#ANCIENT GREECE HOPLITE SHIELD LOCATIONS SERIES#

1 So we’re going to look at the manipular legion, its weapons and tactics and consider the peculiarities that might give it an edge on the Hellenistic military system. Then we’re going to look at the Roman army of this period, the manipular legion. While I’d normally assume this was a pretty well-understood military, looking at the responses to the tweets above, it seems pretty clear that most folks don’t actually have a good sense of how the Romans fought in any period. So we’re going to go through this question. First, today, we’re going to look at how the Macedonian phalanx functioned, but also how the Hellenistic armies it was embedded into were structured, because the Macedonian sarisa-phalanx never fights alone. Then we’re going to address some of what I consider myths about the weaknesses of this form of the phalanx when applies to the whole tactical system it functioned it, namely that it was weak against flanking, weak against archery (horse or foot), or that it was merely a pale imitation of the supposedly greater version of the system used by Alexander and Philip.

None is quite a perfect model set-piece battle, as we’ll see later in the series. And moreover, this staggeringly lopsided Roman success was relatively new: Rome had fought Pyrrhus of Epirus’ Hellenistic-style army in three major engagements from 280 to 275 and didn’t decisively win any of them, though none of Pyrrhus’ victories were anything like as decisive as the parade of Roman triumphs during the second century, despite Pyrrhus being regarded in our sources as the finest general of his generation (and we have reason to think he is, in fact, being tactically innovative). It’s a question that crops up on social media frequently, usually in the form of someone tweeting or posting something along the lines of this:Īnd of course a lot of folks use that as an opportunity to give joke answers (machine guns! cruise missiles!), but what struck me was that on the original tweet and both my response to it (where I posited the answer was ‘Romans’) many of the responses confidently asserted suggestions or solutions which simply do not match up much at all to the actual battle record of these armies. A lot of it was what I am going to term ‘ Total War tactics’ – the sort of very simple tactics (flank them, pummel them with ranged fire) that everyone knows but which rarely decide the outcome of battles, in part because everyone knows them and so armies are well-prepared for them.Īt the same time, as we’re going to see the answer to this question has some complexity to it. On the one hand, we may note one clear historical fact: from 200 to 148 BC, the Romans win every single major land engagement fought against a Hellenistic power – most of them lopsidedly so. On the other hand, all of those victories have their own quirks.

#ANCIENT GREECE HOPLITE SHIELD LOCATIONS SERIES#

This week on the blog we are starting what is a planned four-part series looking at the twilight of Hellenistic warfare and the triumph of the Roman legion. Our core question is a really common one: why was the Roman legion able to decisively defeat the Hellenistic sarisa-phalanx?

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