Weight and grip of sarissa and shield in macedonian phalanx

[PMBardunias]

Filling up the body of citizens with the most promising of the perioikoi he created 4,000 hoplites, teaching them to use the sarisa with both hands and to bear shield with strap (ochane), not with porpax.

I see no reason to believe that this indicates a lack of porpax, only a shift in bearing the weight with the strap as opposed to holding it on the arm. Below are some images one of our members took at Ephesos, the very concave shields look as similar to the only actual depiction of sarissaphoroi that we have as you could want. Remember that they would have to use these shields with a sword at times, so a single grip at the edge would not be sufficient.

As to how and if they could hold the sarissa when holding such a shield I can't say. Perhaps as you say the porpax was not used at this point in the fight- fighting in this way would be something that had to be "taught" as in the quote above.. I even have my doubts about the almost ubiquitous pose of the sarissaphoroi in modern depictions- side-on, with the pelta basically facing to the left. It is not what is shone- the peltae are clearly facing forward, though that is about the only thing clear in how they are held. There is also Plutarch's description of Pydna:

"The battle being begun, Aemilius came in and found that the foremost of the Macedonians had already fixed the ends of their spears into the shields of his Romans, so that it was impossible to come near them with their swords. When he saw this, and observed that the rest of the Macedonians took the targets that hung on their left shoulders, and brought them round before them, and all at once stooped their pikes against their enemies' shields, and considered the great strength of this wall of shields, and the formidable appearance of a front thus bristling with arms, he was seized with amazement and alarm; nothing he had ever seen before had been equal to it;

"Round before them" to make a "wall of shields" does not fit well with the common pose to me. Then there is the question of what happened when two phalanxes clashed. I assume the shield had some use or they could have just left it on their back until the lines broke up. My guess is that both phalanxes ended up with sarissa "fixed" in their peltae just as the romans did. Maybe the side-on pose with the shield facing the side was used when the extreme 1.5 foot spacing occurred.