Weight and grip of sarissa and shield in macedonian phalanx

[PMBardunias]

How difficult is it to go from bearing a shield with a strap and a small loop near the rim to only carrying the shield with a porpax and using the loop near the rim as an antilabe when confronted by an enemy in close combat? Seems like it could be a very awkward transition to me, which may have been why some soldiers just fought with their shields as they were.

Any transition problem would be preferable to a shield that is held at the edge and strapped to your neck in my opinion. What would be best if the porpax was not used would be a single, central grip- which then makes the shield much like the convex shields of Hoplomachus gladiators. If you can show how a strap and single grip near the rim could work well enough to not be abandoned with experience it would be interesting because those enigmatic Urartian shields have something like this- albeit with a solid hand-grip perpendicular to the rim.

Right off the bat, I am dubious of taking any sort of tactical detail from artistic representations.

You are preaching to the choir :wink:

Then there is the fact that it would be physically impossible (or at least extremely awkward) to bear a large, round shield and a sarissa in the manner that the foremost phalangite is - despite the fact that he is holding it with his left hand, it runs behind the shield itself.

As I said, I agree it is wrong. The question is why the artist got it wrong and can we deduce anything from the manner of his depiction.

I'm confused, as this is exactly the stance that Connolly takes when testing a sarissa and telamon shield in his article "Experiments with the Sarissa - the Macedonian pike and cavalry lance - a functional view," JRMES 11 (2000): 103-112 (fig. 9 shows him with the full setup).

Fig. 9 is pretty good. Reconciling that with fig. 7 or with the pose he has his son in in his article on Pydna is difficult. So frankly I'm not sure what he thinks. Fig 12 is the good because the men are not posing for a photo in what they think is the proper stance, they are moving and thus must be dynamic. The "proper" stance is someplace between fig. 9 and fig. 12. There are numerous problems with the illustration on the top of page 40 of the pydna article, but the shields facing forward seem correct to me.