Was the sarissa a non-lethal weapon? And would the Greeks have done better against the Romans with the dory?

[Ecthelion]

One aspect of the Battle of Pydna which has always struck me is that despite being pushed back through hours of heavy fighting, the Roman maniples suffered negligible casualties against the Macedonian sarissa phalanx.
Does this mean that the sarissa phalanx was basically “less than lethal”? I think it does.

I believe that it was nearly impossible to perform a lethal thrust with the sarissa.
Even if the wielder is able to generate enough muscle power to get the pike moving forward at a lethal energy level, that energy will be lost in the flex of the pike as it accelerates and when it hits home. In other words, the sarissa of the Successor kingdoms (which was longer than those used by Alexander) was essentially a non-lethal weapon.

Of course, we all know that the impractical length of the sarissa was due to an arms race between the Successor kingdoms to see whose phalanx could out-reach whose. It was never meant to fight non-phalanx heavy infantry.

Had the Macedonians decided to opted for dory-length spear instead of pikes, could they have done better against the Romans? The dory armed hoplite phalanxes of old were able to defeat their Persian non-phalanx adversaries without the use of cavalry or flanking maneuvers.

A 3-meter or shorter spear like the dory is much easier to wield and thrust with. The fact that the hoplite phalanx was doing almost all the killing in the Classical period means that it was quite lethal all by itself. In the Hellenistic period, the sarissa phalanxes rarely decided battles, that role was left to the cavalry or to flanking maneuvers.

In the pike and shot age, the lethality of the 3 meter pike was again proven. Pike squares were devastating when matched head to head. And against non-pike formations, the pike squares were unstoppable, even without cavalry or musketry support.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

The thing is that you didn't have to put a lot of energy into the pike to kill someone. First of all, when someone is wearing armor (this is assuming you've somehow gotten past their shield), you don't attack the armor; you go around it. If you've ever cut yourself with a knife, you know how little force it takes to put that knife through flesh. It's very easy to kill yourself with a spear by just walking into it.

The Dory was not 3 meters, it was about 2 (6 foot) which is the same length as a Hasta. 2.5 meters (8 foot) was seen as ideal for the Late Roman Contus (for infantry).

[Markas]

I think the difference would have been negligible. The Sarissa may have been twice as long or more but you got two hands into it, unlike the Dory. The Battle of Pydna showed that without exercised cavalry support it was very difficult to win against an opponent you were frustrating and holding.

I don't agree it was non-lethal, but I think you mean it's main purpose was to push back and disorder/demoralise whilst flanking troops and cavalry took advantage. I more or less agree.

[Mangalore]

in a life and death battle most people try to avoid getting killed because except Hindus none has respawn points. Overall I imagine a battle to be more a series of clashes and probing skirmishes than the kind of melee slugging matches we see in TW games. None expect drugged up berserkers would want to risk their necks that recklessly, soldiers or units will seek targets of opportunity, try to see how resolved their opponent is or otherwise determine their chances before doing a death charge and if they find the opponent to hold and duke it out I would think units would disengage pretty quickly to prevent needless risks. That wouldn't be unbloody but overall the initial phases of battle would be more about building up pressure and finding cracks in the enemy's morale than win in a bloody engagement.


I would think against a sarissa phalanx units will get pushed back as they get frustrated at even trying to get through the pikes so they will rather give ground than get impaled. With a shield like a scutum sturdy enough to stop a pike thrust (in contrast to light shield or wicker shields like in Persia where I would imagine light troops would have to break even more) I guess the legionaires could hold out that way for quite a while. The problem starts when you can't give ground anymore. In reverse melee infantry would see the phalanx open thus see targets of opportunity where small groups of soldiers can charge in hack away at a few guys and either the gap starts to open up as phalangites try to get away from the threat and they push in or they withdraw again.

