Match for the Legions
| Pydna | 40 22 15.13N 22 35 02.59E | The village of Kitros is believed to be the site of ancient Pydna. The battle was fought on the plain to the east of the town. |
| Carrhae | 36 51 50.67N 39 01 52.41E | The battle was fought on the plains to the east of the ancient city of Haran, where Nebuchadnezzar routed the Egyptians. |
| Yongchang, China | 38 14 27.65N 101 57 59.16E | Unfortunately half the town is poor quality - the half in which we are interested. This appears to be the location of the monument referred to below. |
The Roman legions were a military phenomenon. Each soldier was equipped with armour for head and upper body and further protected by a tall, curving shield that covered him from nose to knee. However his greatest protection and strength was his personal morale and discipline, for the soldiers were trained not to attack the men who were attacking them personally, but rather to stab at the man who was attacking the soldier next to them. As he raised his sword arm to strike at the Roman in front of him, the opponent was vulnerable to a sideways stab in chest or armpit.
In addition the legionaries were trained so that at regular intervals the front row of men would suddenly march off to the side and back through the gaps between cohorts to the rear where they could catch their breath, have their wounds treated or refresh themselves with food and drink. Meanwhile their astounded and tired enemies were confronted with a row of fresh Romans advancing steadily, their short swords flashing out between their shields.
Once this system was established, it took an opponent of more than usual genius to withstand the legions. Hannibal managed it by clever tactics: in one famous battle he deliberately weakened his centre, enabling the Romans to break through with just sufficient difficulty that they did not suspect a trap. As they surged forward Hannibal's wings closed in on them, attacking them from side and rear and once the system had broken down, the Romans were as vulnerable as anyone else.
Of course the Romans in their turn were just as capable of exploiting an opponent's rigid system, as they did at the decisive Battle of Pydna when the fearsome Greek phalanx was finally defeated. Alexander the Great had developed the phalanx into a machine where soldiers manouevred in blocks. The front row of men held spears 8' long and each successive row held longer and longer spears until the men in the back row could be equipped with unwieldly implements 32' long!
Once all these spears were level the phalanx simply marched forward. Any enemy in front, unable to get at the soldiers past the bristling forest of spear points, could either flee or die. Effective resistance was impossible.
At Pydna the legions were forced back as the phalanx advanced until the Roman general noticed that over the uneven ground of the battlefield gaps opened up in the well-dressed line of spear-points. He ordered the legionaries to abandon their regular lines and fight as individuals, throwing themselves into these gaps - and, of course, once past the spear-points, the Greek soldiers with their long spears were virtually defenceless against the Roman swords.
However there was one tactic against which the Romans never really found an answer, and that was the horse-mounted archer from the east. The Parthians were skilled horsemen who would gallop up to within bowshot of their enemy and then, still at speed, fire a volley of arrows before galloping away again. Their short, composite bows had a range greater than anything the Romans (or, indeed, most enemies) could bring against them, and they were able to gallop around and around their opponents, gradually destroying them by arrow fire.
The first Roman to encounter this was the Triumvir Crassus who, pretty much without provocation, decided to attack the Parthians as part of Rome's expansion into the east. He was warned by a Parthian defector not to fight on the open plains but he was a rather arrogant individual and ignored the advice. When confronted with the Parthian army on the plain of Carrhae he immediately ordered the attack.
The long lines of legionaries formed up and advanced and the Parthians simply retreated before them, jeered by the Romans who were self-confident enough to think that their reputation was enough to make the enemy flee. When the Romans had been lured some eight or nine miles from their fortified camp, however, the Parthians suddenly turned and began to attack, their short arrows whistling in with such force that they penetrated the Roman shields, sometimes pinning them to the soldiers' arms!
The Romans could not retreat - their backs were even more vulnerable to attack than their front - nor could they advance, for it was clear that they could never overtake the Parthian horsemen. Eventually all they could do was stand still and die. One contingent took refuge on a small rise and found that their position was even worse than on the open plain because now all the soldiers could be hit; on the plain those in the rear ranks were protected by the bodies of those in front of them!
Down through the years the Romans suffered endless defeats whenever the Parthians and their successors, the Sassanians, chose to attack. Their surest method of defense was to pay regular tribute to the Persian kings, but if the tribute was late or the Persian king wasn't satisfied with it or simply wanted to win glory and renown, the Romans just had to put up with sheltering behind their fortified walls until the storm had passed.
On one notorious occasion the citizens of Antioch in Syria were enjoying a play performed in theatre, which was outside the city walls. Suddenly an actress on the stage looked up to the hills visible behind the seating and exclaimed, "Am I dreaming, or are the Persians upon us?" Thinking it was a particularly dramatic moment of the play, the audience burst into applause that was quickly cut short as Parthian arrows began to fall among them.
Such incursions into Roman territory ended with long lines of Roman prisoners being marched off into captivity and archaeologists have discovered interesting evidence that confirms the historical accounts. Several towns in Khuzistan in south-western Iran are laid out using the typical Roman grid pattern and if that was not enough, a couple of bridges are built to the Roman pattern - in particular the cutwaters at the base of the piers are unmistakably Roman.
Perhaps the clearest evidence, however, comes from the royal palace at Bishapur, where the floors are decorated with mosaic. Not only was pictorial mosaic an exclusively Roman technique at the time, but the theme of Dionysius and his attendant animals is definitely Roman. Sassanian artists, even if they had learned the technique of mosaic making, would have introduced Sassanian themes or at least applied Sassanian styles to the pictures.
It is, of course, possible that Roman craftsmen were employed by the Sassanians; such cross-border transferences of skills were not unknown. However given the historical accounts of Roman defeats it is far more likely that the craftsmen were prisoners, using their skills to win favourable treatment from their captors.
Of course the Parthians were not always victorious. Several times the Romans sacked Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital, but the long struggle between Rome and the empire in the east did not end until both were swept away by the unexpected emergence of fanatical warriors from the deserts of Arabia. Weakened by centuries of conflict, both Rome - in its Byzantine form - and Persia more or less collapsed. It was Rome's good fortune that the Arab armies were at first more interested in sweeping east. By the time they had exhausted their impetus in the hills of Afghanistan the Byzantines were safe behind their walls and able to resist the Arabs.
It took fresh waves of invaders using the same tactics - the Turks - to bring the eastern empire to its knees. The Crusaders were defeated by galloping archers and, several centuries later, the Russians, Poles, Turks, Chinese and Indians were smashed when the Mongols appeared with the same unanswerable tactics.
It was not until the invention of gunpowder gave the infantryman a long-range weapon that exceeded the range and firepower of the bow that the horse archer was finally defeated.
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| The monument in Yongchang to the Roman legionaries who are claimed to have been brought to China. |
marched off into captivity There is even the claim that some of these Roman prisoners ended up in China! According to Wikipedia, "The battle is also believed to have eventually led to the first Sino-Roman relations. According to Pliny, in 53 BC, after losing at the battle of Carrhae, 10,000 Roman prisoners were sent by the Parthians to Margiana to help guard the eastern frontier of the Parthian Empire. The Han Chinese later captured this area and the Roman prisoners were likely among the first Europeans to meet the Chinese directly."
The same story is told, in greater detail, in John Mann's book, The Great Wall, where you will find an account of a visit to the descendents of these legionaries, plus photographs of the monument in Yongchang where they are supposed to have settled. Return
