Review: Legion versus Phalanx

Legion versus Phalanx by Myke Cole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is born of a terrific idea. Myke Cole wants to translate from the often too-academic sources the latest thinking about a series of complicated classical world battles: the showdown between the successor Hellenistic states of Alexander’s empire and the rising power of the Romans. More specifically, he pits their two distinctive fighting theories against one another, the Alexandrian phalanx and the Roman legion.

The phalanx, as Cole describes it, is a formation that affords maximum protection to its soldiers while letting them remain a lethal fighting force. Soldiers carry large shields in tight formation and then use pikes to attack as they march slowly forward. You can see how it helped Alexander conquer so much of the world; given discipline and mutual trust, it was a military technology that overwhelmed the wilder, more individual fighting styles of the “barbarians” they went up against.

A phalanx that held together was, essentially, unbeatable. There were problems, though. Sometimes a phalanx might fall into disarray because it moved too quickly or because it was fighting on uneven ground. Because its soldiers had to stand close together, both side-by side to ensure shield coverage and front-to-back to allow for filling in for the fallen, they were compact and could move in only one direction. And, if an enemy could break it, its individual soldiers were less able to fight in the close combat that could follow; pikes are, after all, not very useful close-up.

Cole explains the way the Roman legions answered that technical challenge. For one, they tended to carry javelins. Thrown from a distance, those missile weapons could soften up a phalanx, sometimes opening holes in the line that charging soldiers could enter. For another, they armed their soldiers with short swords which meant that, in the crush that would follow breaching a phalanx, they were able to move more nimbly. And, for another, they stood further apart in formation which meant they could more easily reach an exposed flank. Over time, the Roman legions won, and their formations were a crucial part of how they came to conquer most of the world.

I’m simplifying much of that; Cole is careful to explain that changes in such tactics came slowly and that each side often employed some of the elements of the other. Still, that’s the fundamental claim, and Cole explores it through close-up descriptions of six battles between the Romans and Hellenes.

The good news is that I feel smarter for having read this. I can see some of these ancient conflicts playing out, and I can understand how each side would have embraced its particular tactics.

At the same time, Cole owns up at the start of this to being a nerd. (He is, I gather, a successful fantasy writer as well.) He’s interested in all sorts of esoteric points, and, while he promises otherwise, he can’t help going into tangents that complicate and distract from his central point. His goal, he tells us, is to translate from the academic historians to the general reader, but you can see him always working to answer the academics. He’ll complicate something clear as if he’s trying to show that he knows more than what he’s fully telling the rest of us.

I define a “nerd” as someone who cares more about something than the world says he or she should. In general, I like that sense and am guilty of being such a nerd myself. There’s a challenge about telling the world too much about what we nerds care about, though. However much we may want to indicate that we are simplifying, we’re always pulled back to some nugget we can’t quite share. Trust me, I know the challenge from writing about Jewish gangsters.

As a consequence, I think Cole falls a bit short of his full ambition. As a number of reviewers have pointed out, it takes him a long time to get started – three or four chapters of definitions and background. Then, even when he gets to the individual battles that make up the heart of this, he gives extensive dynastic detail to explain how each significant general rose to prominence. In other words, he does an awful lot of “info dump” here, interrupting his interesting narrative/thesis to give us what are ultimately a range of footnotes.

So, bottom line, there’s a lot of good stuff here, but it may be more for us nerds than Cole originally hoped.


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