Macedonian Sarissa

Origins

When Philip II became king of Macedon in 359 BC, his kingdom had just lost a battle to the Illyrians and its army was weak. He rebuilt it on new lines. His infantry, recruited from Macedonian peasants who could not afford the full armor of the Greek hoplite, were given a smaller shield and a much longer weapon: the sarissa, a pike that needed both hands. Philip had spent years as a hostage in Thebes, where he studied the tactics of Epaminondas, and he combined a deep phalanx of pikemen with heavy cavalry, the Companions, into an army that would conquer Greece and, under his son Alexander, the Persian Empire.

Design & Construction

The sarissa was far longer than the hoplite's Hoplite Dory. Estimates from ancient writers and archaeology range from about four to more than six meters; Polybius, writing of the later Hellenistic phalanx, gives fourteen cubits, about 6.3 meters. The shaft was made of cornel wood, which is hard and strong, and many scholars believe it was made in two pieces joined by a metal sleeve, so that it could be carried on the march in halves. It had a heavy iron head and an iron butt-spike, which both balanced the long shaft and allowed it to be planted in the ground. Iron heads and butts found in the royal tombs at Vergina in Macedonia are thought to come from sarissas. The weapon weighed perhaps five to seven kilograms. Because both hands were needed to hold it, the phalangite carried a small round shield, about 60 centimeters across, hung from a strap around his neck and shoulder. With the sarissa held level, the points of the first five ranks projected in front of the front rank, and the ranks behind held their pikes upright to break the flight of missiles.

Combat Use

The Macedonian phalanx was not usually the arm that won the battle — that was the job of the Companion cavalry — but it held the enemy line in place with a wall of points that no infantry could get through. At Chaeronea in 338 BC Philip's army defeated Athens and Thebes; Alexander then led the phalanx to victory against the Persians at the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, and as far as the Indus, where it faced war elephants at the Hydaspes. After Alexander's death the phalanx became the core of the armies of the Hellenistic kingdoms. But it needed flat ground and protected flanks. At Cynoscephalae in 197 BC and Pydna in 168 BC, the Roman legions, armed with the Roman Gladius and Roman Scutum, got into gaps in the phalanx on broken ground and cut it to pieces.

Legacy

The sarissa fell out of use with the Hellenistic kingdoms, and the Romans' flexible legion replaced it as the model of ancient infantry. But the idea of the pike phalanx came back in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the Swiss formed deep squares of pikemen to defeat mounted knights, and the Pike ruled European battlefields until the bayonet replaced it about 1700. The sarissa is the ancestor of that whole tradition.