with its somewhat more careful officers, yelling that there’s not enough murderin’ going on, give the order to charge already! (Common issue, supposedly Arminius ran into a similar problem at Pontes Longi).
The battle formations… honestly, I’m insufficiently well-versed in European history to have any idea how often similarly complex (not mechanically identical, to be clear) systems popped up. I’m not convinced that being at war every year for centuries was sufficient to develop it (a young and inexperienced hastati is still going to be young and inexperienced). It might be a function of state complexity? Dunno.
“it could mass produce them because it had a significantly greater population density and productivity than its neighbours.”
I’d also argue that it had a social structure significantly more amenable to mass producing these sorts of things as well (compared to the Celts and Celtiberians that created the kit), on two primary counts:
1. The social importance they placed on the smallholding farmers that made up the bulk of their military forces. This social importance directly translated into improved material conditions for this class (via imposition of political will), which allowed them to procure more expensive kit in larger numbers.
2. A social structure that downplays the importance of local ‘big men’ and tribal chiefs, and the subsequent effects of wealth-hoarding that that system encourages. This is a bit of conjecture, but the Gauls/Iberians/Celtiberians do beat the Romans on a number of occasions (and to significant slaughter). One would assume that this would allow Roman mail to percolate into the Gallic fighting classes (as happens with Hannibal’s army after a couple of victories), but we don’t particularly see this happening. Mail is very long-lasting material, but we don’t particularly see an up-armouring of Gauls, Iberians and Celtiberians after major Roman defeats. This suggests to me that the spoils of war are being retained by their elites for selective redistribution in the ‘favours’ system by which those elites maintain their social position, rather than the more effective approach of just giving as many men of your tribe as possible a mail shirt.
This could be me falling into the classic trap of assuming that the fall of the Roman Empire was caused by the leading issues in our present-day society (worsening systems of inequality), but I do think there’s significant merit in the idea that the Romans did exceptionally well in a time period where they seem to have had quite widely distributed wealth, and the more that wealth became concentrated in the hands of the elite the more fragile and less effective their polity became (with supporting arguments coming from the fact that they appear to have curbstomped practically every other major power around them, and one leading difference between Rome and those powers is that they had more baked in systems of inequality in one form or other).
As a speculative comment regarding this, we know from their history that the Romans were nearly always at war with someone. And that they were unusually willing to build favorable relationships with subordinate allies to help make sure they could maintain a large troop recruitment pool with the ability to recover from disasters, which is probably a big part of how they survived constantly being at war without being ground down over time.
I speculate that this combination probably gave the Romans a lot more time to experiment with its tactics and formation, to maintain veterancy and discipline, and overall to develop their fighting system to its most effective form.
I believe the long answer is our host’s book, “Of Arms and Men: Why Rome Always Won”, forthcoming (at some point) from Oxford University Press.
Serious question, how many of these scholars have experience in physically stressful/combat situations? It seems like early scholarship was done by military people. But I wonder how a lack of schema (or an understanding of it) has affected the scholarship on this topic.
“I admit, it would be really interesting to see how long a set of reasonable fit reenactors could keep up this kind of pulsing fight, never withdrawing much more than a few steps beyond measure.”
As someone who used to do HEMA and is now training for long distance running, I’m also curious about this. What would you imagine might make a good experimental setup to test this? Setting up a pell, going into measure, throwing a couple strikes, and taking a couple steps back out of measure on some kind of timer would be easy enough to set up. Convincing someone else to get involved for a 2-3 hour test would be a much taller ask.
SAG-AFTRA has safety rules for stunt performers that include mandatory rest and whatnot, which were developed over time as performers died working; I would start by looking in that for anything specific to mock armed combat, not just for safety but because it should describe the edges of what we already know on the subject and how sets for those performances are currently designed.
There was a study on Mycenaean Dendra armour that pitched 13 Greek marines against each other for 11 hours or so. Might be interesting to see their full protocol.
The DOI link doesn’t work anymore, so just the pop‑sci article:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/researchers-get-modern-marines-to-test-ancient-greek-armor/
I broadly agree with much of our host’s post this time (macro agreement) though as usal there are some micro disagreements
“Micro pulse v. macro pulse”
I agree with the comment above (Christoph Brennan) that this is far too binary and indeed arbitrary. At what range, or involving what number of people, does micro become macro?
In ruling out macro lulls specifically for Romans, you are left with the problem that in the standard model of Roman (Republican) battle, the whole point of Roman tactics was the ability to withdraw one third of the army from contact and replace it with a different third. This to me implies some pretty macro lulls. This standard model has never been really clearly elucidated, to my knowledge, but I think in this context it has to be addressed (in another post?). Regarding Romans standing their ground, I agree, but again on the larger tactical level, Polybius tells us that the Romans used “distinctive retrograde movements”.
As you recognise, Zhmodikov is in fact pretty sloppy in his use of evidence, making no clear distinction about who is throwing what at who. I thought he had been more or less discredited (even though the ongoing pila throwing model hasn’t been).
“no one has ever suggested Roman soldiers did anything like a shoving-othismos”
Well in fact VDH did suggest exactly that in WWoW.
“And it seems like from some quarters when I express this view there is a degree of incredulity that I would ‘go against the scholarship’ on an issue that is treated as ‘solved.’”
I’m surprised – I would have thought the jury was very much still out (as you show from the later quotes). ‘Volley and charge’ or ‘ongoing throwing’ have yet to find a clear winner (probably because it is a false dichotomy).
“Polybius – who we must stress describes standard spacing in this army which he was an eyewitness to (18.30.6-8) – is not making it up.”
He is not – but then in accepting Taylor’s c. 135 cm (I’m glad you at least throw in a ‘circa’!) you are going against what Polybius actually says, which is that Romans were at double the interval of Macedonians, which must mean four cubits (two metres).
Pydna – be careful here, since the engagement of the Paeligni (and perhaps other socii) is specifically stated (by Livy) to have been different in nature from the engagement of the legions in the centre.
“while the phalanx has a bunch of organizational units, it does not have a lot of maneuver units”
Not strictly true – if nothing else, different city contingents made up separate maneuvre units. But maybe they weren’t very good at manoeuvre.
Overall duration – to me, the argument from casualty rates is decisive against continuous in-measure contact. Five percent casualties (as attested for hoplites) requires a successful strike rate, for a multi-hour battle, of one blow landed every thirty minutes (or more). While one solution is to suppose that there must have been lulls, another is to conclude that battles (or at least, combats) did not in fact take anything like as long as we think – certainly not hours. This is a bigger topic though, perhaps deserving a post of its own.
> Regarding Romans standing their ground, I agree, but again on the larger tactical level, Polybius tells us that the Romans used “distinctive retrograde movements”.
One thing which occurred to me while reading is that “holding your position within the unit” and “the entire unit moving out of contact” are not contradictory.
A unit could push, the opponents fall back, and then instead of advancing again into the taken up space they can also fall back – this could create several meters of separation, so that a section of the line is no longer just outside measure at ~2m distance, but instead is well separated but still in contact at more like ~6m distance. Crucially, that’s far _enough_ that re-engaging with contact weapons requires not just individuals/small groups to take a step or two, but the entire unit to advance back into measure.
Livy’s description of the battle of Zama or Ilipa quoted recently in fact mentions Romans putting in their shoulders and shield-bosses which sounds like Xenophon’s clear descriptions of massed pushing by Egyptian infantry with long shields. I think most readers would interpret this as individual pushing.
As far as dichotomies go, I don’t think anyone disagrees that the Romans preferred to open battle by throwing pila and charging with the sword. The question at hand is what they did against other loose-ordered opponents such as Iberians when the initial charge did not win. Sabin also raised the question whether all the Romans throw their pila at once, or whether two or three ranks (if the Romans had ranks) do so and the rest of the century saves them. So “pulse” theorists believe in a “volley and charge” they just don’t think it usually routed the enemy on its own like on the Plains of Abraham.
Some observations:
“Measure” is technically defined as “arm plus weapon”, but tactically, really needs to include one quick step – if I’m a step out of measure, I can be *in* measure in a blink, and if you’re not ready to respond to the strike, if your weapon and shield are just hanging there, I’ll hit you before you realise I’m in measure now. This isn’t particularly special, either. Any decently trained martial artist can do that.
If you want to drop your guard, you need to be *at least* three steps out of measure. Against some guys I could name, I wouldn’t feel safe until I’m a bit further than that.
Also, “arm+weapon” understates reach. Just by shifting weight to the front foot, you can gain as much as 20cm extra reach. You’ll want to shift your weight into the blow, in any case, to generate energy and momentum, so you might as well take the extra reach, too.
Even simulated combat – in my case, SCA Armoured Combat – is intensely cerebral. Your brain is operating at a very high level, because it has to. A tenth of a second of inattention or loss of focus means getting hit. This is *worse* in group combat, because, as Dr Devereaux correctly notes, there are at least three other people on the other side who *can* hit you.
Even if you have the physicality to handle staying in the line for a good while, you’ll be mentally exhausted in fairly short order. SCA Armoured Combat is fairly stylised, as these things go, and SCA “wars” even more so, but on the other hand, it’s also full-contact. Getting hit means bruises, which ramps up the adrenaline.
And yes, one way of defeating an opposing line is to follow when they take a step back, to force them to stay “on” when they’re reaching a point where they need a break. Once that mental exhaustion sets in, people get sloppy, gaps open in their defences, parries aren’t as fast or as well executed.
