The Makedonian phalanx -- why such depth?

[PMBardunias]

in such a distance it is impossible to understand when your frontman will collide with the enemy to stop in time (especially if you are a fourth ranker or more to the back).

Ah, I see, we were argueing different things. I was not saying the rear ranks can simply stop before a collision, but that they can pull up short prior to contact with the enemy line. This does not involve an abrupt stop, but the gradual decelleration of the promachoi and thus the subsequent ranks have time to slow down as well. Many believe that this is impossiple and men would all topple over like dominos.

Exactly my point. 8 men shoving at the same time shouting in rhythm (en (prepare) dio (shove) (Of course these are numbers, just trying to show the effect )) can really exert enough physical force to push an enemy line, especially if it is not in perfect condition. Yet, I don't like the sustained pressure model for it becomes uncontrollable in the first ranks. I prefer to view it as a series of controlled pushes, which gradually push back the opponent without endangering the cohesion of the phalanx. These could go on like for minutes, but in controlled stages.

I'm all for coordinating rthym. I have written before on the benefit of sea shantys and "work songs" when doing group labor. You know the Spartan's sang to eachother in the ranks before battle. Men who dance together regularly will be much more able to keep in mass rythm even without song at the time.

The problem is that all the coordination in the world is useless if there is space between men. Any space between men will cause force to be absorbed rather than transferred forward. This is where the popular image of sideways pushing in the shield bowl fails. Under pressure those men, or men pushing at arms length, will collapse forward. The collapse acts like a "crumple zone' in a car and absorbs force.

Sustained pressure would obviously be a benefit if you could survive it. We can survive being crushed toa great extent if it happens quickly and them ceases. It takes comparitively little pressure to be lethal if it is sustained because even a small weight on your chest can keep you from breathing and cause lethal fatigue. In episodic pushing with two sides evenly matched either you have a simple back and forth with no ground gained or you end up at my crowd densities since the only alternative to moving back as a unit is packing closer together. This is why it natually emerges, eventually you are not "moving" at all, but simply pushing each other until one side breaks- one step at a time.

It seems to me that your use of the word "crowd" is misleading. Crowds are uncontrolled, indisciplined, uncoordinated. Thus your theory (at least in the beginning) sounds as complete chaos through the ranks, with every man shoving the back of his frontman without caring whether he marches too far from his sidemen and into the enemy lines.

This is a semantic issue. I am using "crowd" in a specific scientific context to describe men who are standing at very close distance, so close that force transfer fluidly through them. It has nothing to do with how the crowd is organized, but at these densities they are quite organized. Sardines in a can are more organized than those swimming.

Of course, but an untrained mass would not engage in such tactics, there would be no point, unless it was itself pushed back, unfamiliar with "othismos" (whatever it might exactly be), so the back ranks would just try to keep their lines shoving the front ranks. Should they be completely unaware, some would backstep, some would not and the line would lose its order (although to exploit that the advancing army should not lose its own order). Yet we are discussing hoplite tactics now, so I think we both agree that however othismos looked like, the hoplites must have rehearsed and trained at it.

Training comes in many levels and surely othismos predates training for othismos. The mid ranks don't need much in the way of training, I'll show you by way of example. You and I are face to face and I push you with 50 lbs of force. Now I get 12 friends to simple stand up between us and we push them until they are belly to back. Again I push the line with 50 lbs of force, and if the men in the middle do nothing but transfer the force like the Newton's cradle, you recieve 50 lbs of force if it transfers efficiently. I try again and this time each man leans forward as I push which only adds a small amout to the effort, lets say 10 lbs. You now recieve 50 + (12 x 10) or 170lbs of force. When you push back, they don't help you, so I only recieve 50 lbs. If you try to get help from friends trained to push hard but don't form this dense, then what happens is each new guy adds less to the effort, until subsequent men add nothing. Something like (50 + 40 + 30 + 20 + 10 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0= 150 lbs). I still win by 20 lbs.

There is little point in pinning yourself against the enemy, unable to fight or defend to exert the same force that you and your epistates would if trained to cooperate in proper stances.

