[split] Phalanx warfare: use of the spear

[Paul Bardunias]

See? A good stylization/artistic lisense! He shows the true grip, still finds a way to not hide his work of art with twenty black lines that would be the spears, in a way completely obvious to everyone from this planet!

By the way, would you call them all javelins, despite an ankle, even though they have already come in close combat and none of them has any fingers inside the ankle?

Later vases about 50-60 years after the Chigi vase go into the whole trouble of showing the two fingers inside the ankyle of javelins.

There is another vase from this period that shows a clear fighting spear, without ankyle, next to a smaller spear with ankyle.  So my guess for the chigi is that the shorter spear was a javelin and the longer the equivalent of a lonchge like the one that Phillipoemen took in the thigh up to the ankyle if I recall. 

I think at the time of the Chigi, and maybe through most of the archaic period, hoplites fought by forming close and throwing things at eachother.  Other cultures that did this form a line of shields, sometimes in more than one layer which the aspis cannot do, then men behind threw things over top.  The front men themselves could move out and throw their spears, or even enter into individual duels in the space between the lines (this happens in viking sagas).  So the men on the chigi may be in this phase of battle, or they may be shown after this phase when the two lines came together to fight with spears in a much more classical hoplite fashion.  The only difference would be how far apart the two lines were- missile range or spear range.