So, the Roman Legion vs. the Phalanx. Anyone who knows their

Go to /his/, you'll have better luck there.

Bump, I was always wondering about this myself

>>35134586
Wait a while I'll explain, not very in depth answer but better than most stuff you're going to get.

>>35134586

They would probably engage the front of the phalanx, then send reserves to flank them, which could deploy faster than phalanx reserves could counter them.

Phalanxes work very well on open ground. When you're on broken up terrain, they don't work so well. Also, it's not like the Romans consistently outkilled the Greeks. They were just more consistently willing to take and absorb losses. These are broad generalizations, but I think some of the larger reasons.

>>35134586
In the battle of Cynosephalae, the Romans and Macedonian (i.e. Greek) armies encountered eachother by accident with the greeks on the high ground. Both armies formed up as fast as they could The Greek General's (Phillip V if anyone cares) right had his elite troops and they formed up first. They hit the Roman's left and started to push them back. The Greek's left, however, lagged behind and the Roman's hit them before they were formed up. As a result. the Greek left was pushed back and a gap opened between the left and right. Some of the Roman right peeled off and attacked the Greek right from behind and that destroyed the right's cohesion. Without that cohesion, the phalanx came apart.

In summery, the phalanx couldn't be broken from the front but it also couldn't break the roman cohort. The romans would just duck behind their shields and turn it into a giant pushing match. After that it was just a matter of waiting until other legionaires got behind them and broke the phalanx from the side.

so say each person has, idk, 10,000 men. and your phalanx formation is at what would be considered the absolute minimum of ranks, 8 ranks deep. that gives you a 1,250 man front, in your solid line of pikes, of which the men are crammed absolutely as close together as possible with very large pikes so as to present as menacing a front as possible.

On the other hand, your roman formation will be, most likely, in the triplex acies. Each "block" of troops will be seperated from each other with as much distance as they are wide, like this

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

Now, if each roman "block" is 6 deep, since they did field in not-deep formations, that results in your 10,000 men, if you choose to deploy them alllll in a line (not in line with tactics) then you get a line that when adjusted for "size" (there are gaps between units) it would be 3,333 "men" in length.

Now, because of the fact that a pike troop has difficulty engaging anything on the flanks because of said compressed nature, the worst thing that could happen is for the phalanx to not be able to engage fully, i.e. being attacked anywhere besides the front. As seen previously, changing your overall strategic layout gives you access to something great: reserve troops. Did the Romans plow through the front of the phalanx? likely not. The "modern" equivalent of a phalanx would be a pike block, and they proved themselves fairly impenetrable short of ridiculously long lances in occasional battles, cannon or massed infantry musket fire.

>>35134635
First of them, the mobility claim. If you've ever did any reenactment from civil war or medieval or whatever you understand some of those things very well.

When you're in formation that's like - one big line - you're not going to keep it. Big stone on the way and the formation literally breaks in two, the battleline goes to shit. Tiny hills that only part of the formation is crossing(remember we're talking about phalanx of few thousand people from time to time). Hell, different inclination will make it extremely hard to keep the formation.

Roman battle line was different. Centuries were 60 man each, maniples were made of 2 centuries. 120 men can maneuver around very easily provided the formation is relatively square-ish. The reason why centuries were even a separate thing was because the maniple could "fold" if it encountered an obstacle without much problems.

In hilly terrain this is simply much more flexible way of fighting. This wasn't a problem for typical Greek wars, when they've pre-planned where the battle was going to take place, but Romans fought where they've had opportunity to do so, which meant the terrain wasn't always perfect. The Greeks had a hard time keeping their battle line solid, Romans didn't - which allowed them to outflank them or get cavalry in vulnerable position to force Greeks to reposition again and again, tiring the soldiers even further and creating more and more "cracks". If something like that happened to the Romans - they would just have singular maniples reposition themselves to avoid flanking or to punish enemy for trying to exploit a gap or something.

>>35134706


Then there comes the equipment. Romans were trained to be the stormtroops of the ancient world. They didn't stand in the formation and just tried to push enemy back with spears(triari did, but they were like 10% of typical Roman army). They went close enough to throw pilum, threw it, got closer to throw another one, threw it and went close and personal. The length of Greek spears didn't help at all when they faced this.

>>35134706
>if you've ever did any reenactment

stopped reading there. Reenactment is dress up. Although neat for the living history, it should never be used as an example. But anyway, I'll continue reading about how you and 23 middle aged dads engaged in a pike phalanx.

