The Simple, Ingenious Design of the Ancient Roman Javelin: How the Romans Engineered a Remarkably Effective Weapon

As Mike Tyson once put it, with char­ac­ter­is­tic straight­for­ward­ness, “Every­body has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Back in the time of the Roman Repub­lic and the ear­ly Roman Empire, all of Rome’s ene­mies must have had a plan until pila punched through their shields. A kind of javelin with a wood­en shaft and a sharp iron shank, the pilum came in both long and short lengths. Short pila had the advan­tage of dis­tance, but long pila had the advan­tage of pow­er, as well as the con­ve­nient fea­ture — whether delib­er­ate­ly or acci­den­tal­ly imple­ment­ed at first — that their shanks would more read­i­ly bend after impact, mak­ing them imprac­ti­cal to remove from the shields they’d pen­e­trat­ed.

With his shield thus made unwieldy by one or more pila, an advanc­ing com­bat­ant would thus be forced to dis­card it entire­ly — assum­ing he was still in the con­di­tion to do so. As you can see vivid­ly demon­strat­ed in the Smith­son­ian Chan­nel video above, a pilum land­ing in the cen­ter of a shield could eas­i­ly skew­er any­one stand­ing behind it.

His­to­ry has it that Roman sol­diers were also trained to throw their pila where ene­my shields over­lapped, pin­ning them togeth­er and thus ren­der­ing twice as much of their defense use­less. After a vic­to­ry, pila could be gath­ered from the bat­tle­field for refur­bish­ment, an exam­ple of qua­si-indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion under­gird­ed by Roman mil­i­tary might.

Like all weapon­ry — indeed, like all tech­nol­o­gy — the pilum had its hey­day. Poly­bius’ His­to­ries cred­its it as an impor­tant fac­tor in the Roman vic­to­ry at the Bat­tle of Tela­m­on in 225 BC. But by the third cen­tu­ry AD, it was phased out, hav­ing become an obso­lete anti-infantry weapon in the face of the evolv­ing equip­ment and tac­tics of Ger­man­ic tribes and Per­sian cav­al­ry. Nev­er­the­less, sim­i­lar javelin-like tools of war evolved into oth­er forms, out­last­ing the Roman Empire itself and even per­sist­ing into the ear­ly age of gun­pow­der. Now, when very few of us face the threat of impale­ment by pila or their suc­ces­sors, we can appre­ci­ate the skill it takes to throw them — as Philip Roth described, in his final nov­el, with an elo­quence very dif­fer­ent from Tyson’s — in the realm of sport.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman San­dal with Nails Used for Tread

Ancient Greek Armor Gets Test­ed in an 11-Hour Bat­tle Sim­u­la­tion Inspired by the Ili­ad

Watch Accu­rate Recre­ations of Medieval Ital­ian Longsword Fight­ing Tech­niques, All Based on a Man­u­script from 1404

A Close Look at Beowulf-Era Hel­mets & Swords, Cour­tesy of the British Muse­um

How Many U.S. Marines Could Bring Down the Roman Empire?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.