The Dory

[PMBardunias]

Paul 9(B) no, balance has nothing to do with it. No one would fight with an unbalanced weapon...

Again, though--if you have a long spear, however well balanced, the MASS of the part in front of your hand--no matter how you counter-weight it--will be easily moved by a short fulcrum (the face of my shield, or my spear point/haft) with a hard blow--and you will have enormous difficulty (in terms of the speed of hand to hand combat) getting it in line again.

If you go back and read you'll see this is exactly what I said. It is not a questions of backweighted-vs midbalanced spear of the same length, but of comparing a spear with a second spear that fundamentally handles like a longer spear.

In fact, in every circumstance, your opponent, armed with a short spear or a sword, will have you down--and dead.

If we follow this logic a swordsman should always beat a spearman of any length which is folly in massed combat. Perhaps the problem is that you have never faced an opponent who is well trained to the 8' tapered dory.

As usual at this point, may I suggest you build some spears and try using them? Honestly--this is something you only have to see once! I wish we had video from last weekend.

I have built and used a variety of spears, I am fully confident in what I said- in fact you backed up all of my assertions with your experience.

Look I admit this is an uncomfortable truth. But the only reason to lengthen spears is because the quality of the infantry is going DOWN, not up.

This is simply untrue. A longer spear guarantees the first strike. If a man is well trained this may be all he needs. Think of the well trained Napoleonic lancers like the Poles- not the crappy later imitations. They only had a single strike. Remember as well that this is group combat. A phalanx with longer spears can simply keep you at bay if you attempt to spear fence with shorter spears rather than close shield to shield.

Pikemen aren't really even fighting--they are moving, and the mass of their spear points is dangerous. But swordsmen--whether Spanish or Neapolitan or Roman--make fairly short work of the front of a phalanx for the exact reason that no individual armed with a 20 foot pike is actually targeting and engaging anyone. Pikes are about morale--not about combat ability. Longer spears make worse soldiers feel braver.

Christian, read Polybius on the phalanx/legion comparison. The front of a macedonian sarissa phalanx was impregnable. Paullus crapped his pants at Pydna facing one. The only example I know of where a sarissa phalanx was actually broken into frontally, as opposed to flanked or penetrated through gaps in the line, was by Cleonymus of Sparta. He had his front rankers drop their weapons and grab the enemy sarissa.

Further, I think both you and Paul M-S insist that spear fencing was either infrequent or non-existent.

You do me a small injustice, since I believe in a period of doratismos before othismos, but Paul M-S espouses ONLY spear fencing.

Fine--if that's the logic, then let's ask--why lengthen a spear, if no one is going to use it at long range? I'm pretty sure you, Paul, believe in Othismos. Okay--if you know that all your hoplites pack in to close range, why give them longer spears? Please don't tell me that it's to kill men in the second or third rank--no one in hand to hand combat thinks that way. Men fight the man in front of them, or perhaps to one side or the other. But if you believe that spears grew longer in the 420s, then I assume you think they got longer because a long spear was a better weapon? Or do I have this wrong?

Yes, the added reach was surely beneficial when two phalanxes engaged in doratismos. I was hard on Paul's progression of spear-to-sarissa because functionally he is on the wrong track as to how the spear itself developed. He is completely correct in thinking "reach" became longer over the classical to hellenistic period, forcing a jump to 2 handed spears.

And my I point out from a prior thread that, as sarauters are hollow, they have very little weight. There's no real counterbalance.

Points are also hollow and small, sauroters surely weighed as much if not more than they did even hollow.

further, as far as I can tell, most spears that show a taper (and what proportion of all spears shown in contemporary art show a taper?) have a double taper. They taper both ways--usually a long spear to the point, and a shorter taper to the butt. Still, to be fair, even the shorter taper and the lighter sarauter will combine to sabotage your argument because the balance point will still be--pretty much in the middle. Nicholas, who's on this list, just completed a double-tapered 10 foot dory with a sarauter that weighs the same as the head. the balance point--the middle.

You cannot taper a "long fore-length" and a "short rear-length" when both head and sauroter are of equal weight without ending up with a balance point between the long fore and short rear section not in the middle. He must have tapered equal length of spear from the midpoint- which does nothing but lighten the dory.

I think that it would be fairer to say that the Greeks always (at least from the 8th C.) knew about all sorts of weapons--long and short spears, and probably pikes, too, by sea and by land. In the late 5th century, as the quality of hoplites dropped, all sorts of things were tried to make up for the lack of trained men--long spears, deep formations, cavalry, psiloi, peltasts, mercenaries, improved cavalry--all in response to the lack of trained hoplites and increases in army size.

Troop quality surely increased in the late 5th c !!! The rise of highly trained units like the "picked 1,000" of Argos and the sacred band at Thebes are two examples of this and direct attempts to match Spartan professionalism. The rise of the professional soldier is a hallmark of this period.

Surely many weapons were known- the dorudrepanon is a famously comic example. Axes may have been seen on a battlefield early on, but these and other such weapons were never common in Greece. There were varous other weapons seen in regions outlying Greece.

And Paul (now M-S) I find it odd that anyone believes that the Sarissa is superior. I'm pretty sure that a cursory examination of the evidence will show that Philip's sarrisaphoroi never, ever beat hoplite armed infantry straight up--they required a cavalry victory on the flanks, every time! In fact, I'd bet that Phillip felt his infantry were inferior, and all he expected of them was that they not crumble away before his cavalry won the day.

You are correct in that Phillip surely created the Sarissaphoroi as a means of creating a indigenous corps that could stand up to well trained hoplites. (note they are well trained contra the notion above). They did this by keeping hoplites a bay with their longer reach and denser spear hedge- preventing othismos. I love hoplites, I'm a hoplophile, but even I cannot make hoplites superior to sarissaphoroi. Why did Cleomenes III convert his hoplites to Sarissaphoroi prior to Sellasia if they were not percieved to be dominant? Surely he had no illusions about winning a cavalry battle. Hoplites were no better at breaking into the front of a sarissa phalanx than romans were. When the macedonians become very well trained we do not see them reverting to hoplites.