with his arms occupies a space of three feet. The pike he carries [the sarissa] was
earlier designed to be twenty four feet long, but as adapted to current practice
was shortened to twenty one, and from this we must subtract the space between
the bearer’s hands and the rear portion of the pike which keeps it balanced and
couched. This amounts to six feet in all, from which it is clear that the pike will
project fifteen feet in front of the body of each hoplite when he advances against
the enemy grasping it with both hands. This also means that while the pikes of the
men in the second, third, and fourth ranks naturally extend further than those of
the fifth rank, yet even the latter will still project three feet in front of the men in
the first rank. I am assuming, of course, that the phalanx keeps in characteristic
order, and is closed up from the rear and on the flanks ... at any rate if my
description is true and exact, it follows that each man in the front rank will have
the points of five pikes extending in front of him, each point being three feet ahead
of the one behind. From these facts we can easily picture the nature and the
tremendous power of the charge by the whole phalanx, when it advances sixteen
deep with levelled pikes. Of these sixteen ranks those who are stationed further
back than the fifth cannot use their pikes to take an active part in the battle. They
therefore do not level them man against man, but hold them with the points tilted
upwards over the shoulders of the men in front. In this way they give protection to
the whole phalanx from above, for the pikes are massed so closely that they can
keep off any missiles which might clear the heads of the front ranks and strike those
immediately behind them. Once the charge is launched, these rear ranks by the
sheer pressure of their bodily weight greatly increase its momentum and make it
impossible for the foremost ranks to face about.
(Polybius, Histories, 18, 29–30)As the sarissahad to be held with two hands, the Macedonian hoplites had small
shields hung around their necks and probably had lighter body armour. Polybius may
have exaggerated the dimensions of the sarissa,but it was evidently huge; in one of
the Macedonian tombs recently excavated at the royal capital Aegae is a metal
spearhead over fifteen inches long. Given the right terrain and with the proper
discipline, this new weapon made the Macedonian phalanx a formidable force indeed.
This hoplite weapon was a longer version of the sarissa used by the Macedonian
cavalry. Cavalry had always been important in the north where the Macedonians had
to defend themselves against the incursions of the nomadic horse peoples of the
steppes. Cavalry had been deployed at Thebes where as a young man Philip had been
held hostage in the time of Epaminondas, but heavy cavalry used as shock troops
had not been a regular feature of warfare in mainland Greece. Cavalrymen were fully
integrated into Philip’s war machine and indeed into the structure of Macedonian
society; his hetairoi were rich cavalrymen. In campaigns, he did not allow soldiers to
74 THE GREEKS