Project- Influences of Roman military on modern day riot control

[MonsGraupius]

I hope that helps.

Thanks. Very helpful.

On the level of violence - yes, it's incredibly difficult to know how much the threat of death would change the situation. However, there is some pretty appalling violence in some videos - including group knife attacks - which almost certainly resulted in death (when I posted links to them previously they were removed by a moderator - to my disgust). My perception is that the crowd/police behaviour & dynamics doesn't change massively even with extreme violence. Indeed, the same behaviour gets repeated time and time again in very different societies - so it appears to be instinctively human behaviour rather than socially learned norms.

So, I think we can get a good idea how a rabble attacking Romans might have behaved. What we cannot know is how training & leadership would affect that, and that is particularly a problem with the Romans and police who are trained to counter their instinctive behaviour.

However, the aim was probably very similar: to get the opposition to back down/run away.

On the depth. When you say "10 deep" I presume you are also saying "shoulder to shoulder". However, very few videos online show anything like that number actually engaged. I think the most I've seen is about five deep. And there are very good reasons why it couldn't be more, because to put it in perspective, if you have a rugby scrum (three deep) and you were to put a little old lady between the rows - the forces are such that she could die due to crush injuries. Obviously a scrum is a well organised pushing machine and it's unlikely most troops would have old women on the front line, but even if we assume a "half-hearted" scrum, in theory there could be seriously crush injuries starting to occur when the line in 6 deep. 

There may be something wrong with that calculation as I've not been able to find any accounts of such an incident. However, if you then added into the equation the extra adrenaline of battle and people literally pushing for their lives ...