Spears are the cheapest and most common weapon

I'm pretty sure Romans never broke a phalanx from the front.

I don't remember where I read it, but I think it was the Macedonians first contact fighting Romans. The visceral sword-wounds frightened them, as they were used to spear pokes.

I'm pretty sure your mom is a hoe

...

i think i know the battle you are talking about

the charge of the phalanx was described as very scary
they charged downhill at the romans

It's more difficult to maneuver a spear with a shield taking up the strength and capacity of one arm in a formation that relies on shields but also dynamicy.
A short sword is very easy to use with one hand, especially in such a tight formation. One-handing a spear is possible for a trained and strong soldier, sure, but there is still the issue of distracting or even injuring the person behind you if you accidentally thrust them with the butt of your spear. This is not an issue with swords.

Spear goes well with a shield but not as big one as scutuum and not in a tight formation as it forces soldiers to hold the spear uphand hence decreasing their reach to the level of sword

The gladius was meant to be a jack of all trades sword primarily used for stabbing.
A machete is as completely unlike it as a fucking rapier user.

> implying Greece isn't nothing but mountains and islands

Celtic fighters were better, hence Romans adopted their fighting style, originally the Romans adopted a Hoplite style. Celtic fighters were seen as great warriors, and the best mercenaries. The sword and shield style of Northern Italy was a better way of fighting individually also, Hoplites for example, were useless in 1-1 combat.

cynocephalos?

Better for the manacle formations they started using later in the Republic.

After Adrianople heavy calvary became more and more of a thing.

>"All gladius types appear to have been suitable for cutting and chopping as well as thrusting"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladius

Why are you hung up over this. A machete is a hefty blade used for hacking and chopping and a gladius is capable of being wielded, and was wielded, in a similar manner.

Roman fighting style, at least by the time of the late republic, consisted of using pila (javelins) to render the enemy shields ineffective / soften up the front lines, while the main bulk of the fighting would be done in very close quarters, in which weapons like the longsword, spear, etc. wouldn't have enough room to work with. Plus, when you consider the roman style of the triplex acies and the constant shifting of the lines, it makes sense to have a smaller, more manueverable weapon that can be essentially "readied / unreadied" quickly.

The Romans combined the advantage of fighting in formation like hoplites or the phalanx with the flexibility and offensive close quarter nature of swords. This required high discipline since fighting at such close quarters is much more dangerous and they had to do this while staying in formation, the Romans first used experienced soldiers for this task in the maniple system and after the marian reforms the state supported them during their training.

By the time the Romans fought Macedonia the majority of the latter's infantry were the phalanx as opposed to the earlier hoplites who might have posed a different challenge in very close quarters. The Romans also had the advantage of a strong navy and economy and so could wait until the Macedonians made a wrong move, like moving onto uneven terrain as they did at the Battle of Pydna. The Romans could maintain their formation even as they pushed into holes in the Macedonian lines while the Macedonians would drop their pikes and reach for their swords to fight up close against someone far more better trained to use theirs. In stable sections of the phalanx the Romans had great difficulty though they were reliable enough to hold until the battle started to turn in their favor.

>especially in defence or anticavalry actions,
Carrahae

>no mention of the Samnite wars in the whole thread
>the literal war which introduced the Maniple system
>stopped Romans deploying Hoplites
>deployed more flexible Maniple companies copied form the Samnites and won.
>Triple line was adopted around then as well

Macedonians had swords as side arms so this sounds like bullshit

>manacle
>calvary

user plz

They defeated the parthians plenty of times

OP's question is very interesting imo and nobody answered. Why did armies gave up gladius formations ? Was it only a matter of cost/logistics ?

They stopped being useful. They didn't disappear entirely. They were issued to limitanei and militias for a short while after they stopped being used by frontline units and after that just phased out completely.

As for why exactly they were phased out
Cavalry was far more widespread, both in use by the Romans and against them. A gladius isn't any good for fighting on horseback, or against enemies on horseback.

Later Roman equipment was produced in state-owned factories rather than private workshops as in the earlier empire, so a weapon that could be used by light infantry, heavy infantry, cavalry, artillerymen, etc. was preferred to a specialised heavy infantry weapon like the gladius.

Personal defence and swordsmanship became more important in the later empire as warfare shifted from a few large pitched battles to many more smaller defensive skirmishes. As a result, shields got smaller, swords got bigger.

Just as an interesting aside for a brief period Roman cavalry appear to have carried two swords. A spatha, and another sword shorter than a spatha but longer than a gladius. Who knows what that was for.

Pretty sure he didn't mean the change from gladius to spatha but the change from sword "back" to spear.

Romans were the most heavy armored and best equipped troops of the day, they were heavy infantry meant to get stuck in to spear formations and rip them up, because at short sword distance a long spear is pretty useless, and spearmen were what every other army on the planet was chiefly comprised of at the time

Short sword proved to be more lethal in such close quarter fighting

>Not that the gladius isn't a nasty weapon, it's basically a machete.

