Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SHARK" data-source="post: 189010" data-attributes="member: 1131">Greetings!Hmmm...well, it would seem that in 197 BC, at the Battle of Cynoscephelae, the Roman Legions, armed with the Gladius, defeated the Macedonians and Greeks, armed with the Phalanx. The pikes used in the protective formation of the Phalanx were certainly brave men, and could be quite deadly if the enemy fought them on their own terms. However, the Romans showed conclusively that if you deploy sword-armed infantry aggressively, attacking with great vigour, and making full use of their inherently superior mobility, the akward, packed ranks of the spearmen or pikemen will be routed and destroyed. The Macedonian Phalanx troops had difficulty in manuevering, and once the Roman Legionnaires worked their way inside the turn radius of the pike, the Phalanx troops were doomed. Even with still shorter spears, it remains more difficult in combat to choke up on the spear accurately and swiftly enough to keep pace with the swordsman. It is because of these factors, that while the spear remains formidable, and an essential weapon in the arsenal of war, that our ancestors, of diverse nationalities, all seemed to arrive at the conclusion that the sword was the more valuable weapon.I think that I have the right of it!<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Semper Fidelis,SHARK</blockquote>

Verification