07-23-2013, 07:15 PM
Quote:Quite a few people believe that missile combat lasted much longer than hand-to-hand sword combat, but if each legionary only carried 2 pilum, how would the extra munition come from? Of course there are also light troops, but each of them also carried a very limited number of javelins.
That's the first question that came to me as well when I was going through the battle accounts. After further research, I began to suspect that part of the answer is that in the post-Marian/late Republic & Early Imperial periods not all legionaries carried pila as their only missile weapons — the evidence suggests that the rear ranks in a century were "light armed" with throwing spears, at least for particular campaigns or battle situations. A concise treatment of the reasoning and archaeological evidence for this can be found in Michael Speidel's paper "The Framework of the Roman Imperial Legion" published in Birthday of the Eagle: The Second Augustan Legion and the Roman Military Machine (you can read a good part of it online through a Google Books preview). The section about weapon specialization & light arms starts on page 129.
Vegetius says that soldiers should be trained in the use of arrows (2.15) and slings (2.16). Examples of evidence that legionaries used these weapons in sieges include Tacitus' account of the storming of Cremona in 69 AD (Hist. 3.27) or the lead sling bullets with legio numbers cast into them excavated around Perugia, relics of the 41-40 BC siege by Octavian of an Antonian faction (see illustration on pg. 124 of Keppie, Making of the Roman Army, 1998 ed.) It would not be too big of a stretch to suppose that some legionaries carried slings as a matter of course, considering their negligible weight and bulk. An archer could carry a lot of arrows, but these would eventually be used up in a protracted fight. But a slinger could re-use enemy bullets or pebbles the right size when his supply ran out
Missile combat might include a lot of simply picking up and throwing rocks. Scipio's soldiers and camp-servants used the plentiful throwing sized stones laying around to throw at the Carthaginian light-armed troops in the opening stages of the battle of Baecula (Livius 27.18.12). Rocks could be practically an inexhaustible supply of missiles. (see Livius 9.35.4)
There also are several references to Romans or their opponents re-arming themselves with missiles lying on the ground. (Caesar BG 2.26.4, 3.5.3; Livius 10.29.6, 38.22.6: Sallust, Jug. 58)
Missile combat might also have been intermittent, taking place in front of the standards in open or a very loose order, allowing combatants space to move in and out of range of their opponents a few at a time and not all at once -- this would allow for longer periods of sustained combat.