Metallurgy wasn't that advanced in ancient times. Metal was softer. The Romans obviously needed their swords to remain straight during long battles, so it could be used effectively with a shield wall. They slid their swords through the shield wall and stabbed the enemy. A bent sword is no use to them.

SAID shield, meaning the huge square ones, you dolt. The swords were the only weapon that worked efficiently with the tower shield

Heavy sword infantry dominated in close quarters, that's why the early Roman fighting style was to throw their javelins to break the formation and then charge into the enemy's line in testudo formation

Pikemen formations were usually the most lethal if you couldn't flank them or break the formation somehow

>charge into the enemy's line in testudo formation
kek

The biggest advantage the romans had was mass literacy, really. All the soldiers knew how to read and write, so the army could plan everything ahead of time and have all the soldiers on the same page strategically and tactically. barbarians were illiterate, and big armies were composed of many different tribes who probably didn't speak the same language.

Romans were manlets that couldn't match their enemies at reach with polearms, so they min-maxed for speed and dexterity.

You can apply most of those things to spears too, and spathas and spears saw a rise in usage alongside each other anyway.

The Romans used spears. You're all fucking retarded!

Many Celts fought sword and board, the sack of Rome changed the Roman military style enough that they adopted a Celtic sword design.

>charge into the enemy's line in testudo formation
What the fuck user

>The shield was their primary advantage over the enemy
Their primary advantage was the Roman state. The organization of which was far superior to their peers. Rome was delivered plenty of defeats and they used enormous amounts of auxiliary and allied troops across the empire and in most battles, the armament of which was not necessarily to legionary standards.

The difference however was that roman manpower was easily replaced. Furthermore as a general (but very much not absolute) rule the Roman military tended to be very careful in protecting its supply lines and supply camps.

This is what they used to win wars. Their discipline, unit organization and leadership was how they won battles and all of this together were their advantages. Whether they had a spear, a sword, a tower shield or an escucheon couldn't matter less.

But the Romans used spears, gladius was a backup.

So what? That just means they never found a solution like the Romans even in the face of such geography.

your 20 stack of triarii is not historically accurate

>Celtic fighters were better, hence Romans adopted their fighting style

The romans adoped the manipular system of army organization as a response to their battles with the samnites. It allowed greater flexibility than the older phalanx formations they fielded.

Swords actually get shit done, whereas spears basically encourage a defensive psychology and are easily defeated by shields. You have a sword as short as the gladius, you are gonna have to get up close and personal with your enemy and stab the everliving shit out of them by being dynamic and aggressive instead of passive and reactive. The Greeks didn't make an empire, and the phalanx-users who did (alexander the great) had aggressive components to their armies to act as the hammer against the anvil of their sarissas.

loooooool

he doesn't know about royal peltasts

This is generally a good point. The Romans were the Zerg of the middle ages. They just keep coming and coming.

t. swordlet

>middle ages
>user... I..

Exactly, people shouldn't forget that in the Roman times, the Italian peninsula housed about 25% of the entire european population. There were a shitload of Romans compared to the rest.

during the middle ages even.

Cynocephalae, and the phalanx doesn't "charge"

>t. Lenny "I learn my history from Total War games" Thompson

citation much needed.

wrong, the phalanx did in fact have a method of "charging"

spear units have trouble fighting and moving at the same time. Changing direction is also difficult, and they can't fight while changing direction either.

The Greeks themselves adopted Celtic gear too, like the shield many of them used. The Greeks weren't just pikemen and Hoplites, especially during the time of Rome.

Macedonian phalanx at the time of Rome was in a state of decline because people kept using more pikes and less cavalry, and abandoning the 'able to be skirmishers if need be' that Alexander trained his pikemen to be. So the phalanx was often just a mass of pikemen instead of the combined arms approach that Alexander and Phillip II developed. (I think it was Pyrrhus of Epirus who was still doing phalanx warfare correctly, IIRC) but otherwise the pike formation was eventually abandoned by the Hellenic world. Rome found the pike formation of the Greeks to be too inflexible and was able to beat them.

Holy shit. Someone on here who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about as far as the decline of Hellenistic Warfare is concerned.

You had to be six feet (roman inches, 5'10" our inches) tall to join the roman army. This is during the late republic/early imperial times when the army was professionalized under Sulla. It wasn't until the military breakdown and loss of manpower under the late empire that manlets were allowed to join.

That's wrong. The minimum height for a Roman soldier was 5'7" in their measurements, which is 5'5" in ours.
>loss of manpower
The Late army was 3-5x bigger

Checked my source (Vegetius) , turns out it was only one legion, legio I italica. Anthropological evidence suggests most roman soldiers were about 5'7"

As for the late imperial army however, despite being larger it was proportionally lacking in manpower definitely. The larger degree of territory to control and increased reliance on foreigners for soldiers led to standards being relaxed. This was especially the case with the later limitanei.

He does't know that 6 armored elephants could kill 2000 eastern spearmen.