Yeah, I looked at the definition and size of “measure” and had about the same thought: Even for legionaries, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s around two meters because a passing step into the swing moves you quite a distance.
Ok this may sound silly but with this battle system I can totally see groups of fellow legionaires in the same maniple that train together at the camp in order to coordinate themselves to cross the measure. People that know each other so well that can react instantly to close up or giving space during a micro pulse… At least as a civilian pushed in a killing zone that would be my first reasoning: 120 men is a lot of faces so I want to be sure to trust the dozen or so around me.
So, your idea is that the first line can pull back during combat, but not the entire formation?
If so, it follows that there must be some space between the first and second line, yes?
Then it follows that having some space behind a line makes it fight better, not worse—otherwise they would not allow it. (I think there are many arguments for why having space behind you enables better fighting.)
From this, it would follow that two lines cannot fight at the same time, because that would require the second line to move directly behind the first line, which would *weaken* the first line’s fighting ability.
This would imply that, for the second line to join the fight, the first line must *stop* fighting and instead act as a living barricade for the second line to strike through.
What do you think of this line of logic?
From my perspective, I think there’s an important distinction between Roman and Classical Greek approaches to this.
Paul Bardunias’ video linked in the previous posts has done a decent job in convincing me that for spear-armed infantry, it’s a hell of a lot more effective to be fighting with two ranks very close to one another (possibly even three, as he mentions the third rank being able to ‘snipe’ shots with an overarm spear through gaps). Just the density of strikes they can put out seems to overwhelm the more sparsely spaced formation facing them. I would imagine that Greeks (or non-Greek spear-and-shieldwall peeps) would be fighting with pretty closely spaced ranks. Thus, I think their ‘micro-pulses’ would need to be fairly effectively co-ordinated with the folks around them so the ‘mob’ moves together when they’re making a push.
Meanwhile, there isn’t really the same advantage for Romans. The second rank of Romans can’t reach past their first rank to strike because their swords are fairly short. Because the Roman system cannot utilise additional ranks to support the first in direct fighting, it’s also not required to use those ranks to support the first, which then allows for a little more space between ranks and more flexibility in the movements of an individual Roman soldier (which we see reflected in their individual combat doctrine). So what you’re saying could well hold for Romans.
I am not a reenactor so I can’t say for sure, but it seems hard for all 3 lines moving back and forth in unison while they are standing so close to each other.
Also, from the perspective of the people on the 2nd and 3rd ranks, why would they feel the need to move back while they are less threaten by enemy strikes? Surely standing their ground makes more sense than moving backward while the enemy is pushing forward.
because the guy ahead just moved back and is bumping into them?
Why didn’t they push back and made the enemy move back instead?
@NVA, the lines don’t move in unison, as Bret writes there are waves and ripples as people move at slightly different times. But ultimately everyone is moving in reaction to what the people just beside or in front of them are doing, easily visible.
As for the 2nd and 3rd ranks, if your mate in the front rank is in trouble (two foes, spear vs sword, whatever) and wants to step back to relieve the pressure, you step back so he can do so and not get killed! These are not armies of Mordor orcs, group cohesion exists.
(Even from a purely selfish viewpoint, if the guy in front of you gets severely wounded or killed, 100kg of armoured soldier falling backwards is quite likely to make you stumble or knock you over, and then you get killed too.)
I agree with the sentiment that the division between micro and macro-pulses seems overly arbitrary. Surely it’s a continuum? It isn’t hard to imagine how a separation that’s well beyond measure – but not fully into javelin range – could emerge organically.
One side has a micro-pulse which “pushes” the enemy back. Aka, the enemy accordions backwards, with their rear ranks staying still and the front ranks closing the spacing into them. The guys that “won” the micro-pulse are not eager to press their advantage this time, so they also accordion back to their former position. If this micropulse only happens at one interval a few men wide at the point of contact, it can easily ripple sideways: if you’re buddy to the side shuffles a step back, you might do the same to avoid being left the point man. Then, both formations regain their nominal internal rank spacing: this time by the front ranks not moving and the back ranks accordioning further back.
Pulled entirely out of my backside, but I think it’s at least plausible for unorganised (or, rather, spontaneously organised) collective behaviour to create a “well out of measure” separation, such that both sides would have to take a couple of steps to then be a lunge away from measure. I suspect the critical spacing is when the back ranks of the formation feel safe enough to have a quick sip of water – less than that and the psychological and physiological stress might simply be too much to bear for hours at a time.
Now going *back* into measure might be trickier to do organically, because there’s a real safety disincentive to be the first man forward. But getting people to do this seems to be exactly the role that we see officers and generals doing in the sources all the time! Micro-pulses are too small for there to be the space for a Caesar to grab a shield, go to the front rank, and lead the men to close with the enemy (eg, at the Sabis). I don’t have a professional’s grasp of the source material, but could it be that we find far more mentions of macro-pulses than macro-lulls, because sources describe what happens rather than when something isn’t happening.
That’s how I envisaged it working. Less of a ‘deliberate retreat to javelin-range’ and more of an organic coincidence arising from multiple different micro-pulse situations aligning such that all (or at least most) men on both sides have withdrawn out of immediate contact (i.e. not completely out of danger, but distant enough that people notice there’s a lull in their need to be hyper-alert to attack), and need encouraging back into it.
Depending on the frequency of micro-pulses, and the comparative time spent within measure and being just outside of it, you could end up with that happening more or less frequently.
As I mentioned in the previous post, this sounds like something a mathematical model would do really well at modelling out (which could then be tested in the real world). Tweak around with the following assumptions and see what emerges:
– In contact, people spend 25% of their time in measure and 75% out or measure (tweak around based on assumptions of how intense we think the fighting would be)
– If you’re neighbour is in measure, you are 50% likely to be in measure as well (to attempt to model an individual reacting to their neighbour’s actions)
– Any other parameters you think are worthwhile/possible to model
From this, I expect you would get some bead on how frequent the emergence of an ‘organic coincidental macro-lull’ would be.
Now, this will probably tell us nothing if the tipping point between ‘semi-regular lulls’ and ‘very rare lulls’ is somewhere in the middle, but if the only way to produce semi-regular lulls is to have people only spending 5% of their time in measure and the rest of the time standing back and jeering then we can probably conclude that they were likely to be freak occurrences. Conversely, if we find that they’re at least semi-regular unless everyone’s suicidally aggressive, that suggests that they were likely to be a regular fixture.
The reason so many javelin-wielding line infantry (archaic hoplites, Roman heavy infantry, Iberian and Celtiberian infantry) carry just one or two javelins is that they expect to hurl these immediately before contact to intensify the force of their onset and then not do any more throwing.
Once more: everyone carried just one or two or occasionally three spears. That’s the basic loadout of the shielded skirmisher, which we see across the world. Because there’s very little good reason to carry more unless you are a specialized combined arms element like a Roman velites who fights in direct support of heavy infantry, or unless you have dropped the shield and have a freer hand and less encumbrance.
Javelins aren’t archery, and people routinely underestimate how close and targeted either of those missile weapons were. Horse archers frequently fought eachother at 20m or less, with bows capable of projecting to 300m and horses capable of closing that distance in a second; javelin-armed skirmishers are approaching closer still and an engagement lasting more than one or two spear throws at a time is liable to devolve into hand-to-hand; outside of specific clashes one restocks easily from the missiles already thrown, or simply collects rocks to throw instead if facing real shortage.
“The starting point of this burst (dare we say ‘pulse?’) of Roman-legion-heterodoxy is P. Sabin, “The Mechanics of Battle in the Second Punic War” BICS 67 (1996)”
It would be remiss of me not to mention that the first version of Phil Sabin’s article appeared in ‘Slingshot – the Journal of the Society of Ancients’ 176, Nov 1994 (the august journal of which I am the current editor).
In defense of micro-pulses: my experience of combat sports (boxing and fencing, mainly) is that you can pretty easily keep up an hour’s worth of one- to three-minute pulses of intense activity, so long as you get ten to thirty seconds of rest after each. So it makes sense that combat would proceed in a series of lunges into measure (hopefully with all your buddies beside you) followed by quick retreats back out to regroup. You would also need to be able to rotate out of contact every so often to get some water or something, which makes me wonder if men weren’t ‘tagging out’ to go to the rear of their file after their turn so that the bloke behind you could have a go for a while.
In the oath from Livy, we have it translated “unless to pick up or fetch a weapon,” but that seems like a paraphrase. Is/are the term(s) for “weapon” words in Latin that specify or imply certain classes of weapon (i.e. might exclude pila)? Is it actually something that could be translated to ‘return to fighting formation’ or the like but the Latin idiom uses a literal word for weapon or arms?
This series has been really interesting. I’m very much not a historian, but I have things rattling around in my head that I’m going to write out here so I can stop thinking about them. Obviously feel free to skip over this 🙂
I know the final part is going to be about the social/societal implications of what’s been discussed so far, but my interest here is in the interaction/feedback loop between the development of the hoplite and the society they’re embedded in.
Foundational assumption: in any Bring-Your-Own-Panoply environment (i.e. individual soldiers have to pay for all their own equipment), the relative status of different tactical roles is ~always going to track the cost of the panoply for that role, and the highest-status role is the one with the most expensive kit. Reasoning: roles are high-status *because high-status people fill them*, and high-status people want to show off their status (assumed: wealth) by doing things that only high-status (wealthy) people can do.
