Studying the Roman fighting style is no simple thing.
It spans over a thousand years, to say nothing of the Byzantines, which is a different animal
entirely.
In the west, if you look at Rome's basic tactical framework in a general way, it can be divided
into three distinct systems.
These systems have remarkably little to do with each other, and were constructed to accomplish
three very different goals.
It's actually astounding that they all belong to the same culture.
Today I want to talk about all three of these in turn.
Let's get started.
The Phalanx system was the first system Rome adopted.
It came directly from Greece, as a result of early Greek influence on the Italian peninsula.
A Phalanx was a unit of tightly grouped armoured spear-men, who moved and fought as one.
There's a reason that the Greek fighting style was being appropriated by these foreigners.
Phalanxes were tough.
Damned near invincible, actually.
They were slow, but once they came into contact with the enemy the combined weight of the
entire unit was too much for anybody to handle, unless it was met with another phalanx.
So the early Romans straight up stole this fighting technique.
They used it with a lot success against some of their neighbours who fought in a much less
organized way.
The standard way to array phalanxes was in one long straight line, as you can see here.
Any enemy charging into this would have been met with one giant wall of spears.
The early battles would have been pretty lopsided, as the Romans just plowed over these undisciplined
guys in loose formations.
The only bad things about phalanxes is that they were very slow, and had a hard time turning.
Also, because of the way that everybody had to support the spear-men at the front, they
couldn't fight in more than one direction at once.
The more traditional way to counteract this was to put a lot of cavalry on the wings to
protect from any flanking attacks.
They could also chase down any faster enemies that the phalanxes couldn't catch.
For whatever reason the Romans never really did much of this, but they were successful
all the same.
This worked for a long time, but it started to get the Romans into trouble as they began
to expand into central Italy.
This area is mountainous, which is not ideal for the slow moving straight lines of the
phalanx.
It's hard to keep a line like this perfectly straight as you move up a hill, for example.
If you have to move around some rocky, impassable terrain, the entire line has to be broken
up, which is the perfect time for the enemy to attack.
Moreover, the inhabitants of this region were no slouches.
They used hit and run tactics, and lots of projectile weapons.
Even when they closed in for hand to hand fighting, these were tough mountain men, and
they gave the Romans a run for their money.
The Romans suffered a string of defeats, and began to seriously reevaluate how they fought.
Maniples were an ingenious solution to this very specific problem with the phalanx: inflexibility.
Maniples were extremely flexible.
First of all, maniples were smaller, standalone units.
This meant that they were capable of fighting in isolation, or even in several directions
at once.
A phalanx would usually crumble if it ever got surrounded, whereas a maniple could shift,
and adapt.
Second, they could move much more fluidly.
Instead of arraying themselves in big solid lines like the phalanx did, maniples arrayed
themselves like this, in a checkerboard pattern.
This was a fundamental change.
Now they don't have to step out of formation if they wanted to or go over hilly terrain,
or dodge trees and rocks, or cross a stream.
The entire formation can kind of flex and bend as necessary, while maintaining its readiness.
It wasn't just the formations that changed.
Their entire fighting ethos was now different.
The solid walls of spear-men were now mostly gone, replaced by men wielding swords and
shields.
Individual maniples now found themselves in specialized roles.
There were three major ones.
First, the hastati.
This is where the young and inexperienced men served.
The hastati were always placed at the front of the line, and were the first to come into
contact with the enemy.
Hastati were outfitted with a sword and a shield, but also with javelins that the entire
unit could throw at a moment's notice.
This was a big innovation.
The phalanx system had no ranged units, which meant that faster enemy units could easily
stay at a safe distance if they wanted to.
Now, not only were the maniples faster, but almost every Roman unit was now a ranged unit.
At a moment's notice they could hit an enemy with a volley of javellins, which must have
fundamentally changed the dynamics of the battlefield.
The hastati were always the first to close in and make contact with the enemy.
Then, after some time, an order would be given, and the hastati would swap out with the second
line, who were called the principes.
These were older veterans, who were outfitted similarly to the hastati, but with slightly
better equipment.
Under normal circumstances these two lines would alternate for the duration of the battle,
giving each other a break as needed.
In a perfect world, the third line would never be used.
These were the triarii, and they were the oldest veterans.
We can think of them as the elite troops.
Unlike the hastati and the principes, the triarii retained some phalanx-like qualities.
They were still spear-men, but were organized more loosely, so that the entire unit wouldn't
crumble if they ever broke formation.
The triarii were so rarely used that the Romans had a saying a for when something was going
badly.
They would say "it's come to the triarii."
I've always liked this saying, because it has a meaning that's unique to Roman culture.
It means that "the enemy has broken through, and this is the last thing that we can do
to respond."
But it also means "there's a major problem, and it's time for the real adults to step
in and fix it."
It's weirdly pragmatic and optimistic.
Sometimes an entire campaigning season would go by and the triarii would only be used once
or twice.
