The Macedonian Phalanx of Pyrrhus: Sarissas Head-On (EVA0051)

The Macedonian phalanx, seen from where you would not want to be

The points are coming at the viewer. That is not an arbitrary choice of composition: it is the only way to show what a phalanx actually was, because from the front you do not see men, you see a surface of iron moving towards you. On the right, above the pikes, the tower of an elephant. This is Italy at the start of the third century BC, and the people looking at this are Romans.

The sarissa gives everything and takes everything

Five or six metres of pike, held in both hands, with a small shield slung from the neck because the hands are busy. A man armed like this can do almost nothing except stay in line: he cannot duel, cannot turn quickly, cannot fight alone. In exchange, the points of the first five ranks project ahead of the front man — anyone attacking frontally has to get through five layers of iron before reaching a human being.

Unbeatable in front, useless from the side

The flaw sits inside the virtue. A formation this dense cannot change direction without coming apart, and on broken ground it opens by itself: a ditch, an olive grove, a low hill will do it. Rome did not beat the phalanx with a better weapon — it beat it with worse ground and with units that could move independently, which is the manipular system learned from the Samnites, the subject of plate EVA0055.

The elephants, and what they actually did

Pyrrhus brought them to Italy in 280 BC and the Romans had never seen one: they called them “Lucanian oxen”. The first effect is real — Roman horses refuse the smell and the cavalry breaks up — but it lasts a battle or two. A weapon that works by surprise stops working when the surprise runs out, and at Beneventum the elephants would end up going through Pyrrhus’s own lines rather than the Roman ones.

A Pyrrhic victory

Everybody uses the phrase and it comes from here. Pyrrhus won at Heraclea and at Asculum, and lost the war. The reason is not tactical but arithmetical: Rome replaced its losses with fresh Italian levies and he could not — every Epirote veteran killed in Italy was unrecoverable a thousand kilometres from home. You can win every battle and still lose, if your enemy can afford losses and you cannot.