04-11-2006, 02:02 PM
Well, I've been sitting on bringing Lendon's Soldiers and Ghosts (ISBN: [amazon]0300106637[/amazon]) into discussion for a while, but this seems to be the morning for it...
If we accept Lendon's idea that legionaries were increasingly reserved for engineering and besieging while auxilliaries bore the brunt of battle, then we're not really seeing a replacement of the gladius by the spatha, or at the very least not in the timeframe we've been discussing. The same goes for the "replacement" of pilum by hasta discussed in another thread. In this case, hasta and spatha would be the preferred weapons for infantry combat from the 1st c. CE onwards.
That might not be perfectly clear, but I've got to get to class at the moment...
If we accept Lendon's idea that legionaries were increasingly reserved for engineering and besieging while auxilliaries bore the brunt of battle, then we're not really seeing a replacement of the gladius by the spatha, or at the very least not in the timeframe we've been discussing. The same goes for the "replacement" of pilum by hasta discussed in another thread. In this case, hasta and spatha would be the preferred weapons for infantry combat from the 1st c. CE onwards.
That might not be perfectly clear, but I've got to get to class at the moment...
Dan Diffendale
Ph.D. candidate, University of Michigan
Ph.D. candidate, University of Michigan