This explains cavalry (particularly heavy cavalry) being usually the highest-status role, because horses (and armor) are bloody expensive. It fits nicely too with the earlier post about royal war elephants – maybe not the highest-impact role on the battlefield, but definitely the highest-cost one, and therefore that’s what the king does.
Applied to the hoplite context, if the hoplite is the highest-status role on the ancient Greek battlefield, the strong implication is that hoplite panoply cost noticeably more than cavalry panoply, horse included. Which is to say, pretty damn expensive.[1]
Based on the Roman example, it seems like, in this broad military context, you can never have too many heavy infantry[2]. Putting these things together, I’d expect that the makeup of individual armies comes down to “if you can afford hoplite panoply, you’re a hoplite; if you can’t but you can afford a horse, you’re cavalry; if you can’t afford a horse, you’re light infantry” (matching the status hierarchy).
Further assumption: hoplite equipment retains most of its value across many generations – even if it takes damage, you still have the requisite mass of bronze (which I’m guessing is the biggest portion of the cost?) to repair it again.
Putting all that together, the implied chronology is something like this: at some point, people realise that “big shield good”, and start making aspides. Once you have a critical number of soldiers with aspis plus dory, your trajectory is pretty much locked in, because clearly that outcompetes dipylon plus dory. From there, there’s two remaining avenues of advancement: firstly, optimizing the accessories (greaves, helmet, armor type etc), and secondly, getting as many people as possible to replace their existing kit with (very expensive) hoplite gear.
The above assumption of “grandpappy’s shield still works just fine” creates a different dynamic to the normal “elite cavalry” situation, in that a horse consumes a lot of food and then dies, whereas a shield can hang on the wall indefinitely. Thus, while it’s hard to really scale up your cavalry numbers due to the running costs, the ability to e.g. save up across multiple generations for a single set of hoplite kit (“I may be fated to die a skirmisher, but by damn my grandson will be a hoplite if it kills me”) means that your hoplite numbers can scale up substantially over time.
And then as they go from a small unit of the local elite to a larger and larger percentage of your overall fighting strength, the amount of light infantry scales down proportionately, and they’re going from very much fighting alongside the hoplites because they represent a significant proportion of the fighting strength still, to being pushed out of the way because they’re now much less relevant. Cavalry I would assume, in the situation where having a horse is no longer a military status symbol, reduces down to *mostly* “people who can’t afford hoplite panoply but own (or have access to) a horse anyway for other reasons”, because if they can’t be hoplites they can at least be better than the light infantry.
To me, that seems like a coherent developmental path that fits/explains the gradual development model being discussed.
(The development path for the orthodox approach seems, honestly, kind of insane: the implication would seem to be that, at some point early in the archaic and over a relatively short period of time, military leaders a) came up with an improved combat style, b) refined and essentially perfected the equipment such that it didn’t need updating for centuries, and then c) successfully managed to get the bulk of their citizenry to all buy a big expensive new set of military equipment. Having all that need to happen in the span of, say, 100 years, seems pretty implausible? Are there any remotely similar sets of events during the pre-modern era?)
[1] My understanding is that this status hierarchy reverts to the “norm” by the time of Alexander, with the Companion Cavalry being the most elite unit – because they’re transitioning the infantry from mostly bronze to mostly iron, with the latter being much cheaper? This also seems like it tallies with Alexander’s elite infantry unit being the “bronze shields” – presumably because they’re the wealthiest infantry with the better (or at least older) bronze shields, with pretty much everyone else having iron shields instead? Possibly what is meant by “silver shields”?
[2] Realistically, at least – the tactically optimal amount of light infantry is probably not actually 0, but in practice I assume no actual society is going to reach the point where you have too much heavy and not enough light, if that’s predicated on individual wealth? The Romans geared their whole system around generating as many heavy-infantry-affording farmers as possible, and they still had plenty of people poor enough to be fielded as light infantry.
Applied to the hoplite context, if the hoplite is the highest-status role on the ancient Greek battlefield, the strong implication is that hoplite panoply cost noticeably more than cavalry panoply, horse included.
The conclusion is wrong, and the prior I’m not sure about. The Greeks did have cavalry, the cavalry were generally populated by high-status individuals, and their equipment and mounts cost substantially more than the pretty scanty Classical heavy infantry gear (a shield, a spear, a linen corslet if you were lucky, greaves if you were really lucky) and in some cases were fairly state-funded for this reason.
Early hoplites, meanwhile, seem to have been at least partially horsemen — the class of combatants from which the panoply evolved were charioteers, who over time switched to riding their horses, and the kit’s spread to increasing numbers of poorer foot eventually lead to the Classical hoplite-as-infantryman as the aristocrats dropped their shields and served as true cavalry.
The above assumption of “grandpappy’s shield still works just fine”
I would caution that in practice, war gear gets banged up a lot; bronze is better in this respect than iron, which rusts itself to oblivion in no time, but overall I think the turnover is still going to be pretty substantial — especially for stuff made of organic materials like a shield; would you really trust 100 year old wood to save your life on the battlefield?
presumably because they’re the wealthiest infantry with the better (or at least older) bronze shields, with pretty much everyone else having iron shields instead? Possibly what is meant by “silver shields”?
Iron shields for a full phalanx would not have been cheaper than bronze — they would have been somewhere between a king’s ransom and flat-out impossible. Leaning towards the latter. The technology to make steel or even just wrought iron plates of that size in one piece only became widespread in the later medieval period, and by the time we see iron shields of appreciable size we’re in the 1500s dodging arquebus fire. We do, I will note however, have one example of a crude iron cuirass from a Hellenistic tomb, and based on its construction it’s a niche possibility that these were in wider use by some of the Hellenistic mounted aristocrats wearing seemingly-linen tub-and-yoke corslets in depictions.
Realistically, at least – the tactically optimal amount of light infantry is probably not actually 0, but in practice I assume no actual society is going to reach the point where you have too much heavy and not enough light, if that’s predicated on individual wealth?
This is somewhat complicated, because we do get the impression that cultures specialized on a certain form of combat might see reason to seek out warriors for other roles from abroad, finding it more efficient than replicating the capability in-house. This is the case in Classical Greece with a diversity of light-armed skirmishers who were found to be tactically vital and were hired for significant sums from the less polis-oriented neighboring peoples who had expertise in the field; my impression is that the “conscripted urban/rural poor given some javelins” type was significantly outcompeted by these (initially) foreign specialists, who were much more motivated and often high-status in their own societies. These ethnic patterns like the Peltast were over time converted into more technical terms for battlefield specialties, and those specialties were eventually fulfilled by trained professionals of native Greek origin as well.
Also presumably when one really need lighter infantry that has good discipline right at the moment and no foreign hire is available, heavy infantry with their gear stripped down can probably suffice (if a poor option). During medieval europe one can have mounted man at arms dismount and fight on foot if they really need heavy infantry to hold the line. It might be a hit to morale, but sometimes the heavy gear/horses would be tactically not useful. The reverse is obviously not possible in a pinch.
I largely agree, but for two points. Iron won’t rust to the point of losing notable mass unless the items are stored ludicrously badly (like under mud), and it is much cheaper to scrap and reforge an iron article than it is to get an equivalent amount of iron via smelting from ore. So once there’s iron in the family there will normally be more iron each successive generation. Second, we do know in the Roman case that velites were (ideally) members of the kinds of families that could provide heavy kit but weren’t because someone else was already marching in it; the conscript-velite was supposed to inherit non-velite equipment sometime during their military service age range, between musters/deployments.
> Applied to the hoplite context, if the hoplite is the highest-status role on the ancient Greek battlefield, the strong implication is that hoplite panoply cost noticeably more than cavalry panoply, horse included. Which is to say, pretty damn expensive.[1]
Unfortunately, this is where you’ve come unstuck completely. Owning a horse you can fight on cost more than hoplite kit, and not by a small amount. One obvious way to understand why is that cavalry kit is hoplite kit plus a horse or two!
The trick is that highest status role is not in fact entirely correlated with cost. Armies are made up of people from society, and other factors can be relevant as well. One option is to play up the political and battlefield status of your ‘yeomanry’ class, sometimes with those who could afford other options deliberately playing down to that level as a demonstration. It’s 2000 years later, but Maximilian I took the field as a pikeman with his landsknechts for exactly the same reason of driving up their status on the battlefield. It seems very likely that something like this was going on with hoplites.
(The other trick is that the equestrian class still existed and was generally considered higher status)
Thanks for the clarification! And it was such a nice theory, too… How do we know how much military equipment cost so far in the past? Also, presumably there must then have been some common forcing function if a lower-cost fighting style became higher status in so many independent (albeit culturally related) polities?
I would think it’s just that the heavy infantry were the decisive arm. Battles in Greece were largely won as hoplite engagements, not cavalry charges. My understanding is that Greece isn’t great horse country, so they don’t have a lot of horses and there’s a lot of terrain where they aren’t useful. Likewise for the Romans, they just didn’t have a lot of cavalry and were of the opinion that the cavalry they did have wasn’t very good, so they used their native cavalry strictly as a supporting arm. The general is with the infantry because the infantry are most likely to determine if the battle is won or lost, though Roman generals were on horses since they weren’t expected to fight in the front lines.