I've read shit where the Romans front line would just slip past the presenting pikes and then the dude behind them would just pop off the head of it or some damn thing. It always seemed like they just broke the phalanx apart by just getting in close with their shields while chucking throwing spears and plum. They had a number of ways of dealing with the phalanx so it's hard to pin it on one thing

>>35134711
The important thing to note is that in the end the conquest of Greece wasn't a path of unending victories for Romans. They've got beaten quite often, actually. However, the problem was what kind of victories those were. One of the most successful leaders of Greeks was king Pyrrhus of Epirus - who's known for winning battles, lots of them in fact, but many of those were costly victories, and Greeks had much less resources(including men) than Romans.
>>35134720
It helps you with imagining how it was. I've did medieval reenactment in high-school, including doing fairly large battles and when I first read about "Roman legions were more mobile than Greeks because Greeks were in single Phalanx and Romans were split into semi-independent maniples" I've instantly knew what they were talking about - thanks to that experience. This is the problem historians(especially pop-historians) often have, when they write absolute bullshit in their books because they didn't really grasp the practical surface of the problem(very often you can see it when you watch a WW1 or even WW2 documentary and they mention cavalry - by that time cavalry was little more than mounted infantry - that little more was sabre and/or a lance).

>>35134755
>d they mention cavalry
as a part of bygone era*

Manipulars and reserve units made them Romans much more tactically flexible than phalanxes. They could engage the phalanx from the side while front-line units already engaged them. Phalanxes could turn, sure, but then they'd just turn the flank to another Roman unit.

>>35134755
>that little more was sabre and/or a lance)
Isn't a lance quite a lot though? And also useless as fuqq in WWI?

>>35134586
So in summary, yes. Hope that helped.

>>35134810
They didn't carry them when they dismounted so it was literally nothing.

The point is that they were low-tech version of motorized infantry. No army aside from American one was able to motorize its army in 100% so all of them depended on horses to some degree.

>>35134826
No army in WW2. In WW1 it was almost all horses.

>>35134706
>Centuries
>60 men
>In the army of a country where cent means 100
What is the meaning of this? Force inflation?

>>35134847
It's like with their battleline composition. Hastati(spearmen) didn't have spears and were the first heavy infantry to fight the enemy. Principies("the first" as in - the best) were the 2nd row and triari(the third) were the third row and were the only ones equipped with spear and the most elite part of their armies.

At first century had 100 people but then they've quickly changed it to 60. At first hastati had spears but then it was only pilum and gladius. At first principeis were in the "first row"(of the battleline, not the century or maniple) but after some time they were 2nd.

>>35134711
This guy gets it. Shield wall plus pilum was an excellent way to break enemy formations up to the point where they could wade in with short swords and remove gyro

>>35134586
>1) Front ranks of a roman maniple/cohort/whatever have you form up their shield wall against the spear wall, and the rear ranks 'spill' forward over the sides of the two formations, surrounding the phalanx. This idea is probably born of the difficulty I personally have of understanding rigid formation fighting.

shield walls were hardly if ever used because it required the front ranks to be locked together which made them vulnerable and easily tired, Romans usually held a checker board pattern to their formations with a small space between the rows which were intercalated to easily let fresh legionaries push through and forward past the already tired ones at the front. Shield walls would be far less mobile and lock the legionaries in place, they could contain a phalanx but not for long.

>2) The romans hold their scuta at an angle and slope them, pushing the pikes up and away as they advance. This is a wild guess, as I'm unsure if weapons like the Sarissa could punch through the scutum or not.

the Sarissas might not punch through, but remember there were several rows of them, if you got past 3 or 5 you were still looking forward to several more. The Romans were said to have suffered very harsh loses at Cynocephalae and Pydna during the first contact but rather than break the phalanx through, they contained it until they found ways to pull the entire enemy army apart from a thread.

>Help me understand, /k/. Outside of strategic factors, how did the Roman legionary surmount the phalanx? How did the shield and short sword defeat the spear/pike?

basically what Romans always did when things got hairy: not give up when anyone sane would, grind the enemy down, drag them out way beyond the point of exhaustion, and exploit any opportunity that would present itself.

fact that the Macedonians they faced had done a terrible job at properly defending their phalanxes with lighter infantry and cavalry was also a determining factor.

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>>35134883
>remove gyro