Yeah, spears are great! The Romans get a ton of praise for the phalanx, but after that they were so tactically inflexible as to be laughable. When romans hit the dense-ass forests in Bavaria they practically came to a halt, trying to maintain formation while moving through the trees. The local residents, who were usually a good bit taller than the average roman citizen, would just charge up to the phalanx formation, with all its bristling spears, and use their zweihanders
View attachment 52423 to just hack off the ends of all the spears, terrifying the roman soldiers and crash into the formation and start hackin' away.
Wait what? As far as I know the Romans never used the phalanx - that was the Greeks’ tactic. The Romans used the Testudo, the multi-wedge formation and several others, but they were never that big in spears. Auxiliaries sometimes used spears, but the Legionaries never used combat spears, only the pila (the throwing spear they used that had a very thin tip which bent as soon as it hit a shield or body to make it almost impossible to remove, forcing the target to throw their shield away because it was weighed down by the pilum stuck in it).
I hate to be the party pooper, but swords like the one pictured didn't exist until a thousand years later.
The romans were defeated, but not using such swords.
The Romans’ biggest defeat in Germania (Teutoburg Forest) was because some Germanic auxiliaries who had accompanied them turned on them when the Legionaries were building their camp, giving the Germanic tribesmen time to sweep in and massacre them before the Romans had time to react.
Certainly the Germans were similar to the Celts or other northern tribal peoples in their style of warfare.
And talking about German/Viking Berserkers, they made Celtic Fanatics look like Victorian gentlemen sipping tea.
Celtic Fanatics were essentially what Dwarf Slayers were based on - they believed they were doomed to die and that no amount of armour could save them from the gods’ judgement, so they would have a booze-up the previous night, days themselves in woad and then turn up to the battle with no clothes on and just a sword and shield for protection. Pretty mad but sane compared to Berserkers.
Berserkers on the other hand turned the drinking up to 11 and then would embody some sort of predatory animal (usually a wolf or bear) for the duration of the battle, where they would run around like mad things with nothing but their chosen animal’s skin on and would hack anything that moved within their immediate vicinity to pieces, whether friend or foe, so they were generally steered towards the enemy before being unleashed. Absolutely nuts.
good points!
In fact if you were teleported there you would most likely not even know who is who. Judging everything we know the style of clothing and the equipment of Greek vs. Persian forces were mainly the same at that time.
I thought the Persians had tall rectangular wicker shields with more eastern designs on them, compared to the Greeks’ round shields.
The movie is based on a comic, which is based on a bizarrely exaggerated propagabda story about the battle, written quite some time after the actual event.
Indeed - if you want to watch a remotely accurate version of the 300 Spartans, watch the old 50s-60s film. At least there they actually wear armour and there are no battle rhinos or elephants the size of Mumaks.
Also as
@GreenyRepublic says the Spartans were a rearguard for the majority of the Greek army, sacrificing themselves to allow the rest of the Greeks to escape. There were also some Thebans who stayed with the Spartans as well, protecting their flank in the mountains from the Persians, and who ultimately died with them.
As for spears vs. swords:
The spear (or pike) was the main weapon in most conflicts before the 17th century, in all parts of the world we know of.
Indeed pikes were still extremely widely used in the 17th century as well, because muskets were pretty inaccurate. The main reason they were used over the longbow by this point was not because they were that much better (longbows had already proven dangerous to even plate-armoured knights since the Hundred Years‘ War because of their far quicker rate of fire, not so much due to penetration power), it was because it was so much quicker to train someone to use a musket as effectively as they could than it was to train them to use a longbow. Archers had to train for long hours since they were 9 or 10 to be able to fire even remotely accurately, while a musketeer could be trained from a peasant to a battle-ready soldier in a few months, maybe even less. Even then, musketeers were still immensely vulnerable to cavalry charges so pikemen were used to counter cavalry. Indeed 17th Century warfare had a rock-paper-scissors feel to it, as musketeers countered pikemen because they were much slower and easier to hit, cavalry countered musketeers because they could charge into them with few casualties because of their greater speed and the musketeers could only use either their swords or their muskets as clubs to defend themselves, and pikemen countered cavalry because horses quite understandably refused to charge into a forest of long pointy things.
And yes I agree, Swords were handier in confined spaces like on castle staircases (which were designed so that defenders coming down the stairs had more room to swing their swords) but that’s probably the only place where they were more useful than spears.
For the sake of starting a friendship wrecking argument, I mean deep discussion, which shields are best?
Answer: the Norman Kite Shield.
The gauntlet is thrown!
Ah, but it depends on what you mean by ‘best’ - if it’s aesthetics wise, I’d say a Celtic shield (nobody had such good craftsmen as the Celts), while if it’s in terms of combat ability I’d say the Roman Scutum (its almost as tall as you are and you can do a variety of things with it).
Also, the Saxons used kite shields toward the end of the Saxon era too - the main reason they mostly had round shields at Hastings was because they lost a lot of their teardrop shields at Stamford Bridge and took Viking round shields as replacements.