Oh, and how they’re depicted in histories and battle narratives may relate to the audience for those works. By the Classical period, as far as I’m aware every polity in Greece proper was at least nominally a democracy or oligarchy (Sparta has kings, but a lot of the decision-making power is vested in a council and magistrates from an oligarchy) and the oligarchies would include many hoplites in the ruling class. So the infantry have meaningful political and economic power, while in Medieval Europe, in addition to the cavalry being more impactful on the battlefield, everyone with meaningful political power and thus the likely sponsors and audiences for a book fight as cavalry.
Aristotle makes the point of the correlation between different forms of government and the dominant military branch. For him, it is the cavalry-domination that brings about oligarchy. Heavy-infantry-centric armies will lead to a republic with some property qualifications. Navy means democracy, as only the state can equip it and the poor rowers will get political power. As this is an observation from a contemporary who had seen the Greek polis system in its final bloom, I think it has some value.
A Roman general, by the way, would conventionally lead from behind. The classic point in the battle speech was, according to contemporary rhetorical text books, to remind the soldiers that the general was right behind them, ready to observe the soldiers, to reward the brave and punish the cowardly.
(BTW, I changed my email in the email field.)
The fundamental common feature is that if shock/heavy infantry in good order want to go to a particular place, nothing else on the ancient (or medieval) battlefield can really stop them. So there is a lot of value in having your society be able to raise a solid heavy infantry arm somehow, and attaching social status to performance of that role is one good way.
But also, at least for the Romans while we think about the infantry as the defining factor, in fact service in the cavalry was a mark of higher social status, precisely because it cost so much more. I’m reasonably sure that pattern holds true for the Greeks as well.
Right, the *value* of heavy infantry is clearly very high. The thing that caught my eye is that 1) the *status* of (elite) cavalry seems almost always higher than that of infantry (from pre-cavalry chariots through Alexander’s companions to medieval knights to early-modern dragoons, noting particularly the remarks about subcontinental elephant cavalry being relatively ineffective but still the thing that the king does because it’s a status/wealth display), contrasted with 2) the assertion (if I’m reading correctly) in earlier parts of this series that hoplites are the highest-status warriors on their battlefields, even above cavalry.
If that is a correct reading, then that seems like an anomaly that needs explaining – particularly if it’s a pattern that repeats across a large number of polities, as that strongly suggests it’s adaptive somehow. If it’s not a matter of panoply cost, then something else must be driving the status-wealth inversion here?
Yes, you supplement the pay of different kinds of warriors differently. Those whose equipment makes them individually consequential in battle get political power, the group that combines raw numbers with equipment to become consequential get collective praise, and if there’s also a group that has nothing but numbers going for it what they get is actually being slightly more ignored than they otherwise would be. This seems to be a general pattern in polities regardless of how the gear ownership is structured, so pilots and patrol boat captains are disproportionately elected to office in the USA, or England recasts the Welsh and Welsh-marcher longbow as the heart of English military pride.
I think there’s some merit in what you’re describing, but it’s missing a couple of critical feedback loops that can push things one way or another in interesting ways (and avoids having to rely on things that are evidently false, like cavalry gear including the horse costing less than a hoplite panoply).
First off, I think it’s probably useful to see these different approaches to combat as competing classes within the military system. Not class like a Marxist would understand it, but ‘class’ as in ‘a bunch of people who think hoplites are how proper men should fight’ and ‘a bunch of people who think cavalry are how proper men should fight’. These classes compete for societal prestige (consciously or unconsciously, overtly or covertly, completely or incompletely), both on and off the battlefield, and thus a greater share of the resources, and increased dominance of their own specialised way of war.
By looking at it within that slightly more complex model, you can start to play a couple of those feedback loops I mentioned.
1. Success feedback loop. At nearly any given point, an army is going to be in some intermediate step between ‘literally everyone is a cavalryman’ and ‘literally everyone is a hoplite’. Thus, there is the opportunity for either of those approaches (or any other that is present, like peltasts perhaps) to ‘carry the day’. To acquit themselves so well that society in general shifts their opinion slightly about their importance in warfare. This could manifest as either a deliberate policy to enable more folks to fight as hoplites, say, and/or in an organic process by which high status people want to be seen to be doing the important bit and gravitate towards that role.
2. External political struggle feedback loop. Because these martial-classes also exist outside of a battlefield context, and can be made up to a greater or lesser degree by different non-martial political classes (in something closer to the Marxist sense of class), ‘civilian’ political struggles can influence military ones. Say your cavalrymen are largely the very wealthy aristocrats (hundreds of acres, multiple tenant farmers) while your hoplites are more ‘well-off regular people’ with decent sized farms but nowhere near the wealth of the large landowners. Now, let’s say that there’s been a non-military societal shift that’s divvied up a bunch of formerly aristocratic holdings to multiple families of hoplite-peeps. Come the next battle, you’re going to get more hoplites and fewer cavalrymen. Now apply that to every single political decision that inadvertently affects the abilities of different groups of people to engage in warfare.
Just these two feedback loops can interact with each other in interesting ways, such that none are truly as deterministic as you’ve laid out. I’m reminded to the process by which in the late Roman Empire, increasing amounts of agricultural land was being swallowed up by latifundia (effectively our aristocratic cavalrymen) which one would assume would lead to an increased reliance on cavalry in battles, but hundreds of years of the ‘success’ feedback loop pointing squarely towards ‘heavy infantry are the way to win wars’ forced the Romans to change the way they recruited heavy infantrymen (i.e. a professionalised force) rather than changing to a cavalry-focussed way of war (though my understanding is that did happen a bit).
Compare and contrast that to the general waning of heavy-infantry militias like the Anglo-Saxon fyrd in comparison to Norman-style mounted knights. One could imagine that if Harold hadn’t copped an arrow to the eye and the fyrd emerged victorious (which was a closer run thing than is popularly perceived), the military tradition in England might have looked quite different (considering that Harold would have pulled off a fairly herculean feat of defeating the Danes/Norwegians in Stamford then quick-marching all the way down to Hastings and defeating the Normans there too, which would be pretty prestigious).
Lastly, as with all class-based analyses, it’s worth understanding that this is a bit of a binary simplification of more complex processes. People, by and large, tended to have an understanding that you needed multiple different military arms to achieve victory, and the really successful ones understood that those needed to be used in concert (i.e. Alexander). But broadly I think the above is true about processes that are beyond an individual’s control to meaningfully influence (i.e. a king might want more heavy infantry against a societal current of ‘cavalry are good’, but has few levers available to create many within his lifetime, and those levers are risky to pull).
Actually the heavy infantry militias didn’t wane out as shown by the 1181 assize of arms calling for royal officers to ensure that freemen with 16-10 marks of land had mail shirts, shields and spears while freemen with less land had spears, shields and gambesons.
This would be updated in 1285 to keep up with developments, which would then be invoked by king henry the 8th who replaced the fuedal system with shire levies entirely.
“some of the spacing and interval problems … have been revisited by M[T]. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic: A Reassessment” Historia 63 (2014) and to a significant degree resolved”
It’s a while since I had read Michael Taylor’s article, so I’ve just re-read it. I’m surprised our host thinks the issues are “to a significant degree resolved” (though I suppose it depends what ‘significant’ means), as I’m not convinced by all of Taylor’s arguments, and AFAIK the consensus on Romans isn’t convinced either (so far as there is a consensus – maybe there isn’t? Of course, most academics neither know nor care. At any rate, there is still debate and uncertainty).
The problem with Taylor’s 4.5 foot Roman frontage (Bret’s c. 135 cm, or for for me, 3 cubits or 1.5 metres) is that it means ignoring what Polybius actually says – both Polybius’ statement (of a “three foot interval in width and depth”) and Polybius’ comparison with Macedonians, which has one Roman facing two Macedonians. It is clear from this that Polybius envisages the Romans having double the file interval of the Macedonians (i.e. 2 metres, not 1.5).
Now it may be that Polybius was wrong (and his account is far from a model of clarity), and Taylor’s suggestion is possible (though unsupported by any actual evidence) but I really don’t think you can say that the quesiton is ‘resolved’.
The same applies on a larger scale to maniple and legion frontages. Taylor’s arguments are interesting, but to my mind there are far too many uncertainties, particularly as to Roman depth, to make any such calculations really compelling.
I don’t know that this makes much material difference to the points at issue – and the wider point, that Romans did at least have regular intervals and were not just a crowd or mob, is well made.
Incidentally, following up Bret’s remark that “no one has ever suggested Roman soldiers did anything like a shoving-othismos”, I am reminded that Michael Taylor himself seems to make exactly that suggestion in this same article, note 35: “For a similar [to Zama] case of close order othismos with locked shields, see Livy 34.46.10-11, as Roman soldiers struggled to egress out of a narrow gate, and were for a while unable to open their formation.” Depending what he understands by ‘othismos’.
Livy says “The two legions were ordered to advance through the principal gates, but the Gauls blocked the exits in such dense masses that they could not emerge. The struggle went on for a long time in the confined space; it was not so much fighting with their right hands and swords as pushing with their shields and bodies, the Romans trying to force a way for their standards, the Gauls endeavouring to get into the camp, or at all events to keep the Romans from getting out.”
This is a useful passage (note the gate! Paul Bardunias will be pleased) though to me it still doesn’t suggest a mass shove by the whole formation.
