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Updated: June 2, 2025
The rampart itself was usually twelve feet high, armed with a line of strong and intricate palisades, and defended by a ditch of twelve feet in depth as well as in breadth. This important labor was performed by the hands of the legionaries themselves; to whom the use of the spade and the pickaxe was no less familiar than that of the sword or pilum.
His narrative, in fact, perfectly accords with what history teaches us of the mutual position of the two interlocutors. The procurator, Pontius, surnamed Pilate, doubtless on account of the pilum or javelin of honor with which he or one of his ancestors was decorated, had hitherto had no relation with the new sect.
There was used by the Saguntines a missile weapon, called falarica, with the shaft of fir, and round in other parts except towards the point, whence the iron projected: this part, which was square, as in the pilum, they bound around with tow, and besmeared with pitch. It had an iron head three feet in length, so that it could pierce through the body with the armour.
They were certainly not armed with the pilum, nor drawn up in maniples; but used pikes and were employed in phalanxes. Now as for the field legions, each consisted half of Latins and half of Romans, there being in each maniple one century of Roman and one of Latins.
In the manipular legion the thrusting-lance was confined to the third division, and instead of it the first two were furnished with a new and peculiar Italian missile weapon, the -pilum- a square or round piece of wood, four and a half feet long, with a triangular or quadrangular iron point which had been originally perhaps invented for the defence of the ramparts of the camp, but was soon transferred from the rear to the front ranks, and was hurled by the advancing line into the ranks of the enemy at a distance of from ten to twenty paces.
That epoch laid the foundations of the commonwealth both within and without; it created a united Italy; it gave birth to the traditional groundwork of the national law and of the national history; it originated the -pilum- and the maniple, the construction of roads and of aqueducts, the farming of estates and the monetary system; it moulded the she-wolf of the Capitol and designed the Ficoroni casket.
About this time they threw away their defensive armor, not able to bear the weight of the cuirass and the helmet; and even the heavy weapons of their ancestors, the short sword and the pilum, were supplanted by the bow, a most remarkable retrograde in military art.
Each soldier carried two of these weapons, and threw the heavy pilum over the heads of their comrades in front, in order to break the enemy's line. In the time of the empire, when the legion was modified, the infantry wore cuirasses and helmets, and carried a sword and dagger. The select infantry were armed with a long spear and a shield; the rest, with a pilum.
“There goes the son of as good and frank a soldier as ever brandished pilum,” said Vitricus to himself, “till in his last years some infernal god took umbrage at him, and saddled him and his with one of those absurd superstitions which are as plentiful here as serpents. He indeed was too old himself to get much harm from it; but it shows its sour nature in these young shoots.
The ponderous pilum, and the heavy, straight sword of the infantry were exchanged in the barrack-yard for drill-weapons of twice their weight; and so perfectly were the detail and regularity of actual service carried out in their daily discipline, that, as an ancient writer has remarked, their sham-fights and reviews differed only in bloodshed from real battles.
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