Project- Influences of Roman military on modern day riot control

[Bryan]

I am not a Roman scholar but I can give you the opposite perspective on this because I teach crowd management.  The answer is, unfortunately for you, that Roman tactics have next to no influence on modern crowd management.

Densus, I would be very interested to discuss the subject with you. In order to understand the dynamics of a Roman line, I have collected dozens of videos showing crowd control which show a variety of techniques being used both by rioters and police, but without speaking to someone it's difficult (from the clips which tend to be snippets) to understand what factors lead to the various formations.

And perhaps then you might share with us what you believe to be the likely depth of a Roman line based on your crowd control experience? (If you wish contact me direct via messaging).

For interest, I was trying to work out the physics involved when cavalry charge a line of people. I couldn't find anything online to help me model it and as it was difficult to work out how it could be modelled, I ran a quick test to see what happens and what factors affect a "horse" charging a line "soldiers" / "police".

Note, the extreme care I took to ensure very lifelike figures - joke! But the weight of the "horse" is roughly in scale to that of the "soldiers".

Real time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa1oJ77Z42g
Slowed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk83NUPfR-8

Note my conclusion was that it would need to be modelled as a complex series of collisions of both "horse to men" and "men to men". It's also a question of psychology - if the men are prepared to stand and the line is too deep for the horse, then most horses will refuse to charge a dense line of men. However, if the front lines try to get out the way, the horse will get through even a relatively deep line leaving a hole.

Riot control horse units have success against rioters and protesters because neither are almost never armed with real weapons of any sort and are rarely formed up in any real manner. Historically, cavalry didn't defeat infantry frontally by running their horses into people full tilt to batter them with the horse's weight, the riders used spears and swords and javelins for a reason. Horses aren't cars, they are made of flesh and blood, and if they run into something hard (like an iron helmet or a shield boss) at a rapid rate of speed they will break or tear something, trip on bodies, etc. Horses are prey animals, their natural reaction is to run away from harm or danger (its why they run so fast in the first place). Stallions are more aggressive, more likely to fight, aggression can be encouraged in animals that already possess it, but it takes lots of training (years) of high quality animals (meaning very expensive, before the years of training) to get a horse that would even contemplate frontally charging infantry (which almost all cavalry in the ancient world never did, let alone train for). Horses and people aren't legos, they are living, breathing, thinking beasts, full of copious amounts of organs and blood, who usually will try to do what they want vs. what another person wants them to.