New hoplite book

[Old Husker]

It seems that each polis must have brought a few unique practices to its phalanx fighting, with any number of singular combat practices at Sparta being perhaps best known. One that has interested me for quite a while is Spartan use of a straight sword that was exceptionally short compared to those of other Greeks, something that seems to have made them the butt of any number of ribald jokes among contemporaries. I've long thought that this custom implies a different style of front fighting by the Spartans, who, when reduced to use of the sword by loss of spear (and butt spike), might have used their aspis to slightly hook/jar aside the shield of an opponent for a quick side slash or jab with this stubby device. Frankly, the idea was inspired by descriptions of how Zulu warriors in South Africa used their unusually short weapon, the iklwa (a stunted and heavy assegae or spear), though the analogy is at best only approximate (the iklwa apparently being rather longer than a Spartan sword and always plied underhand, while the Zulu shield was a bit different too - though about the same width as an aspis and likewise fixed on the forearm, the elbow was near the edge with the hand-grip in the center, rather than the reverse for the aspis). Of course, such a practice requires the front-fighter to have some modest freedom of movement (at least on occasion), something much easier to picture in the looser Zulu array than in a close-ordered phalanx. All the same, the shoving match/combat-sport described above, suggests that Spartan youths might have trained in a way that prepared them for applying just such more free-ranging techniques at the head of their files. Does anyone with reenacting experience have any thoughts on the practicality of this idea?