When it comes to wars in the classical era, the first impression in many people's minds may be the phalanx commonly known as "phalanx" and "Macedonian phalanx". For example, Guibert, the military theorist of the Enlightenment who laid the foundations for the Napoleonic "Grand Legion", declared in his masterpiece Essai général de tactique (General Theory of Tactics):
Alexander once again expanded the art of war and conquered its cradle, Asia Minor. The art of war in this period has been perfected to the extreme, and the phalanx has been praised as the first class army in the universe.
However, since the phalanx era is more than two thousand years old, and many of its details have become unknown over time, it is unlikely that we will rely on the memories and writings of front-line officers and soldiers to restore the actual situation as we did in the study of modern warfare (although perhaps more detailed than some military systems in the Dark Ages or the early Middle Ages). At the end of the 18th century, when Gebel wrote, even a knowledgeable theorist like him generally "gave a rough outline":
Among the Greeks, the tactics of Thebes were different from Sparta, and Sparta was different from Athens, and they all changed constantly; Phalanxes in the era of the phalanx system were once nearly perfect, but the Roman army soon surpassed the phalanx; As far as the Roman legions themselves were concerned, their weapons and formations changed twenty times.
As far as classical historians are concerned, perhaps the most brilliant writer of the military details of the opposing positions and even the comparison of the Macedonian phalanx with the Roman legions is Polybia, which he described very brilliantly in the fragments of volume 18 of the General History:
When the phalanx maintains its unique formation and strength, nothing can resist its frontal attack or impact... When the phalanx is folded into a tight formation, each person occupies 3 feet [front and rear] of space. The Sarisha he was holding was originally designed to be 16 cubits long, but now in actual combat it has been shortened to 14 cubits, and from this 14 cubits, the hands of the gun and the rear part of the gun used to balance the front gun body must be deducted, so each heavily armored infantryman will extend the Sarisha 10 cubits away in front of the body. As he advanced toward the enemy, he clutched the spear with both hands. This means that while sarisa of column 2, 3, and 4 will reach before sarisa in column 5, even sarisa in column 5 can reach 2 cubits before column 1. Suppose the phalanx maintains its typical formation and tightens up in both the left and right directions and the front and rear directions... The shield is tightly clasped, and everyone's shoulders are close to their shoulders... The formation is so compact... Each Roman soldier, then, had to face two phalanx soldiers at the forefront at the same time.
Polybia uses the units "cubit ruler" and "ruler", although the two words are quite confusing in Chinese, but in ancient Greece they were very different, the elbow ruler (πῆχυς) originated from the distance between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger, and the ruler (πούς) derived from the length of the foot, which was only two-thirds the length of the elbow ruler. Although the unit of measure of length often varied across ancient Greece, for example, the Pergama ruler was about 33 centimeters, the Olympic ruler was 32 centimeters, and the exotic Roman ruler was only 29.6 centimeters. However, in general, it is not too much to set the "ruler" at 30-33 cm and the "elbow ruler" at 45-50 cm.
However, even in the mid-19th century, there were many famous military theorists who were unaware of the military details of the phalanx of the classical era. For example, when Writing the Article on Infantry, Engels focused on Rüstow, an authority on military history and the author of Infantry History. However, Lusto did not understand the ancient Greek unit of measurement, and he had a wrong concept of the spear used by the opposing array, so he made many bizarre mistakes. He had always believed that there were no real super-long guns among the Macedonians, believing that "Sarissa" could not be as long as 14-16 cubits, so he took it for granted that the Greek word "elbow ruler" used by Polybia was pronounced "ruler", and forcibly shortened the 14-cubit-foot (6.3-7.0 m) long "Sarissa" to 14 feet (4.2-4.7 m).
Considering the degree of development of military writings in the classical era, there were already many works comparable to various military manuals or ordinances in modern times, although there were not many materials preserved, but two of them provided an extremely important reference for the details of the layout of the phalanx. The first is asclepiodotus of the 1st century BC:
The need for combat gave rise to three differently spaced formations: the most sparse formation, each occupying a horizontal and vertical space of about 4 cubits; The tightest formation - each person is only 1 cubit away from the comrades next to him, and the shields are tightly clasped; The middle formation, sometimes referred to as the "tight formation", is 2 cubits each person to the front and rear.
