Why Greeks even used phalanx if it was so immobile? Romans had more flexible formations and rekt them

Pydna, Cynosephalae, Thermapolyae (the one in 191 B.C., not the Greco-Persian one), Magnesia. Any of those battles ring any bells?

it was an anti-cavalry force, something the Romans didn't get until cavalry prevented them from breaking out into the middle east, in pure infantry battles it's shit

B8

Why is that so? Why it took so long to counter it?

Not him, but you have to remember, this is way before you have something like a professionalized, meritocratic officer corps. Officers in ancient armies were almost always either elected by their men or were given command by virtue of noble birth.

Tactical innovations happened very slowly, when they happened at all.

There are many narrow passes in Greece that reward a tough immobile formation, besides they had light troops and later cavalry to support that formation

Not really "immobile" except in very specific instances. The strength of a phalanx is its irresistible advance, which it really needs open, level ground for.

>lol rome btfo
>posts pic of Thracians and Greeks

>WOW IT TOOK 5 OF YOU TO KILL ME

the phalanx was supposed to be use with other units wasnt it? You need archers, slingers, and light cav for it work work properly to begin with.

>the phalanx was supposed to be use with other units wasnt it?

Not originally, no. Lighter supporting troops like skirmishers and cavalry developed later, and I mean, centuries later after the first phalanx fighting in the 8th-7th centuries B.C.

Lmao why couldn't you just fucking walk behind the phalanx with your army and kill them from behind?

Ancients were so fucking retarded, no wonder they all died at like 25

well the phalanx was a fairly wide front, so going around the side would take a while and give them time to adjust. Plus I always assumed they had cavalry or swordsmen to protect the flanks but apparently they didnt.

On the other hand maybe it was a matter of honor to meet your enemy head on in the phalanx, but I rather doubt it.

>Responding to b8

whatever, i'm easy.

bitch please.

Greek warfare until the Peloponnesian war was often highly ritualistic and strict rules of warfare would be observed. Armies would often agree to meet each other on flat ground to settle their disputes with violence.

Real life isn't Rome total war. Greeks didn't use heavy cavalry until Alexander. They were an anti infantry force.

When the Greeks had their "world war" the traditional ritualistic methods of warfare were abandoned. Fairly quickly afterwards you start seeing light infantry forces mixing with a phalanx force, the use of skirmish tactics with said light troops, and with Alexander we see extensive use of cavalry.

>Greek warfare until the Peloponnesian war was often highly ritualistic and strict rules of warfare would be observed. Armies would often agree to meet each other on flat ground to settle their disputes with violence.

A 'classical' Phalanx battle would be just two sides stabbing each other until one gave. They would then go home and make pottery and shit.

kek

>implying being able to consistently and effectively field and maintain more troops than your enemies is a fault of Rome.

Nigger, do you know how armies work?

>LOL, who fights wars to win?

Fpbp

And of course ignored

>Pydna
>29k romans rekt 44k macedonians

>Magnesia
>30k romans rekt 70k seleucids

I'm not seeing it.

Romans were fucked by the Greeks many times.

Well, not him but I think what he might mean is the vast reserves of manpower rome traditionally counted with respective to most of their contemporaries. In that a compatible defeat of Roman forces would only serve to slow them down.

My teacher said that phalanxs were unbeatable and never lost is that true ?

I would like to know more.

no, they lost to Macedonian phalanxes.
Other wise they lost to flanking maneuvers.

And those 44k were all the men of the kingdom and mercenaries while Rome had hundreds of thousands to spend in battle.
This guy gets it.

Am I supposed to be impressed that Ceasar slaughtered farmers and touth with his gang of trained killers?

It's an image of Thracian mercenaries presenting the heads of Romans to the Macedonian king Perseus.

>phalanxes in general lost to Macedonian phalanxes
Reading is not your forte, huh?

He didn't specify which type of phalanx.

Exactly.

Romans literally ass-fucked a Seleucid army larger then theirs at Thermopylae of all places. I bet Darius and Xerxes were laughing their asses off from the afterlife.

>Seleucid
>greek

>which they copied from the Greeks

What's new? Their entire culture was based on aping Hellenes.

Yes, they are Greeks. Ethnically, culturally, and linguistically completely Greek, with some small Thracian, Illyarian, and significant Macedonian admixtures as well. Are you retarded?

>Seleucid
>not Greek
What autistic memery is this?

>Why did people use the most advanced tactics and techniques they had, instead of better techniques and tactics invented later.

>Tactical innovations happened very slowly, when they happened at all.

Best point yet made in the thread. The Romans started with a phalanx around the time that the Greeks used them, but over the course of their interaction with the other italics came up with a more innovative system that was far more flexible and mobile than a phalanx, plus had the added benefit of proportioning command to junior officers who could make the decision on their own when to reinforce the line if it started to waver.

The Greeks never adopted this system, perhaps owing to sclerosis. Every Greek wanted to be the next Alexander, and that meant mindlessly copying what he did without putting much thought into what made it so groundbreaking. Few of them had the crack heavy cavalry that made Alexander's "hammer and anvil" strategy so effective. They tried gimmicks like scythed chariots and elephants but really they depended on the Phalanx to inflict casualties, which as it turns out is pretty bad at. Romans with oval shields and short swords had no problem hacking through pikes to the point where Greek generals would order their phalangites to throw down their pikes and fight with their swords when facing Romans.

