Wielding a sarissa overarm

[PMBardunias]

Patrick:

Lances, at least those that have shapes that look like lathe work, are very thick compared to sarissa.  I would like to see a Medieval lathe for one of these. You can find online contraptions that modern lathe workers use to work on long poles, they invariably use some sort of cuff or wheels on ball bearings to allow the shaft to spin while supporting it close enough to the working site that there is no crazy vibration.  If you, as my liege, told me I had to use a lathe to make a jousting lance, I would take a long log, the width of the fat section around the grip, lathe out the grip section, then finish the rest with a draw knife and spoke shaves to avoid ever spinning a narrow diameter shaft.

It may not be obvious, but the problem with vibration is that you get all sorts of crazy gouging into the wood you are working. So maybe a mixed early lathe, later finishing it could work, but I can say that the initial removal of wood from the shaft is much easier than when you start to become afraid that each cut could take too much.  I admit to having screwed up shafts by taking a bit too  much, then taking a bit too much more later in fixing the screw up. 

[Patrick Waterson]

You can find online contraptions that modern lathe workers use to work on long poles, they invariably use some sort of cuff or wheels on ball bearings to allow the shaft to spin while supporting it close enough to the working site that there is no crazy vibration.

Point taken - I am wondering how much vibration there would be in, for example, a water-powered lathe with disengagement and speed gears.  And whether a sliding 'working cuff' which travels with the cutter or abrader would do the business of vibration damping.

My nascent engineering knowledge suggests that if the pole is supported at its vibratory 'nodes' the vibration will be almost non-existent because the resonance will be drained off at source.  This is basically the rings/cuffs-and-heap-of-grease arrangement.  If instead the cutter/abrader comes with its own cuff which travels up and down the line, my understanding (right or wrong) is that it effectively dampens the resonance before it can begin.

I must confess my own minimal experience of lathes is limited to computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines, which leave very little room for either vibration or operator error (except in programming!).

It may not be obvious, but the problem with vibration is that you get all sorts of crazy gouging into the wood you are working. So maybe a mixed early lathe, later finishing it could work, but I can say that the initial removal of wood from the shaft is much easier than when you start to become afraid that each cut could take too much.

The precision and accuracy of the process is certainly a consideration.  Letting the lathe do the early heavy work and having a skilled man finish the job does have attractions.

[Jim Webster]

On important part of coppice woodland was that it provided shafts for farm tools, so in a lot of armies where men brought their own weapons, they'd also be weapons they'd partially made themselves. They'd provide the arrow shafts, a blacksmith would make the heads, they'd provide the spear and javelin shafts, the blacksmith (or bronze smith or whatever) would make the head.
Whilst to us, making a spear shaft/brush shaft/arrow shafts or whatever seems like a skilled trade, it probably fell within the list of skill sets that most 'peasants' and other rural dwellers had mastered to some level

Making specialist jousting lances with the handguard was probably specialist. Making pikes might have been but it would be more the case of applying an old skill to a bigger project 

[Erpingham]

One might suggest that making wooden tool handles and spear shafts was a skilled job, just that they were common skills in agricultural communities.  If we go back to sarissa making, we will be beyond the lengths available from coppiced wood.  It will have come from split timber from mature trees.  Macedonia was quite famous for good quality timber, so the Macedonians should have had no difficulties sourcing the material. 

[Patrick Waterson]

Indeed.  I would wonder about split timber, though; given the girth of a fully-grown 25-foot dogwood and the general classical attitude to timber*, I suspect it would have been a case of one tree, one pikeshaft.

*Which we of the present day would regard as unforgivably wasteful, but they had much more timber per head of population to play with.

[Erpingham]

Indeed.  I would wonder about split timber, though; given the girth of a fully-grown 25-foot dogwood and the general classical attitude to timber*, I suspect it would have been a case of one tree, one pikeshaft.

A quick reminder they were probably made of ash, which is quite capable of growing large and straight enough to provide several pike shafts.  As a whole dogwood tree was the size of a sarissa, logically, it wouldn't provide enough timber for a sarissa, unless you cut down two small trees and joined them together in the middle.  But this is taking us back on ourselves - we had already discussed the dogwood/cornel misunderstanding and the issue about jointed sarissas.

