How Effective were Spears Against Cavalry?

[Nathan Ross]

Our sources only revert to reporting if they really have to, by ommission, or by oversight, but certainly not by intention.

And yet this particular incident is described in detail - why, if it was mere fantasy? It could be an allusion to the tactics used by Scipio against elephants at Zama (Frontinus, Stratagems), or even by Lucullus against the chariots of Mithridates; but these examples might also suggest that such tactics were not impossible or unknown to Roman arms. The orator of Panegyric XII also mentions that the Maxentian army adopted a wedge attack formation in this battle, and Constantine's men enveloped it somehow.

Most panegyrics are at least 50% flights of fancy, literary allusions and poetic metaphors. But the remainder preserves some important anecdotal details - crucially, most were given very soon after the events described, and often to audiences with direct experience of those events. Part of the fun of reading them is trying to tease the one from the other. But to dismiss the whole lot as fabrication risks throwing away some of our most vivid contemporary sources.

Delivering an imperial panegyric was enormously prestigious, and could crown the career of an aspiring orator. Clearly, besides deploying a wide range of learned allusions and tricky rhetoric (what Edward Dixon calls "the late Roman passion for the obscure"), the orator had to demonstrate a full knowledge of what he was describing, and avoid making statements which would seem foolish or ignorant to his audience - ignorance was not an attribute for skilled orators! These were crafted, rehearsed recitations, and everything in them was intentional. Judging the intention is the difficult part, but we shouldn't just pass them off as meaningless statements.

so in this case, then, when Nazarius says that the clibanarii are trained 'to preserve the course of their assault after they have crashed into the opposing line', he was presumably not just speaking out of his hat (or any other suitable orifice). His audience - whether Constantine himself or (as seems more likely) the younger Caesars and their staff - would probably have been well aware of what clibanarii were for, and may even have seen them in action. Nazarius would not have risked sounding like a buffoon by just inventing a detail like that.