Victor1234
Educated
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
- Messages
- 255
Yes I know, that's what I meant too and why I said it's controversial. You are going with Sabin's interpretation. He is supported by Goldsworthy and Thorne and has been gaining a lot of traction for years because of it (Goldsworthy is...well, gold for some reason despite being a rubbish historian IMO).I just mean in terms of actively fighting/swinging your sword/dodging/blocking type of stuff, that might only last, in a very localized area, for a few minutes, before the men at that point of the front back away to near the edge of, or just beyond, missile range, to take a breather, drink water, hurl insults and step forward and throw missiles, and after a pause some local junior officer or chieftain leads them forward into another melee attempt. Certainly the whole battle can last many hours or all day. Kind of think about it as analogous to, in a boxing match, the two fighters might spend more time rotating around each other and taking quick feeler jabs than they do fully going at it. See if you can find this somewhere:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/300198
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4. unit behaviors are interesting [intentional?]... i have 2x spearman units, and both block stop 10m from each other in formation, and from front lines few spearmen walk to the center to solo eachother.
thanks for trying it!
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4) yes they are intentional, but perhaps fit swordsmen better than spearmen, so I may need a different combat coordinator for them. The idea is to be a bit like the description of combat in Phil Sabin's Lost Battles and other essays where men don't constantly fight, as that would be impossible to sustain, but shift back and forth on the battlefield, locally coming into contact in a flurry of melee and then falling back to rest and throw missiles if they have them, but it still needs work.
Just as an FYI on #4, that topic (sustained melee combat) is very controversial even though it's becoming very popular in academic circles nowadays and has been since the early 2000's.
As a summary, certain academics take the view that ancient battles can't have been all day affairs like the ancient historians claim because actively fighting for too long would tire people out ('be impossible'). They use examples from things as diverse as modern reenactment groups, MMA fights and even the WW2 SLA Marshal study (that itself has IMO thoroughly been discredited) that claims the majority of soldiers didn't attack/shoot but only fired in self-defense.
Frankly, I think it's BS. Just because battles took all day long, that doesn't mean everyone was actually fighting all day long. Ancient historians are very clear in describing a host of other activities that technically count as being part of the battle but are not actively fighting. This includes things like a battlefield recon by cavalry while the main army chills in camp, having breakfast, forming up into lines, etc.
Even Total War battles don't last longer than an hour or two of fighting, which is perfectly reasonable to spend in physical exertion IMO, and this idea that just because it's mostly fatasses that are trying to squeeze into lorica segmenta on weekends and they can't waddle around for more than an hour or two at a time, that this was true for all of human history, it turns portrayals of ancient battles into a joke. How silly do we think people were back in the day anyways?
On the other hand, you have Anders and Zhmodikov who disagree and argue for a more traditional interpretation. Ironically, Sabin actually based his idea on Zhmodikov's work. Zhmodikov never said that melee fighting only lasted a few minutes though, he said that Roman soldiers spent more time in ranged warfare throwing pila than just the 1 pre-charge volley and that Roman battles took as long as the ancient historians said because they switched between melee and ranged with the flow of the battle, not because they took water breaks or time outs.
To me, the controversy is moot. Sure, it's technically open to multiple interpretations because we have no conclusive witness accounts to say specifically one way or another from this time and they are trying to explain how battles could last all day. Sabin's theory is they had short rounds and took breaks like in boxing or MMA, which is farcical and anachronistic if you think about it even a little. Modern boxing rounds last for 2-3 minutes because they're not the blood sport they were originally, but we have records from the first semi-organized/legal fights and the rounds were over 20 minutes long in the beginning. One of the longest fights we have is from Australia, where 2 dudes bare knuckle boxed for over 6 hours in the 1850's.
We also do have accurate timekeeping and records from early modern period battles that were still melee heavy, that spell out point blank that melee fights went on for hours and nobody collapsed from exhaustion, from a time when clock technology was also pretty advanced. Anyone reading any of the IIRC 4 common soldier/lower officer memoirs from the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) is immediately struck by how physical the fighting was. In particular, there is a pike battle on the Imperial right flank that goes on for 2 hours and only ends when the commander gets killed and they rout with no breaks in the fighting.
Ultimately it's your game, but know there are multiple interpretations of it in academia.