The difference can best be summed up in their respective outlook on war. Greeks fought in a very genteel fashion, wanting to observe strict rules of engagement. Romans saw warfare as an act of survival, and the only rule they observed was "win". Romans were hard pragmatists, first and foremost, and fought with far greater savagery than the Greeks were accustomed too. There was a story about a Roman army defeating a Greek phalanx in the melee, and as per custom the Greeks raised their spears in surrender. The Romans kept right on butchering them until someone explained to the Roman general that the Greeks were surrendering, and he had to go to great lengths to get his army to cease the mindless slaughter.

It was also because the Maniple system was tactically far more flexible and marching large battalions or squad of men in hoplite or phanlagite armor and weapons in phalanx formations made deploying Greek troops far more lengthy.

To be fair, warfare is about more than just battle
if one side manages its empire well enough to field 5 times the number of the other empire that's a more than deserved victory.

When it comes to Greece, every single city state had the opportunity to be as big as Rome, they simply didn't grasp that opportunity.

And then there was the manpower problem. Greeks were notoriously xenophobic and jealous with who got to be citizens, and losing too many hoplites could be a deathblow for a city-state.

The Romans, however, had a highly martial society and was founded as a haven city, where scumbags, lowlifes, criminals, and debtors could flee their problems and build a new life for themselves. Todays conquered barbarians were tomorrow's loyal legionaries (mostly because they killed all the men of fighting age and raped all the women of breeding age) which allowed them to bounce back quickly even from appalling defeats. The Romans had a way of outlasting the people they fought.

I honestly wish more people knew about late hellenistic armies and units like thorakitai and thureophoroi.

It helps that Rome's entire culture was built around war. They were basically the ripped meathead from high school except whenever they beat up a nerd, they would make them part of their posse. Eventually they got to the nerd who had spent hours on his writing and making up his own fantasy novel setting, and when asked what his favorite book was, his response was something like "I dunno, I just spend all of my getting laid" (please note that Roman's sexuality was a detriment to their cultural formation). So then they beat up Greece and when they added them to their posse, they liked his books so much they basically made that into half of their identity.

Can we put the high school metaphors to rest, please? High school is not real life, Greeks and Romans were people like you and me, they aged and matured the same way that we do. It was a highly heterogeneous culture with people coming from all walks of life who couldn't easily be shoehorned into juvenile social cliques. They came from an era defined by savage, continuous warfare, and after they were done conquering it a peace broke out like nothing that that region of the world had ever seen, even if huge chunks of it were now wastelands.

I was attempting to be humorous more than accurate. Everything you said was accurate, but undermines the joke heavily.

Jackass

I apologize for any sore feelings. It's just that people have been making those references throughout most of the thread and I prefer replies that have more substance, even if they were rebuttals of the points that I made.

I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, but you can only hear a joke so many times before it stops being humorous.

>autistic memery
Don't involve us, we agree Seleucids are Greek.

Well Pyrrhus beat the romans in three successive battles and only had to leave Italy because Rome kept on shatting out armies. And he lost way too many veterans of his.

cavalry was used also in the Peloponnesian war.

Athens had a regular Scythian mercenary cav force, and Sparta used Syracusan allied cavalry during the Sicilian expedition.

That's stupid. He wrote "Rome couldn't win without numbers" yet Romans rekt numerically superior opponents. It doesn't matter that Rome had more troops at home, the fact is that they won while locally outnumbered. What difference does it make that they had more troops at home? Especially considering that usually those troops were occupied doing other shit anyway.

Pyrrhus' *victories* required highly heavy losses of his own forces to the point that they were continually destructive to him as well. Why do you think the term "pyrrhic" victory exists?

>ripped metalhead
>beat up a nerd
where I come from metalheads are pathetic neckbeards

he said meat head not metal head

The phalanx is actually more flexible than most give it credit for, assuming your troops are well-drilled. If they aren't, then fuck you. A pike phalanx is also intended to be used as part of a combined arms force

You need to think of a battle plan in terms of how it achieves effects. The goal of a Macedonian general in a battle against Rome may be to find, fix and destroy the enemy army. The scouts and light element take care of finding them, the phalanx engages and fixes the enemy and the cavalry destroys. Most defeats were due to a failure either to bring adequate supporting arms, or the failure of the supporting arms to destroy the enemy (such as the cavalry running off to loot the baggage train rather than killing the enemy).

The Romans did fuckall against the phalanx at magnesia. Had the Seleucids not brought elephants, rome would not have broken them.

Because it's actually extremely effective. Defeating it required the formation to be badly handled AND have piss poor support on the wings.

Or the romans adopted a more mobile system of war because their society was incapable of producing sufficient cavalry forces to support a phalanx.

The phalanx is not inherently inferior to latin methods of war, or vice versa. They're both highly effective, and which one you use is going to depend largely on how your society functions, if you use either.

