014a - A Phalanx With Joints

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. To answer one of the most basic questions about Rome, why was it able to control so much territory for so long, one need look no further than the Roman legion. There were myriad secondary reasons, competent hands-off administration, sound economic policies, and superior engineering skills, but at the beginning and end of the day, it was the legion that secured the longevity of Rome. No fighting force matched it in the ancient world. But its dominance was not the result of finding a perfect method of organizing and leading men and then sticking to that static model forever. Rather, the Romans constantly tinkered, rearranged, and proved the legions, depending on circumstances. One of the great virtues of Rome, and one the Romans themselves took immense pride in, was their ability to learn from their own mistakes and adopt the superior methods of their enemies.

When I was in college, I took a course in ancient political theory where we studied Plato and Aristotle, the Sophists, and other Greek thinkers. But when we got to the Romans, apart from some cursory reading of Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, my professor spent the class periods teaching us legion infantry tactics and how the Roman roads and camps were built. That was Roman political theory, not discourses on the meaning of justice or comparative essays on state organization, but rather how best to build a wall and how to maintain lines of communication in the thick of battle. The Romans did not spend a lot of time with their head in the clouds, but they did spend a lot of time with their feet in the mud. The power, dominance, and stability and legacy of Rome is all wrapped up in its army. Understanding the legions is critical to understanding the Romans, and shifts in how the legions operated mirrored shifts in the socio-political world that surrounded them.

I originally intended this section to be one episode, but as I progressed it kept growing and growing, and so, rather than inundating you with too much information, I have decided to divide it into two parts. Today I will give a brief overview of how the legions changed over the years, and then go into detail about the Greek phalanx in particular, what it was, why it was so strong, and what its flaws were. The Romans used the phalanx until the Samnite Wars, when they morphed into a new system I will detail next week. For those of you with a background in ancient history, I am sure you have heard more than enough about the phalanx, but I want to make sure everyone is on the same page, and I think understanding infantry tactics is critical to understanding classical Mediterranean history as a whole.

In general, and this is very general, the army of the Roman Republic had four distinct phases. The first phase was ushered in by Romulus when he founded the army. It was originally formed like any other barbarian horde, with a strong leader leading a mass of men who charged at the enemy and battled hand-to-hand, one-on-one, until one side overpowered the other. The second phase began roughly with the class reforms of Servius in the mid-500s BC. At this point the Romans began to utilize the Greek phalanx, relying on disciplined, troop-oriented attacks, rather than the free-for-all of Romulus' day. This lasted until the mid-300s BC, when the Samnite Wars exposed dangerous flaws in the phalanx and forced the Romans to reorganize their entire army and start a third phase based around the Manipole, which I will discuss at length next week. Later, around 100 BC, Marius ushered in the fourth and final phase of the Republican army, including a series of reforms affecting not just how the army fought tactically, but also how the soldiers were recruited, removing property qualifications, and creating the first full-time professional legion. This was a major contributing factor to the death of the Republic and the rise of the Imperium.

At this point in the podcast, we have reached one of those watershed moments, the mid-300s BC, that saw a transition from one of these phases to another. And this transition is particularly of vital importance because it moved Rome from having just another classical Greek hoplite army to having an army that was distinctly Roman. The Romans, as I've mentioned, were heavily influenced by the Greeks, not just in art and culture, but also in the employment of arms. In the mid-7th and 8th centuries BC, the Greeks adopted a formation of attack called the phalanx, which was composed of individual soldiers called hoplites. The phalanx was the most formidable method of attack in its day and spread throughout the Mediterranean, finding its way to Rome, as I said, around the mid-500s BC.

Put simply, the Greeks abandoned the chaotic charges of man-to-man fighting in favor of a highly organized formation, which would charge and engage the enemy as one. For hundreds of years, the only thing that could stop a phalanx was another phalanx of equal strength, hence the speed of its adoption throughout the Western world. A phalanx was composed of a single line 8 to 16 men deep, depending on the battlefield and number of hoplites available. As a rule of thumb, deeper was better for phalanxes, and there were accounts of phalanxes up to 50 men deep in some battles. Commanders had to make hard choices, however, because the line had to be long enough to prevent any outflanking maneuver, which meant certain death, so a balance was always sought between length and depth. At Marathon, for example, the Greeks gambled by spreading their phalanx thin to prevent the numerically superior Persians from outflanking them. The gamble paid off, but the Persians nearly did break the thin Greek line, and had they done so, the history of the world would have been altered dramatically.

