spear or pilum?

[Paullus Scipio]

Blimey !! What a lot of posts while I slept ! hock:

First, I'm sure I speak for Robert and the others in apologising for hi-jacking Vergilius' thread, but he has encouraged us by describing the discussion as 'interesting' , which it is, so I hope he won't mind if we continue our digression. D
I guess I'll adopt Robert's approach, and break up responses into chunks.

First, to deal with the less relevant stuff:
Duncan wrote:-

If you're referring to "writing 30-40 years after Josephus", then he's not! More like 60 years.

...my apologies for the inexactitude, I was simply referring to the fact that these two writers are fairly close in time, compared to others, and wrote off the top of my head. In fact '60 years' is as far out as '40 years'. Arrian repelled the Alans in 134 AD, and the dispositions are therefore contemporary with that. Josephus could not have written his work until some time after 80A.D. (on internal evidence), probably during the reign of Domitian 81-96 AD ( who is praised by Josephus).The work in Greek is a second version ( the first was in Aramaic and circulated widely in the East), and Josephus refers to using official Roman accounts/reports. If we say 85-90 AD, we shall not be too far out.......so 45-50 years then !!

Robert wrote:-

Hmm.. Lucius Flavius Arrianus 'Xenophon'?

I believe so. Some have thought in the past that Xenophon was merely a nickname, but he frequently signed himself such not only on public documents but in private correspondence and Philip Stadter (Greek,Roman and Byzantine studies 8, 1967 p.155ff ) showed that it was part of his proper name, not a nickname.

Well, my references are quite OK here, I checked it.
Book IV is mostly on siege warfare and, all too bad, the English translations online fail to translate it.

.....no wonder I couldn't find it then ! The on-line translations don't even mention book IV :lol: :lol:

Crispus/Paul wrote:-

Sorry to but in again, but I thought I would address the point about auxiliaries needing javelins.

...the discussion is open to all, so you are hardly 'butting in' ! Again, my apologies for the intensive posting, but as we have seen, the subject is of great interest.....and your points are well made, and I would agree with them.
One word of caution about archaeological finds from forts etc.....not all spear/javelin heads found are weapons. Many are hunting implements, boar spears, hunting javelins etc