Admitedly that's how I can see this kind of stuff working with people afraid to die. In a way war is not so much about killing than making the other side give up. There is the dualism that we are good at inventing ways to kill while being instinctively rather crap at it.

[Condottiere 40K]

Pressure can also build up from the back, forcing the front ranks forward.

[Mangalore]

Pressure can also build up from the back, forcing the front ranks forward.

Sure. If we take crowd dynamics the usual result is however a stampede with mass panic, not really something desirable. I don't say it didn't happen, i don't think that the unit and formation tactics were build around that too much (maybe in cases like the Forlon hope or similar but here you had people signing up for something suicidal like that)...


edit: I mainly think that you want your front ranks to be as good at fighting as possible and in most these fighting formations the front ranks actually were the most experienced. I don't think they would take undue pressure likely or put themselves there if just leads to them getting into situations beyond their control and they can't use experience to get out of. Knowing when to probe, to charge, when to step back however is precisely what you hope for from veteran soldiers to do for you without leadership.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Shieldwalls (Phalanx, Foulkon/Fulcum, etc) basically work as the following: the front three ranks will use spears to attack the enemy while the rear ranks brace and push, with the entire point of the formation being to push back and break the enemy in a slow advance. Essentially what develops is a pushing match, where the two shield walls will ocassionally break combat and relieve the pressure for a moment, while firing missiles, before attacking and engaging again.

[Mangalore]

Shieldwalls (Phalanx, Foulkon/Fulcum, etc) basically work as the following: the front three ranks will use spears to attack the enemy while the rear ranks brace and push, with the entire point of the formation being to push back and break the enemy in a slow advance. Essentially what develops is a pushing match, where the two shield walls will ocassionally break combat and relieve the pressure for a moment, while firing missiles, before attacking and engaging again.

While I read that a long time ago as well the more I hear reenactors and weapon enthusiast talk about it there seems a pretty broad consensus that any martial artist getting pushed around by his own people will stab those MFs before dealing with the enemy. It would also apply for the Greek not Sarissa phalanx only. Given the heavy curvature of the aspis I personally have some reservation concerning the idea that that shield is designed for an interlocking shield wall. But that's more personal puzzlement about shieldwalls usually were used to embolden badly equipped militia and not fully armed and armored line infantry like hoplites and the fact the scutum was curved to give a singular soldier best cover so in a sense I could see an aspis following a similar idea with a different main weapon. From the full armor of hoplites I would assume a far more active combat role expecting to be exposed to enemy attack by sharp objects.

Again I could imagine badly equipped hoplites to operate more static, it just seems rather wasteful for a fully armored and armed hoplite to get himself into such a fix instead of using the reach of his spear to actually fight from a proper distance and move around knowing the linothorax, helmet and greaves will protect most parts of his body anyway. I still expect formations and cohesion just not to the extent to inhibit footing and ability to fight which a shoving match would do.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

I haven't been in a shieldwall but as a reenactor I know people who have, and it's really a difficult concept and only something that can only be understood when practiced.

The problem with your theory is that armor was not the primary form of protection: we have accounts of armor failing quite often, and ancient authors emphasize the importance of staying covered in combat and that the shield is the primary form of defence. Furthermore, the dishing of a shield like an Aspis or a Late Roman Scutum was because it reinforced the shield, and caused blows to glance off, which provided better defence.

[Condottiere 40K]

Reach may be somewhat illusionary after a certain point, when the spearman can no longer control the spear due to it's unwieldiness or properly protect himself with his shield.

A stalled formation allows itself to be enveloped, which may be why echelon tactic was developed. It can't be coincidental, that the depth of the phalanx was increased, in order to create that pressure from the rear.

[Mangalore]

I haven't been in a shieldwall but as a reenactor I know people who have, and it's really a difficult concept and only something that can only be understood when practiced.

The problem with your theory is that armor was not the primary form of protection: we have accounts of armor failing quite often, and ancient authors emphasize the importance of staying covered in combat and that the shield is the primary form of defence. Furthermore, the dishing of a shield like an Aspis or a Late Roman Scutum was because it reinforced the shield, and caused blows to glance off, which provided better defence.

