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The Battle of the Caudine Forks showed the clumsiness of the Roman phalanx against the Samnites. The Romans had originally employed the phalanx themselves [25] but gradually evolved more flexible tactics. The result was the three-line Roman legion of the middle period of the Roman Republic, the Manipular System. Romans used a phalanx for their ...
Descriptions of both shield walls used in attack and as an anti-cavalry formation with spears fixed into the ground exist throughout Roman history, though non-military writers tended to use classical vocabulary in describing such formations as a testudo, its Greek translation chelone (χελώνη), or a phalanx. [15]
The rugged terrain of Samnium, where the war was fought, was not conducive to the phalanx formation which the Romans had inherited from the Etruscans and Ancient Greeks. The main battle troops of the Etruscans and Latins of this period comprised Greek-style hoplite phalanxes, inherited from the original Greek phalanx military unit.
Roman military tactics evolved from the type of a small tribal host-seeking local hegemony to massive operations encompassing a world empire. This advance was affected by changing trends in Roman political, social, and economic life, and that of the larger Mediterranean world, but it was also under-girded by a distinctive "Roman way" of war.
An exploration of ancient sewers beneath the Colosseum, the world’s most recognizable stadium, revealed the kinds of food spectators snacked on in the stands and the animals that met their fate ...
Kitchens that did have roofs must have been extremely smokey, since the only ventilation would come from high windows or holes in the ceiling; while the Romans built chimneys for their bakeries and smithies, they were unknown in private dwellings until about the 12th century A.D, well after the collapse of Roman civilization.
The consul Publius Decius Mus was the Roman commander, and while his able force was ultimately defeated, they almost managed to break the back of Pyrrhus' Epirot army, guaranteeing the security of Rome itself. In the end, the Romans lost 6,000 men and Pyrrhus 3,500 including many officers. [6]
The scutum (Classical Latin: [ˈskuːt̪ʊ̃]; pl.:scuta) was a type of shield used among Italic peoples in antiquity, most notably by the army of ancient Rome starting about the fourth century BC. [1] The Romans adopted it when they switched from the military formation of the hoplite phalanx of the Greeks to the formation with maniples (Latin ...