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And this is actually a pretty good question, because the Roman infantry set is, in fact, very unusual. Overwhelmingly, by far, in effectively all periods prior to the advent of gunpowder, the most common way agrarian infantry fight is with a shield and a one-handed thrusting spear. The sword figures into this system, but the sword is a backup weapon, for use if the spear breaks, not the primary weapon.
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Instead, the first fixed point at which we get a contemporary witness to the Roman army describing it in his own day actually comes quite late: Polybius, writing probably c. 146 B.C., though he places his description of the Roman army earlier, around 216 B.C., (Polyb. 6.19-56). That said, Polybius is more or less a contemporary of this system (he would have observed it in mid-second century, but places his description in 216), seems to have primary source access and his description accords well with our archaeological evidence.1 And he describes the legion you probably know: the Romans have an initial screening line of light infantry skirmshers (velites) unarmored and armed with light javelins, then three lines of heavy infantry. The first two lines (the hastati and the principes) wield a sword (the gladius Hispaniensis), a large, curved oval shield (the scutum) and two heavy javelins (pila), while the third line (the triarii) trades the pila for a one-handed thrusting spear (the hasta). Each line has 1200 men in it except for the triarii who are 600.
(As an aside, those who know my research may note that nearly all of the things I am interested in documenting in the third and second centuries seem to emerge in this period in the fourth. If you are wondering then why I am so focused on the third and second centuries instead of this clearly important formative period, the answer is, for lack of a better way to phrase it, uncertainty tolerance. To work on Rome before c. 264, you have to be willing to tolerate a lot of uncertainty and I tend to want to be a lot more sure than the sources for the fourth century let us be sure.)
So now we have the Roman adoption of the pilum. By c. 200, the first two ranks of Roman heavy infantry have dropped the hasta (including, ironically, the hastati who were named for it) and instead are carrying a pair of pila. At some point before the end of the first century, the last rank of Roman infantry, the triarii, will also drop the hasta for some pila (though note that Roman light infantry, the velites, do not use the pilum, but rather seven lighter javelins called the hasta velitaris).
There has actually been, for the past two decades, something of a debate among experts as to exactly how the pilum fits in to Roman infantry tactics and what that means for how we should understand a legion engaging.
Naturally, this part has to be a bit more speculative; no Roman source tells us why the pilum was preferred over the spear; the shift for most Roman heavy infantry in any case happens earlier than our sources provide that kind of granularity.
This all raises.. not so much questions, as a lot of factors I would love to have a better idea of. Like: What sort of casualties do cavalry tend to sustain in engagements against infantry and other cavalry? And how expensive were horses in archaic Italy, anyways?
I wonder how that concept stacks up against your understanding? If I read your article correctly, I believe you are suggesting it more likely that if soldier still had one or both of their pila by the time close-combat fighting was going to happen, they would drop those pila to draw their sword.
And lastly, since according to my nickname I should mention it, the later Germanic angon, while quite similar to Roman pilum both in function and in construction (and maybe derived from it) was used, as far as I know, both as thrown and as thrusting weapon.
If Romans had both heavy mobilization compared to other societies and heavy metal use per soldier compared to other armies, how did the total needs of wrought iron of Roman army compare with other societies?
So while it may be true that the pilum is very heavy for a dedicated javelin, it does not seem as exceptional when factoring in the often heavy historical use of throwing-and-thrusting spears as projectiles, which the Roman heavy javelin does not dramatically differ from in weight or reach.
Cliffsnotes, seems the Romans started to see cavalry as a very useful thing and in consequence fell into the pattern of infantry being a supporting element to a cavalry force, complete with spears and bows and pikes. The pilum survived in reduced capacity and a probable variant thereof was used notably by the early medieval Franks and somewhat by others like the Anglo-Saxons. Then things started back on the process towards cavalry armies with supporting infantry, following which plate armour and guns got involved and everything started getting a bit out of hand; the specialized heavy javelin, which had already rather fallen by the wayside, rolled most of the way down the drainage ditch.
Not only that the Romans thought cavalry was very useful; their city-centric society and citizen-militia centric armies were conquered by migrating warbands that were based on nobility, most often mounted nobility. Society changed and thus, as OGH tells us, the military changed with it. Notably important city states continued to field excellent infantry well into the Medieval period.
By the time the Western Roman Empire fell, the citizen-militia centric armies had been long (half a millenia long) replaced by professional soldiers. And while Roman army remained dominated by infantry, numerically speaking, so were the barbarians that conquered the Empire.
Heavy cavalry goes back to the Sassanid (possibly earlier) cataphract lancers, and probably diffused from there. The barbarians included some steppe groups (Alans, Iazyges, Goths) who would have had some proportion of heavy cavalry.
Heavy cavalry was more limited by horses than by armor technology. First cataphracts likely appeared alongside the Nisean horse breed (first horses bred for heavy cavalry, IIRC) which is first referenced in 430 BC. This horse breed originated in Zagros mountains, which would indicate that it was Achaemenid Empire that first had the capability to field cataphracts. OTOH, however, there are indications that Neo-Assyrian Empire already fielded cataphract or cataphract-like cavalry in 7th century BC, so it is likely that Achaemenid cataphracts were simply more effective than previous variants.
So when you get past the first spear points you would now be between two spears limiting your movement sideways, and you would still have 4 more spear points in front of you to pass until you can attack the enemy.
There are effectively two sorts of shock combat in a battlefield context, though they blend into eachother: on the one hand you have intense close combat, while on the other you have cautious, conservative prodding.
Since humans care significantly about their own well-being and have a deep fear of death, it would also be very difficult to convince them to engage in prolonged close combat regardless of fatigue. And sure enough, our data on battle casualties gives no evidence of the kinds of meat grinders that would inevitably result were close combat somehow the norm.
For fairly obvious reasons, if one group has spears and the other only has vastly shorter swords, the latter force is going to have a miserable time whenever it comes to long-distance prodding, which is to say most of the time.
So instead of spending all of your time in fairly close spear-y proximity to the enemy, you spend most of it quite far away indeed watching the enemy get javelins chucked at them, and the rest right up close and personal hacking at someone with a sword.
It seems to me a fairly straightforward question to answer: the sides flung javelins at eachother and intermittently clashed with swords until one or the other found itself the worse off in the exchange and routed. If both sides were equal in numbers and equipment and training and morale, then it comes down to terrain and luck.
2. How does the cycling of the fromt and rear units work? How the hell do you coordinate something like that? I always thought running away from dudes you were in melee combat woth was a good way to get a spear to the back. Was it possible that the dudes in front would run in close, chuck their javelin and then move back before getting into melee like a heavier version of velite tactics?
It is also theorised that the different centuriae can time their throws against an advancing enemy in a way to create an almost continuous shower of pila with multiple volleys, and then counter-charge a mauled and ragged enemy line. Re-enactors can train to do that, and it seems reasonable to assume that it was one among different possible tactics.
But this is not how a battle formation works. Idea of a Greek phalanx / shieldwall is to have a dense mass of spears. Long enough so the second rank also contribute, and the whole formation is fighting shoulder to shoulder with overlapping shields. A pike phalanx will have even more points per square metre.
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