During battle, the men in the front line held their oval shields, called hoplons, hence the name hoplite, in their left hands and long spears in their right. The hoplites stood close together, and in such a way that their shield protected the man to their left, and the man on their right protected them. This formed a shield wall that was virtually impenetrable. In between the shields, the spears of the second, third, and sometimes fourth ranks shot through the gaps, stabbing and gorging anything they could. A mass of individual fighters would simply be massacred if they attempted a head-on attack. They would be unable to break through a well-disciplined phalanx.

Now I know what you're thinking. If a phalanx was 8 or 12 or 16 men deep, and only the front four lines were attacking, what were the other four, eight, or twelve lines doing? The answer is threefold, but all three folds relate to the all-important task of maintaining the cohesion of the phalanx. The first fold is that as the phalanx initially charged each other, and in the subsequent shoving match, the front lines had to be braced by the men behind them, so they literally, physically, could not be pushed back. The second fold is that the most common way a phalanx was broken was by retreat from the rear. Once men started running out the back, there was no more bracing, no more support, and the other army could push right through you. A deep line meant removing those back ranks from danger, and hence removing their desire to run away. The man in the back line of a 16-man phalanx was in no danger of being run through with a spear, so he wasn't going to run. It's basic psychology. The third fold is that the stable back ranks prevented the men in front, who really were in physical danger, from running away even if they were scared out of their minds. If anyone in the front ran, then the whole phalanx would break down and everyone would be slaughtered.

Now I know what you're thinking again, and the answer is yes. The first few ranks of a phalanx was a really, really crappy place to be, trapped between an enemy who was trying to kill you and friends who forced you to stay put even as they sat essentially on the sidelines. The only way to live, if you were in the front, was to stick together and move forward, so there was a motivational element to the formation as well. There was, indeed, a lot of psychology built into the phalanx, maybe all that philosophizing on the human condition paid off. In a warrior society like Greece, though, men clamored to be in the front ranks because that's where all the honor and glory was, and where the commanders placed their best men. So, despite all the dangers, they didn't think the front was such a bad place to be. To each his own, I guess.

Now a last important word on the phalanx. It was designed for and used on flat, open plains where the ranks could be deployed properly and there were no holes in the line. In a phalanx, a single gap meant death. The survival of the army was absolutely dependent on an unbroken shield wall. In Greece, this worked well because both sides used phalanxes and so both sought the same sort of terrain. But against an army who used vastly different tactics on unstable, hilly terrain, the phalanx was vulnerable, a fact the Romans would learn the hard way.

In the hundreds of years that the Romans had used the standard phalanx, they had been well-served because they were fighting either other phalanxes or Gallic hordes who were no match for a solid shield wall with hundreds of spears jutting out of it. But when they met the Samnites, the weaknesses of the phalanx became all too apparent. The steep, rough country of Samnium where most of the fighting of the Samnite wars took place made it difficult to deploy and maintain a cohesive phalanx. Plus the Samnite light infantry and cavalry, used to the terrain, were able to easily outflank the Romans. And as I said, an outflanked phalanx was as good as dead. This fatal flaw spelled the end of the Roman use of the phalanx. It was simply not maneuverable enough. When attacking head-on, a phalanx was indestructible, but once hit from the side or back, it was a sitting duck. The densely packed soldiers simply could not turn and set up the critical defensive shield wall in time, encumbered as they were with heavy armor and long spears. If given enough time, the left or right hand column could reform into a front line, but in battle time was measured in seconds and a cavalry detachment that managed to get around the line was charging through the ranks in a heartbeat, slaughtering the closely packed hoplites who could not even turn around to defend themselves. This was why the phalanx had to avoid being outflanked at all costs, and why, when the Samnites proved they could get around the Romans, the Romans changed forever their organizational deployment to develop an immunity to this chronic disease.

What the Romans developed was the system that has been handed down as the classic Republican army formation, which we will talk about in detail next week. The maniple system and its three-line deployment, famously referred to as a phalanx or joints.