Why did the oval shield replace the scutum?

[Robert Vermaat]

Hi Adrian,

Robert, surely Vegetius tells us the length of various Roman spears?

Indeed he does, and I know that of course. But I began wondering where those ideas of the others in this discussion came from. I was a bit wicked, your honor. :mrgreen:

Your statement about Roman spears is not entirely correct. The contos in Late Roman literature is nearly always a long spear, usually the arm of the heavily armoured Catafractarii/Clibanarii, some depictions of it show it was at least 8 feet long. Whilst there are mention of many types of spears in Ammianus, such as the Hasta, Lancia and 'pilis' (pilum), there are also references to contemporary weapons such as the Spiculum and Veruta that Vegestius spoke about. Some Late Roman monumental works show infantry with a spear that appears to be about six feet to six and a half feet long, yet others, such as the pen and ink drawings of the mostly destroyed Column of Theodosius show the infantry in many cases just holding a short spear, probably the Veruta. I believe references to the Spiculum are also to be found in the SHA.

I know, I know, I did not fully elaborate there - there's so much to be said about LR spears (ask Paul McDonell-Staff), and we were originally discussing the LR shield wall and the LR scutum! Trouble with those spears is, as I already mentioned, that the sources either do not describe these spears in full or happily use synonyms when naming them. So yes, a contus is 'probably' always a long spear of 7-9ft WHEN we can check that, and some depictions verufy that, as you say. But indeed, some monumnets only show much shorter spears, and one has to decide whether that's because the spears were indeed 'just' 6ft. (which is not very long, given the complaints about length mentioned below), or whether the artist had a limited amount of space. It's a dilemma: artistic license or a verutum?