I think another advantage to the 6ft spacing is that, if we take Michael J. Taylor’s 3/4 ranks in close order expanding to 6/8 ranks in normal order, 3ft is still loose enough for some sword play but the ~67cm (rim to rim) Taylor proposes is a bit too constricted even if you’re just thrusting. Given the accounts of Romans being unable to fight properly when too close and being given the order to force themselves into a more open order, it doesn’t seem likely that they would deliberately choose a close order that was so tight.
For “proper” spacing, I think it’s as simple as forming up into the 3 or 4 ranks, with the centre of your shield at your left foot and some space between the left edge at the right side of the man to your left. Then the front rankers step forward or the rear rankers step back. Simple, and approximates 3ft per man without needing to get out the rulers.
That case of “othismos” seems like it goes quite a long way against viewing it as physical “pushing”. The reasoning for it was that inter-polis warfare aimed to find winners while keeping casualties minimal. Why would it still be true in the case of Gauls vs Romans? Either they also kept to such a symbolic system of warfare in this case at least, or that’s not the intended meaning of othismos, or it’s used as a general term for multiple things. Possibilities are constrained.
The easiest way out (and always a reasonable one) would be the last option since it’s the broadest, but when a term is broad, it becomes less useful and suddenly it becomes necessary to justify the view of “othismos as pushing” case by case.
Reading this actually is relatively intuitive for me, because the LARP I play sees what you would call micro-pulses pretty much whenever two front lines square off against each other. There’s a lot of watching, gauging for weaknesses until someone gives the psychological push to move back into measure, then one side or the other will withdraw and stabilize their line (accounting for casualties, of course.) Granted this is not a perfect comparison because you tend to see shield lines of between 3-5 people per side and everyone involved is an amateur, but the same function does occur.
I came here to say something very similar about LARPs! Short verison, at the events I play the longest fights are maybe 2 hours at the upper end, show a lot of micro-pulses like Raine describes (and some medi/macro-ones for ahistorical reasons specific to the format/medium/genre), and they DO push the limits of (amateur) endurance. Lots of caveats and details, though! For example…
(American) Boffer LARPing is several steps away from HEMA in terms of physical intensity (lighter gear, etc.), but also the practitioners are usually proportionally less hardcore with respect to both absolute fitness and weapon skill.
The battles almost certainly have an ahistorical amount of greater-than-micro pulses driven by the logistics of LARP combat (the people playing the enemy attack the player combatants, die, reset, attack again, sometimes split into smaller groupings for more continuous waves).
There’s probably also different ratio than historical battle between combat exertion (lots of movement in the small area between contact and measure, swings, dodging) and running short or medium distances (because small numbers on both sides means frequent shifting and reinforcement + plot-based tactical objectives demand repositioning + he enemy changes direction of attack between waves out of a general desire to keep things interesting).
The idea of “micro-pulses” happening sounds very plausible to me. Some kind of ebb and flow of attacks – while being still in striking distance or at least close to striking distance – seems only natural for a heavy infantry engagement where both sides initially stand their ground. I also think that it would be possible for such an engagement to go on for quite a while without an “actual” break.
I cannot escape the impression that many historians have a rather limited personal experience with sports at a competitive level and therefore tend to have only a vague idea of what a human being is physically capable of when he is reasonably trained (and full of adrenaline).
To properly think about the maximally possible duration of a battle, I think it is important to first realize that there are different types of physical exertion: Running a marathon, fighting in a boxing match or playing soccer are very different experiences, even though they are all incredibly strenuous if done competitively. Pure endurance sports like distance running or rowing involve a very steady, continuous kind of exertion, which is, I think, not very useful for thinking about a battle, because fighting involves too much explosive movement to be done in a “steady state” for long. (As an aside, Bret, marathons can not only “take upwards of two hours to run for well trained athletes”, the vast majority of marathoners require significantly more time than that :-)).
I believe a more useful comparison is the exertion experienced in modern sports that require frequent short, explosive bursts of activity (like a short sprint to reach a ball before the other team does, or a layup in Basketball). Examples of this are most team sports played with a ball, like Basketball, Hockey, Rugby, Soccer etc. Because one cannot perform explosive movements for an hour straight, each such burst has to be followed by a less physically taxing moment of relative recovery (like a jogg or even just standing around). What ends up happening in these sports is a continuous ebb and flow of activity for each individual player. This to me seems to be a much better analogue to a battle, where the intensity of different actions, like throwing a javelin or stabbing at someone from close distance, must at some point be followed by less intense moments to recover, for example just passively sitting behind one’s shield for a minute.
It is of course very dangerous to draw any conclusions regarding ancient battles from modern sports, as they are very different things (not the least because sports do not involve armour), but I think it is a useful starting point to consider that it is difficult, but very much possible to play sports like soccer or basketball for 3 hours straight. And while those sports are probably in many ways less physically demanding than a battle, they involve a lot of explosive sprinting and jumping, which is incredibly exhausting. However, as long as one gets short periods of recovery between these bursts of high exertion (those “breaks” still involve a lot of movement, just not any explosive movement), it is very much possible to keep these activities up for a long time.
While it is also true – as some comments have already mentioned – that modern combat sports like boxing are different and cannot really be done for hours straight (due to constant explosive action and very little opportunity to recover inbetween), I am not convinced that a modern boxing match is a good analogue for fighting in a shield wall. It is rather unlikely that the individual soldier was incentivized to be constantly attacking (Unlike in a boxing match, there is no judge awarding points, after all). Also, unlike a boxer, the ancient heavy infantryman had a shield to hide behind, once exhaustion started to set in; and he was not alone, but could be helped out by his friends next to him and behind him. It seems much more plausible to me that the average soldier wasn’t just mindlessly attacking his opponent until he himself collapsed from exaustion; he probably spent quite a bit of the engagement in a more reactive, not quite as physically demanding state. After all, he had to constantly stay aware of his positioning in relation to his colleagues, to keep his position in the line; he would also have to continuously scan for incoming attacks and at the same time look for opportunities for his own attacks. I think this also limits the potential for delivering explosive attacks; they would necessarily have to be taken more carefully, unless one is suicidal.
Furthermore, the level of sustained exhaustion directly influences the frequency of attacks that can be delivered. It is only natural that the frequency of more exhausting explosive movements (like a thrust actually delivered to kill) would simply have to slow down after a while, as long as no fresh soldiers join the engagement. This can also be seen in modern sports: If a soccer match goes to overtime, the pace of the game will slow down, but this does not mean that everyone stops running. Even some all-out sprints will still happen. They will just be placed more deliberately: The tired player has to “pick his fights” more carefully. I think the same could likely have happened in a battle: After all, your enemy will tire at roughly the same pace as you do, and the pace of the fighting must therefore slow down a little once both sides get sufficiently tired. But this does not mean that the fighting has to stop entirely.
One thing standing out to me while thinking about this, however, is that fighting in a shield wall was probably cognitively extremely taxing. The soldier has to constantly keep up with everything happening around him; any peripheral movement could mean an attack coming to kill him, after all. But physically, I think it is at least plausible that there would be enough opportunity to recover a little between the frequent short bursts of more explosive violence, which should allow the individual soldier to keep this up for quite a while without having to retreat completely. He will just have to spend progressively more and more time hiding behind his shield.
This also seems to fit with my understanding of the fierce fighting over fallen champions (mentioned in Homer I think?). The fighting is fiercer there not because they’re physically fighting harder (because the actual contact is life-or-death either way) but because it’s a prolonged micro-press for a specific point rather than just until the two sides disengage.
Incidentally, I find it interesting that the micro-press behaviour is something I’ve noticed in LARP battles, even if that’s due to different reasons
I appreciate the division between micro and macro-lulls and pulses. I think that’s a useful distinction.
However, I don’t think we can so easily discount the macro-lull or the evidence for spaces between the lines occurring all throughout the battle. In particular, Caesar accounts for tactical evolutions happening throughout his battles that only make sense if there is a considerable space between the lines for such movements to take place.
At the Battle of the Sabis, famously, Caesar seizes a shield from a rear-rank man and moves up to the front of the formation in a hard-pressed sector of the battle. He calls on the centurions and encourages them by name. He orders them to extend their order and spread out so they can use their swords more easily. He then orders the tribunes of the Seventh and Twelfth Legions to draw their lines together and change their formation for better all-round defence. This they evidently carried out.
None of this would be possible even in a “micro lull”. If the enemy is only a few feet away, menacing an imminent attack, Caesar would have no chance of getting to the front and his troops could not have changed their formations in contact either. It necessarily implies a wider gap between the opposing lines, allowing for more time for the Romans to make formation changes or listen to their commander’s directions.
In the conclusion of his account of the Sabis engagement, he specifically says that the Nervii in their last stand kept on hurling their missiles and throwing Roman javelins back at them. This too only makes sense if javelin exchanges happened all throughout the battle, implying a “javelin range” distance between the lines rather than “sword/spear range”.
Or, as I have often mentioned before, Caesar also tells us that the Battle of Ilerda lasted for several hours between Caesarian and Pompeian legionaries before missiles were exhausted and a sword charge was mounted. At this battle, evidently, they stayed at javelin range for quite a prolonged period before closing.
Perhaps Caesar had velites or an equivalent light infantry javelineer skirmisher. If he did, he doesn’t mention them. As has often been mentioned, the velites and equites seem to disappear in Caesar’s commentaries in comparison to their earlier prominence in the accounts of the Polybian legion.