[Dangun]

One might suggest that making wooden tool handles and spear shafts was a skilled job, just that they were common skills in agricultural communities.

I think Jim's comment about what is a craft/common knowledge was really interesting.

It set my brain wandering...
Would a Sarissa craftsman starve? It's likely given the intermittent history of war that generations would go by with very little demand for new sarissa. Obviously punctuated by periods of high to urgent demand.

Then I started wondering...
In this period (or any other, but particularly pre-Roman) what was the average number of times during a lifetime that an average soldier was actually put in harms way. It's got to be a really really small number. How many times in a lifetime did your average Greek citizen have to put on his bronze and turn out for a phalanx. Less than once i'd guess. For some unlucky buggers in some periods it would have been an annual event, but most of the time...

Then in increasingly extravagant tangents...
Should this impact our understanding as to how good "on average" a soldier would have been at doing anything. I.e. not very for the simple reason of lack of practise?

Thanks Jim.

[PMBardunias]

Then I started wondering...
In this period (or any other, but particularly pre-Roman) what was the average number of times during a lifetime that an average soldier was actually put in harms way. It's got to be a really really small number. How many times in a lifetime did your average Greek citizen have to put on his bronze and turn out for a phalanx. Less than once i'd guess. For some unlucky buggers in some periods it would have been an annual event, but most of the time...

This speaks to a possible bottleneck in production of things like sarissa, dory's, or aspides.  In the case of aspides, which were finished on a lathe, it could be that the workshops that made them also made other things like lyres or even large bowls for example.  But even so, it does mean that these weapons probably had an elevated cost when they were needed in large quantities.

[Jim Webster]

I suspect that with the Sarissa, the Macedonian government had some stocks, just to get round the possibility of shortage. We know that some 'sub-Hellenistic' states did hold stocks. Wasn't it one of the later Jewish kings got into trouble with the Romans because of the amount of weaponry he had squirreled away?

With regards to how good ancient soldiers were, I suspect they started from a higher baseline of competence than we manage. Pretty much every young boy in a Greek city would have thrown javelins if only chasing hares etc.
But the general lack of training and drill is probably why they kept things simple. The advantage of a phalanx is that the vast majority of participants don't need all that much experience. The comparative success of various hastily raised 'slave phalanxes' or the Egyptians at Raphia would seem to indicate that many years combat experience weren't necessary for competent performance.

[RichT]

Concerning length and frequency of service (and this is off topic but the whole thread is off topic) - it depends. For the Hellenistic period (which is all I can speak for) some soldiers might be on permanent active duty (the guardsmen, Peltasts, Argyraspides etc) but the bulk of the phalanx would only be called up occasionally, and major pitched battles were once in a generation things. There would be constant low level conflicts though, 'enough to keep the men in practice without exhausting them' as someone (Polybius?) said of Philip V/Perseus' army. At a guess I would say the call up was rotated by region and age group to give everyone a go though I don't think there's any evidence (the mobilisations we hear of are the maximum effort ones before a major campaign). Plus there were mercenaries who did soldiering for a living. And Philip/Alexander's Foot Companions/Hypaspists/Argyraspides got 40+ years of active service.

I don't think I agree that phalanx fighting didn't take much training. Maybe better to say it didn't take much training to do to a basic level, but it took a lot of training (and/or experience) to do well. The slave phalanxes got beaten. The Egyptian phalanx is an anomaly, but there was a crash training programme before Raphia so their training was recent if not long term.

Concerning weapon manufacture - yes Hellenistic kings made weapons centrally and stockpiled them. What the breakage rate of sarissai might have been I don't know, but probably rather low. But while a specialist sarissa-maker might have starved, there probably weren't any - think the lyre-turner-and-shield-maker of Aristophanes (Birds). Someone who could whittle a pole for a sarissa could also whittle a javelin or a hoe or a rake or an axle or an oar or a chair leg or whatever.