See above, but perhaps it would be helpful to describe the stance you envision.

Exactly. Should the enemy train to oppose the effects of an uncontrolled othismos, then the whole process is disadvantageous to the pusher. The enemy though (should he choose to, train to, fight with his rearman a yard away and just lose balance from the shock) can kneel or fall and an uncontrolled push would most possibly make the protostates of the pushing line fall. (a friend (expert in martial arts, among which pangration) once suggested that the front rankers might also brace just before the othismos to keep their line, but should this have happened, it would crop up in a text or two and when we tried it, we found out that it was very difficult and problematic due to the fact that the free hand should firmly grasp the shield arm and the angles produced were just not very helpful. We did not dismiss it though as a theory..).

This cannot occur in my othismos because by definition any space between forces that could be exploited in this manner does not exist. You cannot side-step, you can hardly move. If you kneel the man will not fall over you, there is no room to do so. You are only say 1.5' thick and he is at least 2'-3' taller than your head when kneeling. He can bend over you, but before falling forward he will hit the man behind you- who is also being pushed over you. You die, the girl dies, everybody but your foe dies. You can do this if you are fighting at a proto-othismos density, which is what you guys are doing.

One more observation is that in order to forcibly push you do not judge what the opposition force is. Should it decrease, the back ranks, the real pushers in your model would never know it until it would be too late. In their minds, they would just march forward pushing and would not know when to stop. Should they try to, it would again lead to chaos, for some would judge they should lessen their pressure, some would keep pushing thinking they routed their opponents, some would stop too soon and the line would lose its formation. You cannot leave such decisions to the judgement of the individual filecloser. 1000 files would mean 1000 different opinions as to when to stop, lessen, increase pushing force. In a matter of seconds, the line would be no more (should the push be successful!). Actually I agree that such effects would occur in a battle, when you or the enemy would force such a situation but I want to believe that this was not the famed othismos, but a "crowd" effect of too much density.

Such things surely did happen in battle, but less than you might think. There is a great deal of infrmation being passed through the file of pushing men that allows the system to be what we call "self-organized". Think of it as being able to "feel" that way the battle is going. You simply have to respond to cues given to you from the men you are in contact with and they system will appear well organized.

You wrote that often in reenactment the attacker was worse off than the defender. That tells me right away something is wrong since there can be no "attacker" in othismos, both forces must be at similar density. It is the equality of opponents that causes othismos.

Actually there is much difference between a "right-over-left" and a "left-over-right" overlap of shields. Although most reliefs we have suggest the first to be prominent, I think that this is the case only during march, for it facilitates movement.

See my other post, but this is something that I have been long arguing on here. There are in fact no images I know of that show hoplites in battle with their shield overlapped left over right. There are many images going back to the Chigi vase of hoplites marching with thier aspises edge on. Look at them again and you'll see this is the case, one telling feature is that weapons sometimes appear between shields in a manner that would be impossible if they overlapped. I am very pleased to find my self verified.

So, how did they disengage? A command? I am sure that in that concert you are referring to people also wanted to disengage but the mass didn't (mostly because the pressure is not applied to all equally, but to only certain unlucky individuals). I cannot imagine your model working like that, for it would demand a simultaneous decisions by both sides.

This is an easy one if you think about it. How did the crowd at the concert disperse? As the concert came to an end people at the perifery (rear rankers) turned and left. Because the barrier (or phalanx) is only in one direction, unpacking backwards is easy. Actually the force is applied pretty evenly to the ranks near the front,it is near the back where it tends to unravel because those men are not packed as tight and are pushing more like you do in stances that maximize force, but eliminate transfer.

Should one side recoil, the other one would only be motivated to push harder, for the enemy would be giving in. Once engaged as your model suggests, it is, to my opinion, not possible to disengage, since any such attempt would encourage the other side.

At the peak of pressure both phalanxes are essentially one entity. There surely were periodic tightening and loosening of the densities even with no net movement of the battleline. The assumption above is that one side wants to rest and the other wants to attack, this could occur, but many wrestlers or boxers pull apart by what appears to be mutual consent because they are both similarly fatigued. By the way, there are elements of my othismos that have to happen and those that could have happened. Such lulls are in the "could have" category, perhaps they fought continously until one side simply broke.