>Romans with oval shields and short swords had no problem hacking through pikes
Romans literally NEVER breached an organized phalanx from the front. Ever. Not once.
>to the point where Greek generals would order their phalangites to throw down their pikes and fight with their swords when facing Romans.
This never occurred. Post a source or drink bleach, you lying cunt.

Because they thought following the example of Leonidas in every situation was a good idea.
They were probably too concerned buggering boys too.

Was the Greek Phalanx ineffective against the Macedonian Pike Phalanx? Would that formation work against Romans? Why didn't we see that type of Phalanx warfare make a return after the fall of western Rome?

if any of that sounds retarded I apologize in advance

>Why didn't we see that type of Phalanx warfare make a return after the fall of western Rome?
It never went away. What do you think a shield wall is?

Romans were perfectly able to field cavalry units if they wanted to as a state/society. The issue was that only the equites or equestrian classes in Roman society i.e. the knightly and senatorial classes were the ones who could afford horses and the equipment and weapons to go with them. That's why Roman cavlary always remained such a small force usually used to harry and harass fleeing or routed enemy forces or to attack vanguards of armies.

>The Romans did fuckall against the phalanx at magnesia. Had the Seleucids not brought elephants, rome would not have broken them.

And had they not broken up on the rough terrain at Pydna, the Romans wouldn't have broken them there. And had they not drifted apart and opened themselves to a flanking attack, the Romans wouldn't have won at Cynoscephalae.

Guess what? In every case, something went wrong. The phalanx is much, much less flexible than the manipular system, and battles are irreducibly chaotic. Flexibility is good to have in and of itself, because shit will go wrong, and being able to hop with it often means the difference between victory and defeat.

>Or the romans adopted a more mobile system of war because their society was incapable of producing sufficient cavalry forces to support a phalanx.

Except phalanxes were instituted way, way before the Greeks were fielding cavalry with their armies. You don't "need" cav support to make a phalanx work, it's just that except in very limited circumstances, the phalanx is extremely ineffective without cavalry support.

>Romans literally NEVER breached an organized phalanx from the front. Ever. Not once.

So? They always managed to get around the need for doing so. That's like saying that horse archer armies were never once defeated by infantry that didn't manage to catch them; technically true, but ultimately meaningless.

>Rome was perfectly able to field cavalry
>lists the very reasons they couldn't field enough cavalry
Would you like to try again? Perhaps try supporting your argument, rather than mine.

>Except phalanxes were instituted way, way before the Greeks were fielding cavalry with their armies.
The Macedonian phalanx wasn't.

>So? They always managed to get around the need for doing so.
And that has nothing to do with the patently false statement that Romans had "no problem" hacking through pikes. They had a very big problem with it.

the romans took mythology from everyone they conquered but they liked greek the most because it was so similar (there was a jove before the romans discovered zeus)

>The Macedonian phalanx wasn't.

Since when are Macedonian phalanxes all phalanxes? Since when did the pre-Peloponesean War Greeks field cavalry with their phalanxes?

But most importantly, how does the fact that the Macedonian use of cavalry to supplement their phalanxes support the statement of

>Or the romans adopted a more mobile system of war because their society was incapable of producing sufficient cavalry forces to support a phalanx.

When societies that produced literally 0 cavalry seemed to use phalanxes just fine at battles like Marathon and Pletea? Maybe, just maybe, you're talking out of your ass about what does or doesn't make a phalanx work, and why societies would adopt it?

>And that has nothing to do with the patently false statement that Romans had "no problem" hacking through pikes. They had a very big problem with it.

Which itself has nothing to do with the value claim that the phalanx was better than the manipular system. It very clearly wasn't.

It should be noted that the hoplite phalanx is just a spear and shield wall with relatively heavily armored troops. The Romans did employ the same kind of force as their core infantry for most of their duration.

Are you retarded? I was just interjecting here that the Romans did possess a cavalry, it just did not ever constitute a major branch of their army for several centuries.

It should be noted that at the time EVERYONE did that, greeks included. Half the so called "greek" pantheon is not even originally greek.

This.

By the time Romans clashed with Greeks, Greekshits were either using
>Macedonian Phalanxes.
>Flexible soldiers like Thureophoroi or Thorakitai that were developed right after the Celtic raids.

In fact latter Greek Soldiers and Roman Soldiers were virtually rook arike. Romans smugly thought they were "imitation legionaries" as opposed to a concurrent development.

"The Greeks talk a whole bunch of rubbish"
"Fuck 'em"

Rather interesting that Polybius who wanked the Roman dick harder then most still considered the Macedonians to be the most warlike of all peoples.

Well Rome suffered many defeats but they didn't tend to matter due to their massive manpower reserves. Perseus defeated the Romans in one field battle and held them at bay for two years. He even offered peace favouring Rome after his victory. Rome ignored it and sent more armies that defeated Perseus and destroyed Macedon and Greece. The problem with Hellenistic states wasn't their way of fighting but rather that a single defeat could spell ruin for their kingdoms. Rome could just arm their plebs with state funs while Hellenistic kingdoms relied on rare Macedonian settlers that were often in short supply.

I thought he said that about the Thracians?