How did the armies advance through the fallen?

[stevesarak]

I would think that marching and advancing over obstacles would have been practiced.

We have often used haybales as obstacles to practicing line advances, or deliberately sought broken or rough ground, or a fields with shrubs and perhaps other obstacles to practice in.


I can' t imagne the Romans NOT doing something similarly practical.
[/b]

It sounds like your group really gets a feel of what it was like to be legionary back then.

So even though walking over the slaughtered may be messy, with practice it could be done without worry of falling.

Thanks

Not if the enemy is wearing segmentata (i.e. in the event of a civil war), in which case accidentally standing on the armour would likely cause a legionary great problems--hobnails have no grip on anything smooth.

That’s a good point, and I can’t see anything being done about that, so I’d assume in a case like that, when there became an impasse, to dangerous to fight on the line, that either you took the time to check your footing, or else fell back a few paces, drawing the enemy with you, so either they fought on bad ground or both fought past the carnage, or at least until it was time to move again.

That brings up another question. How stationary was the line of contact. Did one side usually get pushed back? Against barbarians I could see that, but what about during the civil wars. Roman against Roman, where the two sides met, did the fighting usually stay there, both side fighting back and forth or did one side, for what ever reason, usually get pushed back?

[D B Campbell]

One Greek force was actually seen to have thrown away their clear victory because they had to leave the area right after the battle, and then came back later and asked to recover their dead (something like that, I don't recally the details!).

I think you mean the battle of Thyrea, ca. 550 BC, Matthew.

When 300 Argives slaughtered 300 Spartans at Thyrea, the two surviving Argives thought they had won, so they ran back to Argos to report their victory. But when they returned, they found that an unnoticed Spartan survivor had taken "ownership" of the battlefield by erecting a trophy.

(Apologies for going slightly off the topic, but I'm just reading the whole thread from the beginning. :oops: Now you can get back to Romans trampling each other!)

[Tarbicus]

I would think that marching and advancing over obstacles would have been practiced.

I don't see that being done with an emergency army, especially during the Republic. In later times yes, but there's still a reference also to a later Roman battle where the men kept slipping on the blood and guts, which I'm looking for.

Added: Adrianople, 378 AD, according to Ammianus.
"The ground, covered with streams of blood, made their feet slip, so that all they endeavored to do was to sell their lives as dearly as possible; and with such vehemence did they resist their enemies who pressed on them, that some were even killed by their own weapons. At last one black pool of blood disfigured everything, and wherever the eye turned, it could see nothing but piled up heaps of dead, and lifeless corpses trampled on without mercy."
31.13.6

[marsvigilia]

Hobnails. Large conical hobnails.

[Paullus]

Although out of the era, at the Battle of Flodden in 1513 between the Scots and English many of the combtants had to remove their shoes and hose in order to gain a foothold on the sides of a depression between the two hills where the battle was fought. Although the battle was fought in the rain I heard somewhere that the conditions were significantly worsened by the blood and gore of the fallen, particularly at the base of the hills where the majority of hand-to-hand combat took place.

Hobnailed caligae seem quite practical, illustrated in brutal detail by English billmen and Scottish pikemen trying to push forward only to fall flat on their backs before sliding forward towards the enemy. It is a typical, elegantly simple Roman solution to a potentially devastating problem.

[marsvigilia]

And good for stomping nasty Celts underfoot.