forget almost everything you have seen in the films. the first armies of rome did not carry the red rectangular shield or the short sword with which the screen has forever fixed the image of the legionary. all of that belongs to a much later rome. at the start, the roman soldier fought in a far more ancient manner and, in its essentials, more greek.
between the age of the kings and the first centuries of the republic, warfare in italy was dominated by etruscan influence and by that of the greek colonies in the south of the peninsula. from that fusion came the citizen-soldier of rome’s early period: a hoplite. he was protected by a great round wooden shield faced with bronze, a helmet and greaves; his principal weapon was a long thrusting spear of more than two metres. he did not fight as an individual, but as a part within a block.
on the battlefield the citizens formed a phalanx: a solid wall of overlapping shields, bristling with spear-points.
the phalanx was brute frontal force turned into a tactic. each man covered with his shield the left flank of his comrade, so that the whole line advanced as a single mass, without gaps, pressing against the enemy until it broke under pressure and weight. it was the same principle that made the greek hoplites famous, and hence the popular but essentially accurate comparison that the first romans fought “like spartans”: not identical in every detail, yet of the same tactical family, that of hoplite combat practised throughout the mediterranean.
that wall of spears is what allowed rome to withstand the constant pressure of its neighbours in its most fragile centuries. but the phalanx concealed an explosive social implication its inventors had not calculated. the hoplite kit — shield, bronze, helmet, spear — was expensive, and each citizen paid for it out of his own pocket. which means that the bulk of the formation, the body that truly decided the battles, was made up of plebeians who had resources enough to arm themselves. the defence of the city rested, literally, on their shoulders.
and that connection between purse, weapon and vote was inscribed in the roman constitution itself. tradition attributed it to a reform by king servius tullius: the census classified citizens by their wealth, and on wealth depended two things at once, the military kit each man had to furnish for himself and the weight of his vote in the assembly. whoever could afford the hoplite panoply fought in the front line and counted for more in the voting; whoever could not arm himself was relegated on both counts. war and politics were not two separate things: they were the same hierarchy seen from two angles. the man who held up the wall of shields held up, by right, a share of the state.
from there sprang a dangerous question. after the expulsion of the kings, the infantry that bled for rome began to reason aloud: if we are the ones who make up the dead and the muscle that keep the republic standing, why have we no voice in its government? the phalanx was not only a war machine; it was a political machine. an army that fights shoulder to shoulder soon discovers its own collective strength, and a body capable of winning battles is also capable, by downing tools, of paralysing the state.
in time, this same rome would leave the phalanx behind. the rigidity of the hoplite block, too cumbersome on broken ground, would eventually give way to the manipular legion, more flexible and articulated, the one that would conquer the mediterranean. but that tactical transformation would come later, gradually, driven by the hard wars of the centuries that followed — the disaster of the river allia against the gauls among them — when the impenetrable wall proved brittle against enemies who did not play by its rules. in these early centuries, however, the wall of shields was still the heart of rome: it not only guarded the walls but was about to force the aristocracy to reinvent the distribution of power in order to keep control of the country.
