During his long reign Philip reworked the Macedonian army from the ground up, and Philip’s success in conquering Greece (and Alexander’s in conquering Persia) rests in large measure on reforms which turned on the use of a new weapon - the sarissa, a heavy thrusting spear, some fifteen feet long (Pol. XVIII 29; Asclepiodotus, 5), which Philip had introduced (Diod. XVI 3) and which one had to hold with both hands (Pol. l. c.). A sarissa was made from the trunk of the cornelian cherry tree which had no heart-wood; that is to say, a sarissa made from wood near to the exterior of the trunk still had the same density and toughness as one from wood near to the core (Theophrastus,
Enquiry into Plants, III 12).
Holding and thrusting with the sarissa required large amounts of physical training. Second, since Macedonian soldiers fought in phalanx (just as hoplites), if a unit of sarissophoroi were to have any maneuverability, the men had to be drilled exactly. If a unit were to make, say, a 90° turn, all men in it had to raise their sarissai perpendicular to the ground in unison, execute the 90° turn in unison, and line up exactly so that they could then lower their sarissai parallel with the ground - without hitting each other in the head as they did so. The maneuver, obviously, worked only if every man, once the turn was completed, stood in the proper place relative to everyone else. It took practice; and under combat conditions, obviously, the faster and the more smoothly it could be done, the better. Additionally, the more such maneuvers an army could execute, the safer it was in combat (see, e. g., Arr. Anab. I 6,1-4).
It took years for an army to learn how to use the sarissa, and an army accustomed to fighting otherwise was apparently difficult to retrain. When Alexander decided to have a Persian army trained in the use of the sarissa, he started with new recruits - teenaged boys not used to fighting in any other way (Arr. Anab. VII 6,1). Moreover, experience counted for a lot in fighting with the sarissa. In the wars of the Diadochi after Alexander’s death, the best soldiers were Alexander’s superannuated veterans. They were mostly in their seventies; but even if their knees no longer bent properly and their eyesight wavered, they could still hold a sarissa because they had been doing that from before anyone else had been born and, when the signal came, could execute the necessary maneuvers with a perfection born of forty years’ practice. These redoubtable septuagenarians several times cleared the field of armies with an average age some thirty years lower than theirs (Diod. XIX 28, 30, 41, 43 - see chap. 20).
This army was many years in the making. Much experimentation had gone into the armor worn by the sarissophoros. Because the sarissophoros carried a great deal of weight already, any piece of armor that he could dispense with was a welcome relief. But he still had to have some defensive armor - it was only through experimentation that Philip learned that a helmet and greaves were necessary, but that a breastplate need not be worn (Poly. IV 2,10). Since the sarissa kept both hands occupied, the sarissophoros could not hold a large hoplite-shield in his left hand. But experimentation presumably showed that some sort of shield was still necessary, so eventually Philip hit upon a small shield that could be strapped to the upper left arm (Asclep. 5). Since when holding a sarissa one naturally turns one’s left shoulder towards the foes, only the narrowest portion of one’s own upper body is exposed - so a small shield actually serves the purpose well enough.
Next, a Macedonian file was sixteen men deep. Its name, however, was dekas, literally “group of ten” (Arr. Anab. VII 23,3-4), so surely it had once consisted of ten men. At some point its composition was changed, but the old name stayed. Now, in a file of sarissophoroi the sarissai of just the first five men protruded past the first rank (Pol. XVIII 29; Asclep. l. c.). The back eleven held their sarissai at about a 45° angle. These sarissai then functioned as a reasonably effective screen against arrow fire (Pol. XVIII 30). Only through long - and utterly brutal - experimentation could Philip have known that eleven such sarissophoroi were required rather than, say, five or eight.
The Macedonian army was a fighting machine without peer in its day. The fifteen-foot sarissa was half again as long as the longest hoplite spear, so no hoplite phalanx could withstand a charge of sarissophoroi. Until the early second century BC, when it finally succumbed to the Roman manipular legion (see chap. 24), it held the field.
World History
