Continuous Combat or Pulses and Lulls?

Over on his blog Bret Devereaux has followed up a chat in the comments with a post on the mechanics of Roman and Iberian combat. About ten years after historians of ancient Greece started to challenge the “rugby scrum” model, Roman Army Scholars started to think hard about what ancient writers said the Roman army and its Iberian opponents did in combat. These descriptions have significant differences from descriptions in earlier Greek writers like Tyrtaeus, Thucydides, and Xenophon (for example, Roman armies can be driven back hundreds of metres before turning the tide, whereas the first time Thucydides’ hoplites turn their backs (tropein) is so important that the other side erects a monument (trope) to it). The blog post is well worth reading. In lieu of a full response I have some comments below.

First, I don’t know anyone who denies that Republican Romans preferred to throw their javelins and charge with the sword. Writers such as Polybius, Livy, and Caesar describe this many times. The question for debate is whether if both sides stood firm, this would result in uninterrupted combat, or a few minutes of combat after which one or both sides back off to catch their breath, throw things, rethink their techniques, and build up courage to go in again. Its also up for debate how much the two lines would separate: just a few steps, or as far as they could throw a javelin? Devereaux calls these two possibilities micro-pulses and macro-pulses although of course there is no hard divide.

Second, between say 800 BCE and 200 CE, infantry with spears had one or two spears. I cannot recall a single painting or sculpture which shows more than two, and mass sacrifices of weapons at La Tène ‘Celtic’ sites or the Danish bog of Hjortspring usually contain one, two, or three spears per shield. The Christian Roman army festooned itself with spears and lead-weighted darts called plumbatae, but in earlier times the closest thing I know is Livy’s story that some Roman velites were trained to sit on the horse behind the rider and carry no less than seven short darts to hurl when they dismounted (Livy 26.4.4, cp. Polybius 6.22.4 where the darts are slightly smaller). Livy presents this as a special technique for a special situation, and troops on horses or chariots often carry more weapons than troops who have to walk on their own two feet.

Therefore, some infantry who ran around the combat zone ducking and leaping and throwing spears had just one or two spears each, and a Roman infantryman’s two pila is not a small load of missiles. One of the beautiful things about throwing spears is that you can pick up the other guy’s and throw them back, whereas a gunner who shoots all his ammunition is out of luck. Two spears is the same load as an Iberian caetratus, Germanic warrior, or Thracian peltast. If you are used to Romans and their customs, you might not realize just how unusual some of these customs are.

Soldiers with two spears, a shield, a sword, and a helmet could fight many different ways. In tenth-century England they could form a shield wall (OE bordweall) and hurl spears before they closed to trade cuts and thrusts above each other’s shields. In ancient Thrace they could form a loose cloud, run close ducking incoming missiles or beating them aside with their shields, and toss their own spears then decide whether the enemy was weak enough to close in with. Romans seem to have used both approaches some of the time, as when Roman armies in Spain adopted Iberian tactics or Arrian suggested that Romans should form a wall of shields backed by archers against Alan cavalry. There are many open questions among scholars such as whether the round flat shield adopted by the Romans in the third century was better suited for loose formations or a dense shield wall. Some people used to believe that Imperial Roman auxilliaries fought in a looser formation than the legionaries but the evidence for that seems very weak other than that they had slightly smaller and flatter shields. Gear can tell us some things, but there was a great deal of room for two groups of warriors to chose different ways of fighting with very similar equipment. There is lots more to discuss in the original blog post over on ACOUP.

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Further Reading

• John Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts (Yale University Pres, 2006)
• Quesada Sanz, Fernando (2006) “Not so different: individual fighting techniques and small unit tactics of Roman and Iberian armies.” In P. François, P. Moret, S. Péré-Noguès (eds.) L’Hellénisation en Méditerranée Occidentale au temps des guerres puniques. Actes du Colloque International de Toulouse, 31 mars-2 avril 2005. Pallas 70 (Presses universitaires du Mirail: Toulouse) pp. 245–263
• Bartosz Kontny, “The war as seen by an archaeologist. Reconstruction of barbarian weapons and fighting techniques in the Roman Period based on the analysis of graves containing weapons. The case of the Przeworsk Culture.” Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 16 (2008) pp. 107-146

(scheduled 20 December 2025)