Help with Roman weapon.

[Turin]

In combat, the pilum was the primary weapon of the legionaire. The first two that were thrown, (one heavy, one light) upon closing with the enemy are only the first.

My understanding was the lighter one was not actually as much like a pilum as it was like a standard javelin.

[Drifter Bob]

In combat, the pilum was the primary weapon of the legionaire. The first two that were thrown, (one heavy, one light) upon closing with the enemy are only the first.

My understanding was the lighter one was not actually as much like a pilum as it was like a standard javelin.

I am not the greatest expert in the universe on this, and the pilum did change somewhat over the more than 10 centuries or so that it was in use (actually more than that, since many germanic tribes used essentialy the same weapon which they called the "angon" well into the dark ages) but from what I understand, in most cases both the heavy and light javelins were both pila.  In some cases this meant a heavier constructed pilum, in others they actually appear to have had removable lead weights which could be added or taken off for weight.

Here is a link to the web page of one of the most promiment roman re-enactment groups in the world, Legio XX.  Don't be put off by the word larp in the url, they are a far cry from any larp.  Here you can see both heavy and light pilum.

http://www.larp.com/legioxx/pilum.html

Here you can see 3 types of pilum, one with a lead weight.

http://www.lawrensnest.com/images/rwp8009.jpg


The Romans did have other kinds of javelins. there was the old thong-spear of the greeks, which has been referred to as  a veritum in the roman arsenal, though I'm not sure if the term is correct.  That was basically an ordinary javelin with a wrist thong affixed to it which would be wound aronud the shaft.  When thrown, this imparted spin, with obvious benefits for speed and penetration.  I believe this was largely replaced by the pilum though by the time of the Marian reform, though I coud be wrong.  

The romans also had a much lighter "javelin" which was something like a lawn dart, wihch they called a plumbata.  I have read that this was considered their longest ranged weapon, more so than slings, or the bows they used at the time (which I believe were fairly low powered, until the introduction of the Hun's recurve)  Plumbatas were in fact vital to help deal with archers, along with 'artillery' of course.

There are several surviving plumbata heads, but the body obviously being of wood has deteriorated.  These replicas are therefore partially speclative.

http://www.fectio.org.uk/groep/plumbata2.jpg

http://www.fectio.org.uk/plumbata1.jpg

These are original fragments, partly made of clay(!)

http://www.romanofficer.com/Images/permcol11-2tn.jpg

Here you see a speculative method the Legionaires may have used to carry these on their shields.

http://www.fectio.org.uk/groep/2003pos12.jpg
http://www.fectio.org.uk/groep/2003pos13.jpg

I have asked Mathew Amt of the Legio XX to chime in here if he has time, if he does he basically knows everything there is to know about late Republican, early Imperial Roman military kit.

I also heard an unofficial rumor that the TROS community may be seeing more of each of these weapons sometime soon....

DB

[Degamer]

How about this, it has the same stats as a standard Javelin, with the aditions of: +1 damage against hard armors, if a pilum is successfully blocked, add a cumalitive +2 activation cost to the shields Block manuever.

[Drifter Bob]

from the legio xx site:

   The pilum was probably thrown at a range of about 30 yards, just as the Roman line charged.  The small point could penetrate a shield and wound the man behind it, or even pierce armor.   Any man with a pilum stuck in his shield would find the javelin's weight so cumbersome that he would probably discard the shield.  The pilum's head shape prevented its easy removal, and the iron shank prevented its being cut off.  (This shield-removing capability has always been over-emphasized--the pilum was designed to kill.)

[Matthew Amt]

Avete!

  Thanks, Drifter Bob, for doing most of the work for me!  You and Mr. Holmes have made most of the pertinant points.   Just a few clarifications, though, since you asked.

  Yes, like any other weapon on the battlefield, the pilum was designed to kill.  And yes, it was in use for a LONG time, so it went through a lot of evolution and variation along the way.

  Back in the early Republic, c. 5th to 4th century BC, it did indeed come in "heavy" and "light" versions.  The light one seems to have been the socketed style, with a long narrow iron shank and a small point, with a socket at the bottom to connect to the wooden shaft.  The heavy version generally had a shorter, stouter iron shank with a barbed head, widening at the base into a large flat tang which was solidly riveted into block at the top of the wooden shaft.  By about the 2nd century BC or so, the tanged variety also has a version with a longer, slimmer iron shank like the light pilum, though it seems the overall construction was still "heavy".  

  The general concept was to throw the light pila first, then the heavies just before the final charge.  I don't know of any primary source that mentions more pila being passed through the ranks, though.  More likely, the men farther back in the ranks held onto theirs at first, and moved up to the front as the men who started there got tired and moved back to rest.  Of course, we don't KNOW for certain that they did this, either!  Much would depend on the depth of the formation, which also varied.

  I think it's Plutarch who says that Marius made a design change about 100 BC.  He found that the iron shank was not bending very often, so that the enemy were able to throw the pila back at the Romans.  So he had one of the two iron rivets that held the parts together replaced with a wooden peg which would break or shear off on impact, causing the head to flop and making it unusable.  After the battle it was a simple matter to replace those pegs.   One problem is that on many of the surviving pilum heads from this general era, the edges of the tang are bent to form flanges which essentially wrap around the wooden junction block.  So they aren't going to flop if one rivet is missing!  But of course few of these can be dated with certainty, and there do seem to be pilum heads with simple flat tangs which would function as Plutarch says, so there's no real reason to think he's making it up.