My own theory of the legionary is that he was essentially a shock infantry, but following Ardant du Picq that shock was predominantly moral and psychological. The ideal circumstance for the Roman legionary was that the gladius charge after the pila volley would rout the enemy, ideally without a blow being struck. I would compare it to the musket and bayonet in the age of Napoleon: The bayonet charge was decisive, but bayonet fighting was rare. Most of the killing with the bayonet was stabbing fleeing men in the back, and I believe the gladius was similar. Certainly gladius fighting was more prevalent than bayonet fighting, but I think it very likely that most people killed by the gladius were hit in the back while they ran away.
The shield-disabling design of the pilum also supports this I believe. For most soldiers of this period, the shield was the primary defence. The pilum is uniquely designed for penetrating shields, which potentially wounds the enemy but is also psychologically shocking as it pierces the man’s sense of safety. With the shield pierced and encumbered by a heavy javelin, the enemy front-ranker is forced to discard it just as the legionaries come howling at him with a wickedly gleaming sword. Do you stand and fight without your shield? You’re physically and psychologically vulnerable, and therefore very likely to run. I think the Romans were geniuses at generating the rout in this way.
If the Roman legionary was meant to fight in prolonged hand to hand contact, I strongly suspect he would have preferred a spear or a pike instead of the gladius and he would have looked more like the hoplite than the legionary we know. Indeed, in the Late Roman army the pilum and gladius combination is set aside and the Roman infantry adopt a shield and spear combination which is much more “typical” for premodern armies. I also am downright certain that if the Romans relied on close range sword-fighting to try to pierce formed lines of spear or pike troops, they would have gotten shredded. The corselettos and sword and shield troops of Renaissance warfare, even well armoured, were generally at a disadvantage against pikemen in frontal combat, and so I don’t see why the Romans would be any different.
That all being said, I think the idea of “micro-lulls but no macro-lulls” makes good sense for those armies in which prolonged close combat was indeed the whole idea, as in the classical hoplite phalanx or the Macedonian sarissa phalanx.
If the Roman legionary was meant to fight in prolonged hand to hand contact, I strongly suspect he would have preferred a spear or a pike instead of the gladius and he would have looked more like the hoplite than the legionary we know.
This is the crux of it, yes. We can quite firmly infer that the thrusting spear is the better weapon for prolonged combat, and while the Roman legionary did not trade spear for sword (all of these warriors had swords) he traded his thrusting or multipurpose spear for a specialized species of long-shanked javelin.
This is the crucial distinguishing element of the Italian manner of fighting, from which the other facets — replacement of the aspis with a centre-gripped thureos, adoption of manipular and triple-line order, greater emphasis on the sword — all most probably derive.
And as the sword-legionary evolves, we see the thrusting spear retained longest by the veteran line, the triarii (and also by the equestrians, with the most class privilege, but probably mostly for other reasons).
From my own HEMA experience:
A typical melee between two groups is micro-pulses all over the place, until one or a group of people think that there’s an opportunity for a breakthrough of the enemy lines. That’s when (in-game) casualties mostly happen.
In the micro-pulses, sure someone gets hit here and there, but everyone is trying not to get themselves killed (again, in-game) so you want to provoke and feint as much as you can without actually taking a hit.
The thing not to do is to successfully trick the guy opposite you and then step forwards for a good chance of landing a hit without him being able to riposte – perfect tactics in a one-on-one but in a battle line that’s how you take a cut from the guy to the left of your opponent.
With heavy kit – helmet/mask, padded jacket and trousers, hard plastic or even metal armor, maybe a shield, you can hold a micro-pulsing line for quite a while without getting overwhelmed like in a duel. The longest I’ve been in was around 30 minutes (because that’s the time our “class” had that part of the field) and it felt like moderate exercise that I could have probably kept up a whole hour. I reckon it’s more of an endurance thing whereas actual combat is more like a sprint.
Macro-pulses do happen, but for a different reason, namely in scenarios where if you get hit then you have to make your way back to the respawn point.
We sometimes do a “last man standing” challenge where a small number of people in full kit each have their own “arena” and all the others line up as challengers to fight duels until one hit lands (whoever gets it), then retreat for the next challenger to engage (the challengers rotate, the “gladiators” do not). The fittest and most experienced of us start getting tired and ending up making “unforced errors” all over the place before the 10 minute mark, and that’s with a second or to between each challenger, and even if the “gladiator” has an advantage in weapons and experience so they’re expected to defeat most challengers easily – before 10 minutes in they’ll be taking hits all over the place, and need a chance to catch their breath then a towel and a bottle of water shortly afterwards.
If one guy in a row gets pushed back a measure, the guys beside them may do so to avoid becoming a target, the guys behind them will back up and the whole formation will move back.
I could see two formations after an extended bout engaging in simultaneous withdrawels based on the mob psychology. This may not have been considered a lull if they were within thrown weapon distances (<10 meters), and this bought may have helped encouraged the formation to move back into measure.
And even if the soldiers only have two javelins only the first few ranks can throw them and their not formed up similar to muskets so back ranks couldn't really throw unless there was in unit rotations.
Mid pulses very well could have allowed for multiple pila throws.
Thanks for another interesting read. It’s always interesting to contrast these analyses with how ancient (or medieval) warfare appears in fiction.
Thanks for a very interesting post! Extending from this I wonder how do shock cavalry on shock cavalry engagement that didn’t see one side rout at or before contact continues. In popular media, cavalry on cavalry battle usually results in jousting or smashing into each other, the latter being more of accidents (as no one, including the horses, want a high speed horse collision). I remember a post here years about about LotR mentions that shock cavalry form dense formation (dense enough that you can’t really turn as an individual rider in the formation without the formation turning), and shock cavalry on shock cavalry fight usually result in both sides slowing to a stop at spear range and stab at each other while standing. Expanding from this I am guessing the micro-pulse logic can apply, but I don’t know if horses, even with training, can dash backwards like humans do. If horses can’t dash backward then “moving out of measure” seems very difficult, resulting in both side having to fight until one side turns and runs or dies. This would make cavalry on cavalry shock battle much shorter as there is no “probing” option, you either press the attack or stand your ground.
On the other hand, it seems that shock cavalry formation might also exist in the form of having enough spacing between each horse to have the entire formation capable of turning on a dime. In which case there are probably enough space between each file to have opponent’s horse charge through. In this case jousting logic applies as both formation pass through each other.
And a minor question would be how the mechanism of elephantry on elephantry shock battle functions. Presumably most of the information would be from Hellenistic monarchies and India. Do elephants fight like wild elephants do in a natural environment?
Shock cavalry vs shock cavalry has been discussed previously. I recommend
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/08/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-ii-total-warg/
both for Bret’s original post and a very in-depth discussion in the comments between Hergrim and Alan Paull about Napoleonic era sources.
As for elephants vs elephants, although for some reason “elephant” isn’t showing up in the Tags there is a multipart series on War Elephants beginning in July 2019
You can see this kind of pulsing behaviour in certain kinds of violent street protest. I say “certain kinds” because in most circumstances I do not think you can draw a lot from modern confrontations between police and protestors that can be applied back in time to historical shock combat.
Firstly, both the police and the protestors are rarely attacking each other with full intent or full force. Both sides are operating within limits on the amount of force they can get away with using both in terms of the rules the police operate under and the fact that most protestors do no want to go to prison for assaulting a police officer. The very context of a protest, even a violent one, is that both sides are not yet really trying to kill each other; if they were, people would be bringing guns and bombs not sticks and riot shields.
Secondly, even when protests turn really violent and both the police and the protestors are making a real attempt to hurt each other, the police tend to have such an advantage in equipment, experience, and training that the conflict does not play out as a heavy infantry on heavy infantry shock engagement. More usually, the protestors are so lightly equipped that it turns into more of a heavy infantry on light infantry engagement, with the police being able to easily shove the protestors off of whatever point they are holding while the protestors are fast enough to harass the police with projectiles at will unless one side gets caught badly out of position.
That said, there is the occasional situation in which protestors show up equipped and willing to stand and fight in formation against the police, and the police react by taking that engagement. A few interesting video examples below. Obvious warnings for scenes of violence:
This first video, from South Korea, shows relatively lightly equipped protestors who are surprisingly willing to get up in the face of a police line and trade blows. As they are lightly equipped and in a loose formation, they get pushed back as soon as the police decide to charge them, but you can clearly see both the protestors and the police hopping in and out of measure to try and strike each other. 0.24 to 1.45 are the parts of interest:
In this second video, also from South Korea, the protestors are more heavily equipped and are fighting in a denser formation. They have helmets and, given that they have clearly shown up to this protest willing to fight, I would not be surprised if at least some of them had improvised body armour under their jackets. From 0.15 onwards is relevant, but especially 0.25 to 0.32, where we get a shot along the line of contact between the police and the protestors, and it looks a lot like what this post describes in terms of distance and behaviour:
This third video is from Ukraine, and the camera angle is not as useful as the previous video, nor are the police as aggressive and allow the protestors to get right up against their shield wall, and that might be why they very quickly end up loosing this engagement and falling back. However, this video is interesting because it is one of the few good videos of a violent protest in which the protestors, at least in the front rank, are indisputably “heavy infantry” and it gives an uncut birds-eye view of one of these rare “heavy on heavy” violent protests. They have helmets, big shields, and some of them are wearing body armour. When the police do attempt to engage them instead of just turtling up behind their own shields, you again see the kind of pulsing behaviour described by the post. The fighting starts 1.50 and at 5.45 the police pull back and both sides skirmish with projectiles from that point on:
Lastly, this is not directly relevant, but I thought the readers of this blog would find these two snippets from Japan interesting because they are one of the few video examples of a pike formation used in anger. Protestors training at 0.38 to 1.01 of this video:
and a pike formation being used against police at 0.26 to 0.34 of this video:
When the principes disengage and the hastati advance is there another volley and charge? And do principes somehow rearm with more pila in the event of another swap?