Of course there was individual pushing by troops fighting in irregular formations. They tried to hack at their enemies and his shieldwalls stood in the way... But nowhere in this text is a mass or even by unit push described. Only individual efforts of some warriors to push the shield of the enemy aside and open a gap to hack at him, a battle between ordered troops and irregular barbarians. To withstand the first onslaught, Romans (and many others) , tightened their first three ranks (as Arrian orders in his Ektaxis kat' Alanon) to receive a charge at run. Btw, what do you mean by "less dense formation"? I guess you mean the barbarian density?

Yes, and something like this must have been how greeks fought before othismos evolved from it.

This could end up pushing the enemy line a hundred yards in a matter of minutes (btw, the image only shows 1-3 ranks of Spartans at doratismos. Did you intend to direct me to another image?).

Look again. Those men are belly to back in othismos, the front ranks shield to shield. Their aspises are held so that they protect the diaphragm. Note that they can fight quite well in the "V" created by overlapped shields (Right over left) because they use their weapons overhand. It is a myth that you cannot fight in othismos. If you want to try an interesting test, tie two of your hoplites together shield to shield, face to face, and let them try to kill eachother. In my experience this can be quite vicious, but if the men are even cloe in strength, then will simply bind eachother up. Head-butting is optional.

Cohesion is not about files but ranks. Hoplites would strive to keep a line, so a forward march of one step would drive the enemy back and not break the line. After that another step... should the enemy get too packed to efficiently withstand pressure, they would try to advance 2 steps and so on. A line that is not in a receive pressure stance will see its rear ranks being shoven off and to the ground as you suggested, before they would get back to line, another push would bring down more men, since the depth of the formation now would be even more shallow. In a matter of minutes, a line which is not trained to withstand such a push will crumble and no disadvantage would come to the pushing line, nor should there be any opposition for this drill to work.

All you will achieve is to pack both phalanxes tighter if they are at all equally balanced. Then you will be in my othismos. There is no such thing as "too packed to withstand pressure" the difference between your and my phalanx is that you have the major push at the front and the rear ranks useless. I have the major push at the rear and all of the ranks adding force- you lose.

Why do you think that pushing in segments is difficult, complex or less effective than doing the same thing for a sustained time? It would allow for the line to assume pressure exerting and withstanding stance and maintain it too.

I don't think its more difficult, I know it is more weak. It is in fact what the othismos evolved out of and superceded.

Oh.. you should do some reenacting...Most people do it to see themselves dressed up in front of a mirror, but to those who wish to evaluate certain details about warfare, it is an invaluable experience.

Sadly, it has been my experience that all too often reenactment is so inauthentic, no one is getting killed, groups sizes are minimal, that it can produce some very bad habits. It something like comparing modern sport epee with actual period fencing. That said I am a big advocate of reenactment, it tells us vary much, we just have to be able to filter reality fromthe result.

Of course you do... the question was about how would the pusher know it and stop his shoving... According to the "crowd" effect, the first ranks of the attacking line would just lose their balance and fall down. But I already posed this question above

Why doesn't the promachoi simply fall forward, pushing as hard as he can against no pressure, when his foe wothdraws? be cause there are cues from the foe that he is disengaging that tell the promachoi to stop pusing and start stabbing. The second rank man gets the same cues form the promachoi, and so on down the line.

Why "almost immediately" if you are Spartan? I am not aware of any such references. And, if you are suggesting it needs some preparation to be employed en mass, then there should be a command given, shouldn't there?

We see in a number cases men either break prior to contact or immediately after. Usually this involves Spartans. It is possible that this was due to sheer terror of lakedaimonians, but though my ancestors were terrible to face, I'd like to think there was a more functional reason. One possibility is that by marching slow, in cadence, and close order, Spartans could minimize the time it took for ranks to form up dense, giving them a jump on other armies if they moved quickly to othismos. Thus Argives might be making a rational calculation that they cannot close ranks up fast enough to counter the spartans before they would already find themselves being pushed back.