The Phalanx: Hoplite Aspis, Macedonian Sarissa and Rome's Win at Pydna

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Packed shield walls bristling with spears appear as early as the Sumerian Stele of the Vultures in the 25th century BC, but classical Greece perfected the form between about 800 and 350 BC. The hoplite carried a dory spear of seven to nine feet and a bowl-shaped aspis about three feet across and weighing 18 to 33 pounds, which covered his own left side and the right side of the man beside him. That overlap pulled whole armies to the right as they advanced, a drift the Spartans exploited at Nemea in 394 BC. Historians still argue whether the othismos, the pushing, was a literal mass shove, as Victor Davis Hanson holds, or something looser, as Adrian Goldsworthy argues.

The phalanx held together through dynamis, collective will, and the shame of being a rhipsaspis, a shield dropper. At Leuctra in 371 BC Epaminondas stacked his left wing 50 deep and broke the Spartans, while a young hostage in Thebes, Philip II of Macedon, took notes. Philip armed his men with the two-handed sarissa, 14 to 18 feet long with a counterweight, so that five rows of points projected ahead of the front rank. Used as an anvil for Alexander's cavalry it conquered Persia, but on rough ground it came apart, and Roman maniples slipped into the gaps at Cynoscephalae, Pydna and Magnesia.

• The man at the far right of the line had no neighbor's shield covering his exposed side.
• At Delium in 424 BC an Athenian section eight men deep held for a long time against a Theban column 25 deep.
• Neighbors, brothers and fathers stood together, making fear of shame stronger than fear of death.
• At Magnesia, panicking elephants opened gaps that Roman swordsmen exploited against the pike wall.
• Spear hedges returned in the Scottish schiltron and in the massed pike squares of the Renaissance.