Oh, I think that the shield was the primary defense, I'm just not convinced how positive it is for full heavy infantry to be forced in a rather static formation like a shield wall. In the dark ages the shield wall seems mainly for the levies so they only needed a shield and some other weapon and pretty much formed a very simple but safe formation while the better equipped soldiers would operate as the guys to get stuff done by leaving said wall. Shield wall shields seem to be preferred to be flat so I just think if they really wanted a full shield wall instead just a tight formation why didn't they use such a shield?

I don't claim to have perfect knowledge here, just that I find the objections particularly of an intended push and shove rather plausible similar to how Rennaissance pikemen called a clash of pike "Bad War" because they really didn't want to end up in such a fight aka did not organize their formation and weapons with an intention to end up in such a bloody mess. Difference is not so much if and how often it happened but what these military guys actually wanted to achieve doing it a particular way.

[Roma_Victrix]

I think the difference would have been negligible. The Sarissa may have been twice as long or more but you got two hands into it, unlike the Dory. The Battle of Pydna showed that without exercised cavalry support it was very difficult to win against an opponent you were frustrating and holding.

I don't agree it was non-lethal, but I think you mean it's main purpose was to push back and disorder/demoralise whilst flanking troops and cavalry took advantage. I more or less agree.

Well, I see that you sir are a ninja, because I was going to bring up that point about cavalry.



The whole damn point of a pike phalanx is that it pins enemy troops while not only protected on the flanks by lighter, swifter troops that can ward off the enemy's ability to surround the phalanx on multiple sides, but also cavalry, which can swing around and strike the enemy from the side or back. It's the old 'hammer and anvil' maneuver, the cavalry being the hammer, the pike phalanx being the anvil.

From what I know, by the mid 2nd-century BC, when the Romans firmly held Macedonia and then conquered the rest of Greece, burning Corinth to the ground, the companion cavalry of the successor states were highly degraded and use of cavalry had gone into decline as a whole in mainland Greece. Without proper support, the phalanx didn't serve its chief purpose as an 'anvil' that locked the enemy in place while other troops swooped in around the sides. Combine that with the fact that the Roman manipular legionary was a highly trained, mobile, agile, and capable soldier with pila to throw at the enemy before he ever engaged him with his gladius. Also, superior logistics, as usual, played a dominant role in the success of Rome's conquest, so it wasn't all about battle tactics like Leuctra.

[Portuguese Rebel]

Have any of you guys took a stab to the chest with a blunt stick (no metal point, just wood)? Even at half force it hurts like hell. The reason the shield was so necessary is that even being non-lethal, through body armor, a stab of a metal point will incapacitate you. Will leave you unable to react and will get you killed in seconds.

We guys don't know better when it comes to hand to hand formation fight. People of the time fought real battles. They were doing it that way because it must have worked against plenty of opponents.

[Cyclops]

I think the pike phalanx was a lethal weapon vs cavalry and relatively lightly armored enemies (aside from the example of Galatian shortswordsmen rolling under the spear tips that one time). Interestingly Makedonia's neighbours in the southern Balkans had cavalry (Thessaly, Epiros) and light inf (Thrakians, Illyrians) traditions.

The famous incident of the Thrakians breaking in dismay at the manouvrability of Alender's pike phalanx may have been inspired by the awesome discipline but they probably also got a good look at the pikes.

The pike phalanx also offered a strong defense against the principle system of the Hellenic city states that threatened from the south (Thebes, Athens) the hoplite phalanx. It may not have cut down heavily armoured inf but it had greater depth and allowed the cav to go hammer on the anvil.

Pikes seem to have worked well enough frontally vs Republican legions: Roman victories typically occured through flanking actions and the manouevrability of their inf vs the static phalanx.