[Erpingham]

Would a Sarissa craftsman starve? It's likely given the intermittent history of war that generations would go by with very little demand for new sarissa. Obviously punctuated by periods of high to urgent demand.

This depends on how we see the production process to an extent.  If we imagine sarissas could only be turned out in armouries with big specialist  lathes, then presumably sarissa making was on the jd of some armoury craftsman, who could do other stuff when not making sarissas.  If they were made using common wood-working techniques, sarissa-makers could be itinerant contractors who worked with local woodworkers in fulfilling orders.  Or maybe the work was done as needed by local woodworkers because it didn't need any special skills, so these men made other stuff when not making weapon staves.  You can ask whether there were specialist sarissa head makers or sauroter makers or whether these were made by people with general skills in metal working that were generally used for more peaceful purposes.  I'm sure there is evidence of this stuff out there somewhere.

[Patrick Waterson]

Which all suggests royal armouries (as does Jim's mention of the 70,000-sets-of-armour-collecting Hasmonean monarch) and retained craftsmen.  Such gentlemen could produce and stockpile at leisure, allowing immediate replacement of losses in all but the most disastrous circumstances (in which event it is unlikely there would be the men to use additional replacement items).  Such sarissa makers would not starve; nor, as Anthony indicates, would they be limited to sarissa manufacture.  The royal armouries would gradually and steadily produce a variety of weapons (and armour, and shields) on a keep-the-craftsmen-up-to-skill-peak basis rather than through rushed mass production.  This would suffice for normal wear-and-tear replacement and creation of a limited or on occasion not-so-limited stockpile (rememebr how in c.279 BC Nicomedes of Bithynia was able to arm considerable numbers of Galatians at a moment's notice?).  If rushed mass production were ever required (and equipping the Egyptian phalanx prior to Raphia is the only instance I can think of where this might have been the case) there would have been a fair amount of slack capacity available.

Anyone in a permanent professional post would keep up his skills by regular practice (or find his employment terminated), and this would also go for phalangites at the sharp end: the ordinary phalangites might have turned up for drill only once or twice a year when not campaigning (although they did seem to go on campaign quite frequently even if this only rarely culminated in a battle) but the Argyraspides and their equivalents seem to have been full-time soldiers, always ready and by implication always training.

The existence of crack professional phalangite bodies would serve a double purpose: they would act as both a demonstration unit and as a standard of emulation for the ordinary phalangites.  Regarding the skill level of the latter, one might note that even today six weeks of training per year is considered to suffice for a modern territorial soldier (with a few refreshers at weekends) and this level of training and rehearsal - in the presence of the kingdom's best - was presumably also available for the average katiokoi (colonist) or domestic phalangite.

  I'm sure there is evidence of this stuff out there somewhere.

The truth is out there ...

[Dangun]

There would be constant low level conflicts though, 'enough to keep the men in practice without exhausting them' as someone (Polybius?) said of Philip V/Perseus' army.

I'm not sure I buy this. Admittedly I have no evidence to bring to bear...  but it does sound like a historian's (Polybius?) throw away line.

The maths of constant low level conflict seems problematic though. How often do you want to/can you practice something that results in 10% lethality? If you practice something just annually - once a year, that results in 3% lethality, half your adult men will die prematurely from "practice". The maths of practicing something potentially lethal, is a problem.

I am not suggesting that there are no forms of non-lethal practice. I am just picking on Polybius.

[Erpingham]

Might I suggest that the topic has shifted from off-topic sarissa discussion to off-topic conversation?  However, I think it is a really interesting topic, so perhaps we can shift it to a topic of its own?

[Dangun]

Anyone in a permanent professional post would keep up his skills by regular practice (or find his employment terminated), and this would also go for phalangites at the sharp end: the ordinary phalangites might have turned up for drill only once or twice a year when not campaigning (although they did seem to go on campaign quite frequently even if this only rarely culminated in a battle) but the Argyraspides and their equivalents seem to have been full-time soldiers, always ready and by implication always training.

If you mean keep up their skills/become crack troops by actually participating in lethal combat, then I don't think this can be true.

You can't have a lot of practice without also a lot of death. And that is unsustainable, in anything but the short term.