This made them crazy.
We're told that sometimes the triarii were forced to sit on the ground during battle,
like children, because they had this reputation of charging in against orders.
They sometimes resorted to begging to be allowed to get into the fight.
I looked and looked and can't remember where I saw this, but years ago I read something
that said that a Roman general put his triarii up front during a battle because he was getting
reports that there might be a mutiny if they had to sit this one out.
These were tough dudes, and when they were finally unleashed they fought like hell.
Let's go back for a moment to the Battle of the Trebia River.
If you recall, the first two Roman lines fully committed, and some in the centre were in
the process of cutting through the enemy and marching right off the field.
These were the hastati and the principes.
The third line, the triarii, were held was back, as usual.
When Hannibal's epic surprise attack emerged from the long grass, the triarii turned, fixed
spears, and stopped the attack dead in its tracks.
They did their job perfectly, and didn't give an inch.
It was the younger men up front who panicked, and started to give in to the Carthaginians
on the wings.
These same triarii were the ones who were last seen getting surrounded, holding their
ground, and making a heroic last stand as the rest of the Romans were killed, captured,
or driven off.
I'll say it again: these were tough dudes.
Rome used the maniple system for a long time, and Rome eventually rose from a regional to
a global power.
But as this was happening, they started to notice some structural issues.
The maniple was designed to face off against hill people of central Italy, and now Romans
had men fighting from Spain to Asia.
A lot of the time there were now in the position of fighting huge, well organized armies, from
rich and powerful kingdoms.
Things had changed.
Rome needed to reorganize.
The solution that they came up with is called the cohort system.
Before any major changes were made, one thing was abundantly clear.
Rome needed bigger units.
The maniples were just too damn small now.
Against the hill people of central Italy, one maniple here and one maniple there could
make the difference in the battle.
But now, armies were huge, and a single maniple here or there was kind of irreverent.
As the first thing, going into this reform, the size of each unit was quadrupled.
Armies went from having 40 maniples to having 10 cohorts.
But cohorts weren't just giant maniples.
They also fundamentally changed how they operated.
The different experience levels and different specializations were completely done away
with, and each cohort became more or less identical.
The big strategic change that this facilitated was that the army now emphasized mobility.
Unlike the maniple system, these soldiers carried their own gear, set up their own camps,
and cooked their own meals.
These guys could construct bridges, clear forests, build roads, I mean, anything.
These new units were designed to be entirely self sufficient.
They needed to be able to ditch their supplies and march off at a moment's notice if they
needed to.
And they often did.
You can see the appeal of this kind of army.
When you have guys stationed thousands of kilometers from the capital in sometimes hostile
territory, you don't necessarily want a bunch of specialists.
In other words you don't want to risk having the backbone of your army wiped out during
a battle when reinforcements are months away.
You want the entire army to be your backbone, if that makes any sense.
There were new tactical realities that emerged naturally from this new organizational structure.
With these larger cohorts, it was kind of like each army was made up of 10 smaller armies.
This meant that the Romans could now do things differently on the battlefield.
They could now delegate a lot of authority to sub-commanders, who could use their own
initiative.
Under the old system you might have generals saying "move this maniple up, move this maniple
back, send these six maniples over here to reinforce our line over there," and so on.
Under this new system, a general could say "take this cohort and hold the line over there,
fall back if you need to, and reinforce this other line if you can, but use your own judgement."
It's important to emphasize that almost every cohort was identical, which was a radical
change.
It meant that any individual unit could step in for another one without any disruption.
It also meant that if they wanted to supersize an army, all they had to do was add a few
extra cohorts.
There was never a situation where they were thinking "I have way too many triarii and
not enough hastati" There was no such thing as a lop-sided army.
Every unit was the same, and self-contained.
So what did it mean that they used all of these different tactical structures?
It's not like one was a natural consequence of the previous one.
These are three radically different systems.
The Romans were successful with all of them, but they each accomplish very different things.
So what gives?
Above all else, the Romans were pragmatic.
When a thing stopped working, they ditched it, unsentimentally.
They adopted the phalanx fighting system to solve a very specific problem, which was that
they had some powerful neighbours that already used the phalanx, and at the time it was considered
unstoppable.
They adopted the maniple system to solve another very specific problem, which was that they
needed to fight on uneven terrain, and to respond to hit and run attacks from creative,
less well organized enemies.
The cohort system was adopted to solve yet another very specific problem, which was that
they were now fighting larger, more traditional armies, in remote, far flung provinces.
All of a sudden Rome needed a large scale, professional, standardized army, so they just
invented one.
This constant tactical innovation allowed Rome to flourish for over a thousand years
in the west.
That's no small thing.
This constant change also meant that for them, failure was an option.
Each time they were defeated in a major battle, they made significant changes in their military,
and usually for the better.
That's a cultural trait that's hard to teach, but it was probably Rome's greatest strength.