The idea that pikes were non lethal because they couldn't slaughter Roman heavy inf quickly is not supportable. Is there an example where the late Republican battle line folded to a frontal attack from inf? Hoplite and Legionary if battles were long affairs as Scipio shows in Spain and Africa, and only shortened by flanking forces doing their thing.

Now if the Makedonians changed their world dominating system of Pike, Cav and light inf for a medium spear heavy inf, I think they'd be paying more (I suspect short spear inf need more armour) so they'd end up with less soldiers on the battlefield. They might kill a few more Romans, but I don't recall any record of the performance of a classical hoplie phalanx vs Legions.

[Ecthelion]

I am a firm believer in experimental history. If any of you have ever tried to handle a very long wooden pole, you will immediately know what I am talking about. I had a chance when working a Habitat for Humanity construction project. There were some 3-4 meter long thick bamboo poles specifically used for scaffold building. I played around with them a bit and noticed that you really couldn't trust with them.

The reason is that when you thrust forward with deliberate speed, the pole will flex, the actual "spear point" moves forward very little initially. This is where much of the kinetic energy is lost, in much the same way that arrows lose kinetic energy when fired as they flex.

You just can't kill anyone with it. And if you look at all the sarissa battles, none of them are decided by the sarissa alone. At Pydna, the Romans lost only a few hundred men even though they were pushed back hundreds of meters.

On the other hand, the shorter dory was definitely lethal. And almost all the battles of the Classical age were decided by the dory alone. So we can see that the dory was quite lethal, the sarissa less so. And if you spend some time with either lengths of pole arms or just wooden poles, you can immediately notice why.

[Condottiere 40K]

The ideal outcome when deploying pike formations as assault troops, is that the directly opposing formation's morale cracks. While you can't really control a 5-7 metre pointy stick held two thirds downwind, enough of them facing in one direction may hit and wound something.

If you can't really thrust, you have to advance.

[Caligula's_Horse]

The thing is with pike formations, they're very good at getting the enemy to retreat (and rout if they're poorly disciplined), but they're not actually very good at killing anyone.
Now, this isn't much of a problem if the pikes are supported by a strong cavalry arm, which can turn the retreat of even a disciplined enemy into a route and a massacre. Alexander knew this very well, but many of his successors didn't; in fact, part of the reasons the Macedonians lost at Pydna is (if memory serves) their inability to properly engage their cavalry for some reason. Might well have won with it.

None of this makes the traditional dory and hoplon phalanx necessarily superior to the sarissa equipped phalangites however. In fact, hoplites suffer from very much the same drawbacks as pikemen, like their formation's uselessness in rough terrain. A hoplites' equipment is both heavy and ill-suited for individual combat; they can't go chasing down anyone any more then the phalangites.

All in all, while a traditional phalanx might have caused the Romans heavier casualties at Pydna and other such battles, I don't think the overall outcome of the battles would have shifted. In fact, they might have done worse, for while the legions initially failed to break through the pike wall, a more traditional hoplite phalanx might have failed to hold them off even in open ground.
Macedon lost because of a lack of combined arms and an inability to effectively command and control its army more then anything. The Roman system was simply more flexible, allowing smaller units to operate independently and react to the battle as they saw fit, even in those cases when the commanding general was a moron. While a Hellenic style army could achieve such a level of tactical flexibility under a skilled commander like Pyrrhus, setting up such an army was not institutionalized like it was in Rome. Without a remarkable individual to make it happen in Greek state, it simply didn't.

Pydna is a triumph of the Roman military system over the Hellenistic one. The weapons themselves are less important then how the men using them are organized and led.
Probably also worth mentioning, that Rome didn't give up easy, and had the institutions and traditions to set up armies like nobody's business. A loss at Pydna would have just seen another couple of legions coming along a few months later; Macedon, on the other hand, had to loose but once.

