Depictions of Underarm Phalanxes

[Sean Manning]

I can't emphasize enough the difference in stance between sarissaphoroi in combat and hoplites. Sarissaphoroi lead with their left hands, like left-handed fencers. Hoplites have to extend their right arms forwards, making their body square to fore. This is true for any particular stance you want to envision them in for combat- side on, 3/4, etc. If the weapon is in the right hand, then they have to extend it forward to strike or end up with rediculous jabbing over and around their own heads.

The side ways stance of a sarissaphoroi presents a much smaller accidental target to a sauroter. Incidentally, I think it is this side-on stance that allowed the "new" packing density described for the Macedonians. Aspis bearers were limited by the need to stand straight forward at the completion of the strike motion.

Connolley's diagrams often show Macedonian hoplites standing with their hips perpendicular to each rank, but photos of reenactors with sarisas show a less extreme stance. Spearmen and pikemen probably both lead with the left foot and left shoulder, and twisted their hips and thrust their right arms forward to strike. You placed a lot of importance on energy earlier, but any strike which doesn't involve the hips will not be very powerful. And again, you don't need much energy to stab someone to death with a spear unless you want to pierce armour. I have a little training in spearfighting so this is not completely theoretical.

Sorry to be late into this discussion, but relative to Sean's request for a citation, some other data on relative impact energy was provided by Gabriel and Metz (From Sumer to Rome, The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies, 1991) showing (Table 3.1, p. 59) strike energy for spears held overhand at 70.8 foot-pounds and underhand at 13.5 foot-pounds for a ratio of 5.2 to 1 in favor of the former. Schwartz (Reinstating the Hoplite, 2009, p. 80) has repeateded this information, converting it into metric units (newton-meters).

I finally got around to reading Gabriel and Metz a few months ago, and found it was such a shoddy piece of scholarship that I'm uncomfortable using anything in it. They don't give you enough information to evaluate their methodology, and lots of the assumptions they do state are unlikely. Even if you give them some credit for less information being available when they wrote than is available today, they make some really basic mistakes (like arguing that spears were not very effective weapons because heavy armour was reasonably effective against them).

Specifically, p. xix of Gabriel and Metz says that they studied one man (his height and weight are given but not his experience in hitting things with hand tools) who used each weapon an unspecified number of times. Horsfal et al. tested 200 people and explain how they were selected.