spear or pilum?

[Robert Vermaat]

Flavius Josephus equipped regular Roman infantry with a unique ‘xyston’ (Bella Judaica III.95), which is taken as meaning a pilum, but the word is also synonym for ‘dory’, which is the long thrusting spear of Hoplite warfare.

......this is not quite correct and we must back-pedal a little.Xyston is originally the generic term for a spear-shaft , but later is specifically the 8-12 ft (2.4-3.6 m) cavalry lance, carried by Alexander and the Companion cavalry. Josephus was a Jewish historian in the first century, trying to write a history of the revolt for Romans, in Greek, which he all too obviously, from his writings, did not speak well - as all his translators acknowledge. Hardly surprising that he used one of many Greek words for 'spear' (and be it noted, there was no proper Greek word for pila because this was not a Greek weapon, just as sarissa was not a Roman one). He also incorrectly calls the Legionary shield 'Aspis(round circular Hoplite shield)' when talking of the legionary General's bodyguard, and may mean a roman circular shield (parma) ( longche/lancea and Aspis armed)but correctly calls the ordinary legionary shield and the cavalry shield 'thureos'(Greek equivalent of scutum/oval shield/'long' shield), and refers to legionaries as 'hoplites' at times. He calls the Roman cavalry lance a 'kontos' ( lit: punting pole used in shallow rivers, or 'bargepole'), which was Greek slang for a xyston !!)
All in all, writing in a foreign language about technical military terms, we can forgive Josephus' occasional errors - if indeed they are so (see below), I think!

Paul, the ‘xyston’ is maybe only ‘taken as a pilum’ because it is customary to associate the legionary infantry with the pilum. But as I recently quoted from Marchant, that may not necessarily be the case as a pure black & white think. Josephus as well as Arrian might be pointing to a stabbing spear here, and maybe even to a longer one as well.
IF the ‘xyston’ is specifically a cavalry lance of 8-12 ft., it’s considerably different from the pilum. Is this simply Josephus mixing up terminology?

Equally, Arrian who wrote a generation later equipped his infantry (also) with the ‘kontos’, which is also a long cavalry lance of between 2.5 and 4 metres – yet people insist it must be a pilum as well. So is Arrian also blundering, like Josephus?

The Greek word for ‘pilum’ was ‘hyssos’ – if they both meant ‘pilum’, why did they not use that word? So far I’ve seen no explanation by anyone of that simple question.

I get the feeling that people ‘want’ to see Josephus’ guards as well as Arrians ‘kontophoroi’ equipped with pila, and that ‘therefore they translate ‘kontos’ as well as ‘xyston’ with ‘pilum’, even though the text of both need not, and synonyms of those words do not support that.