[tomySVK]

One aspect of the Battle of Pydna which has always struck me is that despite being pushed back through hours of heavy fighting, the Roman maniples suffered negligible casualties against the Macedonian sarissa phalanx.

Well you must also keep in mind that the half of Roman army was made of Ittalic Allies and that the Roman historians recorded only Roman casualties in their works, they simply didn´t register the looses suffered by the Allies to made Roman victories more magnificient. At the start of the battle of Pydna the Macedonian attack hit the Allied units and they must suffered many casualties as one of their tribunes threw the standard in the ranks of Macedonian Agema regiment to force his men to recapture it and to stop the Macedonian advance, but this attacked failed. It´s hard to imagine that the Allied unit attack Macedonian phalanx in frontal desperate attack, were forced back and they didn´t suffered substantial looses.

[Roma_Victrix]

Well you must also keep in mind that the half of Roman army was made of Ittalic Allies and that the Roman historians recorded only Roman casualties in their works, they simply didn´t register the looses suffered by the Allies to made Roman victories more magnificient. At the start of the battle of Pydna the Macedonian attack hit the Allied units and they must suffered many casualties as one of their tribunes threw the standard in the ranks of Macedonian Agema regiment to force his men to recapture it and to stop the Macedonian advance, but this attacked failed. It´s hard to imagine that the Allied unit attack Macedonian phalanx in frontal desperate attack, were forced back and they didn´t suffered substantial looses.

Do we have any instances where the Roman notaries and historians after them made record of the amount of allies killed? My memory is very hazy on this...without looking into it, weren't the losses to Hannibal at Cannae and other battles including the allied losses as well? Or was that entirely Roman citizenry?

[Caligula's_Horse]

Well you must also keep in mind that the half of Roman army was made of Ittalic Allies and that the Roman historians recorded only Roman casualties in their works, they simply didn´t register the looses suffered by the Allies to made Roman victories more magnificient. At the start of the battle of Pydna the Macedonian attack hit the Allied units and they must suffered many casualties as one of their tribunes threw the standard in the ranks of Macedonian Agema regiment to force his men to recapture it and to stop the Macedonian advance, but this attacked failed. It´s hard to imagine that the Allied unit attack Macedonian phalanx in frontal desperate attack, were forced back and they didn´t suffered substantial looses.

Failing to breech a pike phalanx frontally and retreating with minimal casualties is actually the most likely scenario, allied casualties or no.

A pike phalanx has very little capacity to actually kill anyone. Pikes cannot be thrust; a wooden pole 5 meters long starts to sag under its own weight when held horizontally; its simply not rigid enough to be of any use as a thrusting weapon. Furthermore, pikemen had a hard time keeping track of which spear point was theirs--with upward of twenty pike tips dangling in front of you in the heat of battle, its easy to loose track; we know this for a fact because renaissance pikemen are historically recorded noting the problem.

So essentially, what you're left with is a big wall of pikes, unable to thrust. This means that their only real means of attacking is by advancing the whole formation forward, while remaining cohesive as a formation; crack pikemen like the Swiss could reportedly do so at a jogging pace, while levies would be have to be content with a walk.
While intimidating, and very capable of forcing any enemy to retreat (least he be skewered), its not actually that hard to retreat from. The wall of points moves very slowly after all; an ill disciplined army might fall apart in the process of giving ground, but then, an ill diciplined army falls apart when retreating from anything. A well drilled fighting force on the other hand, would simply reform after a retreat, as the Romans did at Pydna.
Either way, as the pikemen have no way of chasing down a retreating foe (as they can only advance very slowly without breaking formation and opening themselves to counterattack), the actual casualties were very light.

Remember that most of losses in ancient field battles were not during the actual fighting, but rather during the retreat when the winning side (and primarily its cavalry element) fell upon the loosing one. With pikes, even the relatively light casualties caused during the actual fighting would be less then normal, resulting in especially low casualties for any force defeating pikemen, which would explain Pydna just fine, allied casualties or no.