I’m a big fan of Florentine calcio which may be one of the few chances to watch extended group-on-group contact combat in the modern world. The scrum there disintegrates pretty quickly into individual duels, though since you can’t actually kill the other team I’m not sure how well it carries over into warfare.
In an attmept to get a better visualisation of combat than just what I can imagine in my head, I’ve watched various combat sports. What do people think of HMB/Buhurt? Although for various obvious reasons this bears no relation to any real life combat (not least, zero lethality (hopefully) and very low wounding), it does seem to me to match quite closely some aspects of how I imagine some ancient/medieval battles might have worked. Take for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFWpkWEA5xg
There are a lot of interesting features here. Shallow formations (two or three ranks) but deeper than most modern group combat. Low levels of action – I imagine people could sustain this level of combat for a very long period, in terms of stamina and endurance. Lots of standing around and tentative bashing (poking is disallowed, I understand). Fairly tight clustering in some places, but also the ability to move around fairly freely on the field (these people have no concept of formal intervals or formations). There is a ‘push’ at 8:10 (though it is nothing like modern ‘othismos’). ‘Dead’ and wounded on the ground form a significant obstacle.
I imagine this forms a fairly close match to Archaic Greek or ‘Homeric’ combat (pre formal drill). It is (though I can’t read his mind) what I imagine van Wees had in mind, despite his choice of a New Guinea analogy. ‘Officers’ shout orders and organise their side into particular attacks. Formations are fairly open and flexible, with periodic closing up. There is a lot of standing about, interspersed with individuals and small groups getting stuck in. It is not ‘skirmishing’, but neither is it unbroken toe-to-toe combat. In terms of lulls, there are plenty of very localised micro-lulls (can’t judge macro-lulls on this small scale, though I understand these things are usually fought in rounds).
My initial thought about Hans van Wees and Bret’s critique was also that there is a real question to what extend the similarities that HvW sees between Dead Birds and Homer are specific to a style of fighting, and to what extend they’re just common to *all* forms of shock combat, and Dead Birds just happens to be the only example he looked at.
I can’t help but think about the fact that behaviour very similar to what Bret is describing in this post, with out-of-measure lining up and micro-pulses into measure, is also visible in a clip from Planet Earth 2 in a confrontation between two packs of hyenas: https://youtu.be/wr3sSKWDmFY?t=33 (The fight ends at around 1:10)
I think I’d prefer “engagement” to “contact”. The problem with “contact” is that whatever the denotation, it carries the connotation of actually touching. In contrast, “engagement” more clearly means “able to quickly enter or leave measure”, which in turn means becoming able to initiate contact or withdraw from contact.
“it is a visible indicator of the more confident side – the side with confidence is pushing into measure, their opponents backing out.”
I wonder if this was a deliberate decision on the Roman part. You armor your troops heavily so they have the confidence to advance, your standard weapons are shorter than most opponents, so they *must* advance to do damage. The opponents generally have longer weapons, so when your troops advance they would tend to back up to get within their measure and out of yours. Which gets them used to backing up and your troops to advancing.
Of course it requires that your soldiers have the money to equip themselves with heavy armor. I wonder how that became possible. In earlier articles I think you said something about how much more money the Romans could spend on equipment than rivals, but it should not have started out that way.
Great blog sir. Anna from PPP says hi!
Tolkien himself seems to be sensitive to a bit of this himself, for example, in the Hobbit, when he describes the ability of the dwarven host to engage, but not *to break,* the goblin lines.
One of the things that make the veterans scary, from a re-enactment and “HEMA” perspective, is the *willingness* of very experienced fighters to stay not just within the engagement/contact envelope, but to remain well within close measure, stepping up as their opponent steps back (counterpoint: exploitable, if you’re a Carrhae-level tactical genius). The beginner combatant swings, ducks, dodges, swings again — the veteran is perfectly comfortable blocking six attacks in a row in order to wait for the moment when his own attack will *actually matter.*
“But to be clear: measure here is the closer proximity, contact is the looser, more distant proximity.”
It would seem that we might sometimes (if not with hoplites) distinguish between sword-measure and spear-,measure. A swordsman at spear-measure might well think it safer to advance, a spearman at sword-measure would surely think it safer to retreat. That is quite an interesting dynamic to introduce (and makes me wonder about the behaviour of battle lines containing both pikemen and swordsmen).
When abstracted to the ‘measure’ and ‘contact’ dichotomy in this post, sword measure and spear measure are equivalent.
I’m not sure they are. ‘Contact’ being understood as ‘the distance at which either side could strike, and thus both sides need to be focussing on attacking/defending themselves’ occurs at the reach of the longest weapon. ‘Measure’ being understood to be the point at which you personally can actually meaningfully strike an opponent is different between sword and spear.
A Roman vs a spearman has more distance to travel through ‘contact’ (and through his opponents measure) to reach his measure, at which point the spearman’s measure has passed (a spear’s measure being more of a doughnut than a circle, with a hole in the middle of it).
Hi Tea!
You’re right! Except for one thing: at the range the spearman in formation can hurt the swordsman, the swordsman can’t hurt him back. **And vice versa**
@Ynneadwraith, @Russ These are not single combats. These are two lines, each supported by more ranks behind, and not geometrically precise arrangements.
So if I’m a swordsman who has stepped closer to the front rank of enemy spears so I’m in measure and my direct opponent is not, I can still be stabbed by the second rank spears.
If I’m a spearman who is keeping the swordsman in front of me at measure for me but not for him, I still have to worry about his mates on either side who might have stepped closer.
Yes the longer weapons do have an overall effect that can mean on average one line is mostly not in measure, but that can change in a fraction of a second for any individual.
Not if one man has a sword, and the other a spear. Not every fight is symmetrical.
As used in this post, “measure” is around 2m and “contact” is up to around 20m. So yes, you’re correct that someone with a sword has a shorter actual measure than someone with a spear – but 1m vs 2m vs 3m are not particularly meaningful differences when the comparison is to contact distances of 20-30m or so.
Here’s a brief, back of napkin level theory on how a macro-lulls could occur in a Roman battle. This follows from my readings of the primary sources as well as Ardant du Picq, Goldsworthy, Sabin, and others.
Let’s imagine a Roman acies of the Punic Wars or the early 2nd century BC, facing a line of Carthaginians or Gauls or Iberians or maybe Greek thureophoroi. They’re facing a block of “line infantry” similar to themselves, with spears, javelins, and swords, not a sarissa phalanx.
The Roman hastati put in their attack. The maniples advance, they throw their javelins, they draw their swords and they charge.
The enemy, willing to the fight but not advancing to charge, throws their own javelins as the Romans charge. Caesar tells us that this was sometimes a tactic used, although he criticizes Pompey’s use of it at Pharsalus. Some of their javelins go home and the Roman line is thinned a little by wounds and fatalities as they charge. Their charge is a little slackened as men raise their shields to ward off missiles rather than charge with maximum impetus and aggression.
Still the charge advances. Polybius tells us about the stubbornness of the Romans in combat. The enemy line starts to waver, its rearmost fighters begin to back away. The front-fighters, feeling their support behind them waver, are already backing up as the Romans come in.
The lines meet with a brief flurry of hand to hand blows. A few Romans are killed, a few enemies are killed. Then, like rioters charged by riot police, the enemy begin to scramble away for safety, feeling themselves overmatched.
The Romans have taken wounds and casualties and expended a lot of physical and mental energy mounting this attack. They are also sworn not to break ranks outside of certain given circumstances. Individuals can’t necessarily break into a full run to pursue the retreating enemy, for fear of outrunning their supporting comrades and being left isolated and on the battlefield. Nor can any individual Roman maniple advance too far ahead of its neighbouring maniples, for the same reason. Therefore, the Roman line pauses on the ground taken to catch its breath, redress its ranks, and maybe rearm with discarded or spent missiles from the ground.
“The method of fighting adopted by the enemy’s troops was to charge at first at full speed, boldly seize a position, take no particular trouble to preserve their ranks, but fight singly and in loose order; if they were hard pressed they did not consider it a disgrace to retire and quit their position, for, waging a continuous warfare against the Lusitanians and other barbarous tribes, they had become used to a barbarous kind of fighting, as it usually happens that when troops have spent a long time in any district they are greatly influenced by the methods of the country. It was this system that now threw our men into confusion, unaccustomed as they were to this kind of fighting; for as the enemy kept charging singly they thought that they were being surrounded on their exposed flank. As for themselves, they had judged it right to keep their ranks and not to desert their standards nor to give up without grave cause the position they had taken.”
Caesar, Civil War, 1.44, via Lacus Curtius.