  By the end of the Republic, however, it looks like the difference between heavy and light pila has gone away.  The tanged variety is slimming down, and the points are generally a narrow pyramidal form, very rarely barbed any more.  Some have 3 rivets rather than two, and most have an iron ferrule or collet at the top of the joint, so it looks like Marius' wooden peg system was no longer in use.  But we do find that the iron shank will bend on impact, keeping the bad guys from chucking them back.   I got a nice 45 degree bend in one of mine, last time I threw it.  (Took it home and heated it red-hot with my propane torch before trying to straighten it, to avoid metal stress!)

 Oh, there is also a lot of press about the specially hardened point or the special "soft" iron shank.  Neither of these is backed up by metallurgical analysis of the archeological evidence.  It's all just regular wrought iron.  The point could certainly have been work-hardened as a regular part of its construction, but otherwise it simply penetrates because of its shape.  The shank below it bends because it is thin, though it may have undergone a little annealing when it was made.  Otherwise, it's all one piece of metal, nothing special about it.

  Last year I threw one of my pila at a Roman shield which had been specially made for testing a Dacian falx on (photos on the Roman Days page, http://www.larp.com/legioxx/rdays.html ).  My pilum went through the shield and stuck into the 2x4 post it was leaning against, splitting it.  Ouch!  It actually took us a few minutes to get the point out of the wood since we didn't want to bend it all up before the next demo.  So, considering that the iron shanks ran from 18 to 30 inches in length, yeah, they are VERY capable of going through the shield and still nailing the guy behind it.  Doesn't mean they always do, of course, but they can.

  Somewhere around the mid- or late first century AD, the weighted pilum shows up.  None have been found by archeologists, yet, but what we see in artwork is a regular tanged pilum with a ball behind the junction block.  We are guessing that this is a lead weight, to add penetration power to the weapon since it had been getting progressively lighter over the years.  The weight does not form part of the actual joint between iron and wood but is just below the joint.  It might have been held in place by a cord wrapping on the wood below it, but there could easily have been some sort of nail or rivet holding it in place.  Doesn't seem to be any suggestion that it was designed to be easily removed or replaced, but we just don't know enough.  And since the wood shaft was under an inch thick by that time, the weight didn't have to be very big, maybe tennis-ball sized or less.  Though there is a tombstone from the late 2nd or early 3rd century that shows a pilum with TWO weights...

  Having a pilum stuck in your shield ruins your day in several ways, even if it hasn't hit you.  As has been said, it has a lot of leverage and makes the shield very awkward to use.  (Most people fighting the Romans, by the way, used shields with a single horizontal handgrip, so dropping it is very simple.)  Since the Romans threw these immediately before charging, you only have a few seconds to try to remove it before the legionaries are all over you with their own shields and swords.  Not enough time to put your shield down, brace it with your foot, and yank the pilum out!  If you can slide back between your buddies to the rear, no problem, but are they going to let you do such a cowardly and disruptive thing at such a crucial moment?  An approaching legionary can use that stuck pilum against you, knocking it aside to move your shield out of his way, or just jumping on it, if it's low enough, to rip your shield out of your hand.

  If the pilum has some play in its hole, the butt end will be resting on the ground, and the buttspike will dig in and prevent you from going forwards.  This could happen very suddenly--ever seen pole-vaulting?  With a few hundred pila punching into your front ranks in a few seconds, just as they are all charging forwards, must have been a lot of guys tripping and cartwheeling over their shields, or trying to stop and get loose, or just going down dead and wounded.  This would disrupt the whole formation!  The pilum is a charge-breaker.

  There were certainly other types of javelins used by the Romans, most of them having points shaped like regular spearheads, if smaller.  The Republican skirmishers called velites carried a number of  javelins behind their shields, some of which apparently had socketed heads like a lighter and shorter version of the socketed pilum.  In the Empire, auxiliary infantry regularly carried a pair of lanceae, essentially a light spear suitable for thrusting or throwing, and these had the throwing loop mentioned above.  (The pilum never did, as far as we know.)

  The later Empire is not my area of expertise, and there is a lot of confusion about the terminology because the Romans tended to use words interchangeably--verutum, spiculum, gaesum, lancea, etc.  Several new types of missile appeared, some of which evolved from the pilum (such as the later angon).  The plumbata is pretty well known, though I'm not sure if modern experiments have been able to support the claims of its impressive range.  (Which might only mean the we're doing something wrong!)  On surviving examples, the lead weight was cast directly onto the joint between the iron and the wood.

  Whew!  That's some of it, at least.  I should get back to work and stop wasting your tax dollars!  I probably haven't simplified things as far as your game rules go, sorry about that.  If you have more questions, feel free to contact me through my website, just be prepared to wait a few days in case I'm behind on my email (as usual).

  Have fun, and Valete,

  Matthew/Quintus, Legio XX

http://www.larp.com/legioxx/

[Mike Holmes]

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to imply at all that it wouldn't be an effective killing weapon. Obviously, sans shields, you want the weapon to be able to kill. Or if it doesn't hit a shield carried, another possibility. That said, it's a pointy stick; of course it's potentially lethal. The only real question is whether or not the shield defeating mechanisms built in were more intended to kill on a shield hit, or to incapacitate the shield (after all we're looking to model this in a game). That doesn't make it less capable of doing either, just more capable of one or the other.

Basically it seems to me like a javelin that in some cases disables shields (pick whatever rate seems plausible to you). Does that all make sense? In any case, it really depends on the particular pilum design you're talking about in any case. So, for game purposes, I'd just design it to do whatever I wanted, and then just say that it looks like whatever would accomplish that task.

Mike

[MikeJW]

Thanks Matthew. That was interesting.