[split] Phalanx warfare: use of the spear

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

Being in the Hoplite push is not fun, but it is not deadly by itself either.
I can testify that the early archaic bell cuirass was not designed with the othismos in mind, the waist rim of the cuirass is impeding the placement of the shield on your back. I could feel that if I let it the flange would be bent flat. In fact it did bend a little, which I fortunately restored completely later.
So I shifted to my leather spolas in order to go on with the experiment. This alone is food for thought regarding both the evolution of tactics and the evolution of armour!

So the most unpleasant thing in the othismos is the lack of controlling your body. The torso flattens against your own and the back shield. Your thighs also square to the point of both touching the bottom of your shield rim.
Despite all this, you can still easily breathe, and your right arm is free to move in almost all directions if raised overhand. If you have it down I suspect it will certainly be cought by some shield. There would be absolutely no room for a spear anyway.

When I was the rear ranker it was also interesting. As we kept on pushing I could feel the line compressing. At first I couldn't explain it since the tree was an unmovable oponent, but as I thought about it, when you first place yourself against the man in front of you, you naturally take a somewhat sideways stance, with one leg forward and one back. You may even be a little crouched in the beginning, so your shield has some distance from your body.
As the pressure keeps on adding, or simply continues with the same degree these gaps close, each man is squared against his shield, torso touching shield rim, pelvis also turned forward rather than sideways. The rear ranker feels this compression like a small forward movement, like having a gap in front of him. When the line is as compressed as it gets that's when we achieved maximum force. The ground is ploughed by the men's feet, like Pressfield described. Actually there is a photo of our feet and the ground.

The othismos is not something you would like to get into, it is something you wanted to survive from.
The shield is designed for this thing precisely. Another thing that was proven is why the porpakes always had wooden cores, even those who had also full metal cover. And also why they had such complex and curvy shape.
The porpax was meant to fit on your ribs, something that happens in the othismos. One of the only metal porpakes was flattened out during the experiment, even with the bearer's hand in it. There is a photo also of this.
The shields were heard creaking in the front ranks, and yet none was damaged, most importantly none of the closest reconstructions which were in the front ranks!

An army which had experienced the othismos enough times to be able to exploit it would have a great advantage. If you could still fight with some effectiveness under such conditions (and this is mainly a psychological feat) then you could easily and quickly get out of it as a winner, since only a few deaths can result in the instantaneous lack of pressure, which the wining side will interpret as a victory and the losing side as a defeat!

That's how it felt to me.

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When it comes to rear ranker officers, was that only specific hoplite city states in Xenophon's day or was that all of them since the 5th century BC? I was under the impression some city states were more advanced as to drill and subofficers within the phalanx than others were. I mean some small nobody city state in Aetolia isn't going to have the same level of drill than the Spartans or Thebans are able to maintain, so if they don't have the complexity of the drill they also don't need the officers to pull it off. Which would include official positions, like file closers/ouragos.

The whole point is that this practice could have easily evolved out of necessity, since you don't need rob be a genius to place your best men in the front and the oldest men in the rear! The oldest men always have some authority over the younger ones, despite not having an official rank. It is possible that the Macedonians made official ranks for the ouragoi because their armies were no longer organized in tribes or age groups. The ouragos could have been a younger but trusted officer