Roman legends also have examples of heroes running away to string out pursuing foes and then turning on them to defeat them one by one. See the legend of the Horatii and Curiatii for this. We also know from modern wars that a unit that has just put in an attack and won a position is often exhausted and has a strong tendency to want to stop and rest, which is why counterattacks are often a devastating tactic in defensive warfare. For all these reasons, I think it likely that the Roman line which has just won a position may not go into full rout pursuit immediately but may slow down.
For their own part, the enemy line might also not be fully broken, but could be rallied by its leaders and advance again to re-contest the ground. Rioters charged by riot police, as we see in footage from South Korea and other places, can rally themselves and return to the brawl again. They would likely rally and reform at a further distance, probably outside of missile range, and then if they were willing to fight they would advance again to attack.
Between the Roman line stopping, and the enemy line rallying out of javelin-range, you are left with the two formations unengaged and shouting insults at each other from across a no-man’s-land between the lines. These sorts of pauses and lulls between the armies would allow for the stuff described in primary sources to occur, like Caesar advancing to the front rank to encourage his centurions or the Seventh and Twelfth Legions at the Sabis making a formation change in action. They also allow for troops to gather spent missiles to re-use, or for soldiers with unused pila to move to the front. The side getting the better of these clashes would also be the one that continues to advance and take more ground, gradually moving further and further forward, and that too fits with how Hannibal exploited these dynamics at Cannae.
Question : you mention legionnaries wouldn’t throw a pilum over the head of the previous ranks, that pila wouldn’t be thrown after contact, and that contact wouldn’t be broken until victory.
But if all those three are true, why do legionnaries after the first rank carry their two pila into battle at all ? It seems like they would just never get a chance to throw them.
So to be clear I am not saying they never threw over the heads of the men in front of them, merely noting that our sources tend to advise against doing such things.
But generally what we suppose in answer is that the Romans had two types of pila – one ‘thick’ and one ‘thin’ – according to Polybius and we generally suspect (but are not told) that each soldier carries one of each. In that case the ‘thin’ pilum (almost certainly a socketed type) has more range than the thick (almost certainly a tanged type) pilum. So you’d throw the thin one first, perhaps at around 20-30m and then dump the ‘thick’ one into the enemy right before the last rush at perhaps 10-15m.
That is, at least, the typical guess.
But that doesn’t answer the question, the question was why do the back ranks carry Pila if only the first ranks would ever be expected to through them.
Unless the lulls between pulse’s were big enough to allow either troop rotation or Pila to be passed up from the rear and thrown by the first ranks before another pulse.
Because you don’t know ahead of time who is going to be in the back rank, and it may change during battle.
As Bret mentioned a couple of posts back, common marching order is 4/6 wide column, so everyone more or less fits on the road or path you’re marching along. To deploy into battle formation, everyone turns 90 degrees left or right, the marching column width becomes the battle formation depth. (There are probably variants for narrow paths where the marching order is 2/3 wide, half depth.) The “front” and “back” ranks here are determined by which way the column turns. In an ideal case that’s known ahead of time, but if the enemy don’t cooperate it might be
“****! Enemy on the flank! Turn to face NOW!”
And you really don’t want to spend extra time redistributing ranks.
And in battle the front rankers will get wounded and killed and have to be replaced by the back rankers. (Possibly before getting into pilum range.) So again, you want your back rankers to be able to step into place right now, no scrabbling around trying to pass weapons back and forth.
There could be a lot of reasons.
As scifihughf says, you may not know who’s going to be in the front ranks. Having everyone have the same equipment and training means that doesn’t matter–whoever ends up there is good. Remember, battlefields aren’t the only places for casualties. A LOT of people died of disease or injury, or were put out of commission by them, just getting to the fight. So even ignoring the fight, you may end up in the front ranks and need to be ready for it.
Second, in the fight you can quickly end up in the front ranks because the guys in the front ranks took casualties. And with a pulse model you may end up needing your pilum even if the guy you’re replacing expended his.
The guy in front of you may need another pilum and it’d be awfully handy for you to have one available to hand him. Again, if there are pulses he may toss more than two in a battle (remember, you’re allowed to break ranks to pick up a weapon, which implies that the Romans knew they may use more than 2 thrown weapons). Running out of ammo is not a pleasant experience when faced with enemies carrying sharp pointy things. Being able to get a reload from your allies is a very good thing. Ask the Russians in WWI and WWII about that one.
And remember, the enemy isn’t just walking sedately towards you like cattle to a slaughterhouse. They’re going to respond. Clumsily compared to Romans, but they’ll do something. And that something could be any of a variety of things that means that now you’re in the front ranks–they can punch through your line creating a new front, they can move out of the way after you launch your first volley meaning you have to do the whole thing again, they can hit you with cavalry, they’ve got lots of options, many of which mean you’ve got to throw things again.
There’s also moral to consider. Putting on your armor gets you ready to fight. It’s almost a ritual, and puts you in the proper headspace. Missing pieces of it does very bad things to your mentality; it nags at your awareness in a rather nasty way. And remember, the point of these charges isn’t to kill, it’s to break the will of the people in the opposing unit. Battles weren’t won by wiping out the enemy, but but making them run away. If you’re already a bit worried because you’re missing part of your kit you’re going to be MUCH easier to terrify.
“the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot to deliver a keynote on the historical grounding of Tolkien’s view of war.”
Oooo, I hope that gets shared.
Thanks for this Intermission, Bret. I feel like I understand much better now, why the Roman system had an advantage against spear-wielding foes, and why other systems weren’t necessarily able to easily adopt successful Roman tactics.
Happy holidays to you and yours! Looking forward to a 2026 full of excellent historical information from this wonderful blog!
If I recall correctly, it has previously been mentioned that soldiers in armies of this period were exhorted not to seek individual glory. This seems to make a lot of sense in the micro-pulse battle environment. A soldier that is too impetuous and seeks glory by recklessly advancing into measure is at best going to become a casualty (and a waste of equipment, training etc.), and at worst is going to create an opening for the enemy by falling and potentially creating a gap than can be exploited.
Geekpride,
This is true in some armies and not in others, and in some periods and not in others, and it varies by class too. The poleis Greeks during the ‘classical’ heyday of the hoplite phalanx very much extolled “passive courage”, the courage to stand one’s ground and hold the formation. In contrast, the Macedonians in the period of Alexander had a considerably more “Homeric” attitude, and Alexander and others of the Macedonian aristocracy were constantly seeking individual glory on the battlefield.
The Romans throughout the Republic greatly admired “active courage”, the courage to attack and to seek out individual combats. The stories and exempla that come down to us through Polybius, Livy, and Caesar, and others, are full of Roman heroes who attack aggressively and seek individual glory as heroic duelists fighting enemy champions. For instance: Titus Manlius Torquatus and Marcus Valerius Corvus. These stories may be “propaganda”, but it’s very indicative of Roman beliefs that these are the stories they told about themselves.
Even in better attested periods, we hear of Romans who were renowned and widely admired for their skills in individual combat. Caesar’s story of the centurions Vorenus and Pullo is indicative here. Or, consider Marcus Claudius Marcellus whom, Plutarch tells us, “was efficient and practised in every kind of fighting, but in single combat he surpassed himself, never declining a challenge, and always killing his challengers”.
The motivation of individual glory was very important to the Roman system of war, which relied heavily on aggression and fighting spirit at the sharp end from individual soldiers.
As a LARPer this is really interesting because of how much of it I see reflected in LARP battles.
It’s usually only 1-2, at most 3, ranks with a loose cloud of healers, other support personel and groups of unengaged fighters behind, doing their thing or looking to close any gaps that open up.
At the beginning we just approach each other, occasionally wildly charging into measure, with most people stopping before actual impact, a battle line forming organically like that, but most of the time the line is formed before in a semi-organised manner with an organised advance to the enemy line afterwards.
During fighting, there is no fear of death to worry about, but people dislike getting hit on principle, and unless you’re one of *those* guys getting hit means you need to act it out, fall back, go to the healers, holding the arrow “in” your knee in place or clutching whatever limb just got chopped.
So everyone is just waiting to exploit openings, holding the line, trying to stay out of measure of the nearest enemy polearm guy while trying to get into measure yourself.
And what you describe, individuals stepping into measure, pulling those around them with them in the process happens a lot too. Enemy NPCs act the same way you do for the most part, but there are the big guys with big armour and big weapons, bullrushing your line and pulling their guys with them, and there are semi-coordinated attacks on your side when your big guys and leaders get everyone to charge, or a small group coordinates to step into measure simultaneously.
But then the line to the flank of yours is pushed back or the enemy pulls out the fog machine or magic tricks, so your entire line pulls back well out of measure, and everyone gets a moment to recover and drink before either the enemies advance on you or your leaders push everyone to advance on them again. Or you withdraw entirely.
Social cohesion matters differently too, because you are used to fight alongside the buddies you came here with, where there is organisation and the push to have each others’ back and look cool in front of each other. Once you are alone in the battle alongside strangers, groups you aren’t part of, there is no trust that they will watch out for you, there may not even be battle leaders pushing everyone forward. I recall in a different blog, about Manor Lords, or maybe Bannerlord, a point about peasant militia realistically not being able to charge at the enemy because at most they have the cohesion to hold their ground. Same thing here, no cohesion, between groups so all you can do is hold your ground alongside these strangers while no pushing happens.
Just some thoughts. A lot of thoughts. Whatever.