08-22-2016, 05:39 PM
(08-22-2016, 05:24 PM)JaM Wrote: egg before a chicken? if anything, Thureophoroi were copy of Roman legionaries... Romans fought that way a bit sooner than Greeks came with the Thureophoroi.. Most probable they introduced them only after Pyrrhus came from Italy and fought wars against Macedon and their allies.
and regarding Othismos, If it was really a thing, what would stop somebody from feinting a push? pushing for a brief time, then suddenly give up? that would cause other side to fall down to be beaten quite easily while they are laying on the ground... It is quite common concept even with sports where people use force to fight others.. like for example Greek-Roman Wrestling..
The Thureos came to the Greeks via the Gallic invasions, but I never said that Romans got the Scutum from the Greeks, just that a man with a Scutum and two pila is functionally the same as a thurophoroi. This by the way is probably why the Macedonians had such problems with Rome. They had been used to dominating Thuroephoroi, but the Greeks did not seem to have the same small unit control that the romans did.
This point is one of the objections I get that show immediately that you do not understand my othismos. This is not aspersion, I think many of my friends did not truly get it until I showed them. You don't "push" in othismos, you crowd together. You cannot "othismos" a single enemy, you need two opposing sets of ranks coming together slowly like two crowds of people trying to go opposite directions through a single door. You cannot step back and cause the man in front of you to fall because there is a man at your back in your way. If there is no man pushing you fromthe back you are not in othismos. The only men who can jump back are the rear rankers of each side. Every time you force the enemy back a step, you may fall out of othismos and need to pack in tight again. Othismos, as Epaminondas knew, is a battle of steps.
The word itself probably means what I describe. It is a noun derived from the verb otheo, meaning to push, jostle, shove. Following all linguistic convention, if you make a noun out of a verb it takes the form of "a state where (pushing, jostling, shoving) occurs". Such a state is a crowd like we see on the floor of rock concerts, etc.