As for the definition of distance, whether this includes the width and thickness of the human body, Asclepio Dotus makes it clear later that the left and right distances in tactical writings are not the width of the open space between people and people, but the horizontal space occupied by each person:
The 1024 wu lined up in the most loose formation covers an area of 4096 cubits, when lined up in a tight formation of 2048 cubits, and when arranged in a buckle shield formation, it occupies 1024 cubits.
The second is Aelian of the 2nd century:
We now begin to look at the horizontal and vertical footprint of infantry in three deployments. In the first case, the soldiers need to form a loose formation below the necessary conditions, so that each person occupies 4 cubits of foot in such a formation. When lined up in a middle formation, each person occupies 2 cubits. When lined up in a tight formation, each person covers an area of 1 cubit.
Unfortunately, Asclepiodotus and Erian's tight formations seem to be different. As a result, later researchers have debated how the "tight formation" of the phalanx mentioned by Poribia is arranged, and at first glance, "each person will occupy 3 feet of space" and "tight formation" seem to correspond exactly to the "tight formation" or "middle formation" of 2 cubits per capita in Asclepiodotus's pen. From the following point of view, the 3 or 2 cubit foot is more like the set front and back footprint space, which is to argue that the "Sarisha" in the first 5 columns can reach the front of the formation. The narrative of "the shield clasps the shield" is more like the "tightest formation" or "buckle shield formation", that is, only 1 cubit per person.
1 cubit foot is only equivalent to half a meter of horizontal space per person, is this enough activity? This is not a problem for modern infantry, for example, the French War Ministry's decree of the twelfth year of the Republic stipulates that "up to now, the horizontal space of each unit has been estimated to be 18 inches; Experience shows that such estimates are slightly lower, and the estimate of half a meter per lateral space (18 inches 5 lines to 18 inches 6 lines) is accurate. Marshal Davo's 1811 order stipulated that a three-column company of 99 men would cover an area of 16 meters, or 48.5 centimeters of space per unit horizontally. The Provisional Ordinances of 11 October 1809 and 1813 both set the width of each arm's land area at 51 centimeters or 19 legal inches.
But the super long guns and shields of the infantry in the classical era look quite cumbersome, is half a meter per person feasible? Delbrück, a giant of military history at the beginning of the 20th century, initially thought that this was not feasible, but he eventually led the empirical examination of classical military history, so he approached the Der Berliner Akademische Turnverein and asked them to arrange for students to perform "Sarissa" exercises.
What happened next was recorded in the annotations of the first volume of Delbrück's History of the Art of War, and last year, the country also published this masterpiece, but unfortunately the annotations were cut a lot, and although the following anecdote survived, there were several "feet" of the scenery and the foot-to-metric conversion of the snake (the original book did not have this conversion at all), and the Berlin Gymnastics Society unfortunately lost its name and became "a number of sports research societies in Berlin".
The Berlin Gymnastics Society was very reasonable, arranging students in a large square line in the large playground of Schönholz, except for the shorter first pole, everyone else had a wooden pole about 20 feet (about 6.3 meters) long: all made of brand new solid spruce wood, but of course it could not hurt anyone! Then began to test whether the new force could move at normal speed.
As a result, this group of student rookies was able to easily move forward with a per capita horizontal area of less than 2 pu feet (0.63 meters), and even accelerated to a fast step forward! Well, it doesn't seem surprising that trained phalanx soldiers advance in a 1.5-foot footprint.
Delbrück thus concluded that Polybia's phalanx was probably 1.5 feet per capita against the Roman legionnaire infantry. As a result, the space occupied by the Individual Roman Infantry of "One Against Two" or even "One against Ten" during the battle was probably not as wide as 6 feet as many people suspected, but only 3 feet.