The word covers two formations that differ fundamentally. The Greek hoplite phalanx was a line of spearmen with large shields, typically eight ranks deep, in which only the first two ranks could reach the enemy. The Macedonian phalanx of Philip and Alexander carried the sarissa, a pike of five to six metres held in both hands, with a smaller shield slung from the shoulder, in which the points of four or five ranks projected beyond the front.
Both share one property that explains their dominance and their eventual defeat: frontal invulnerability and flank fragility. A formed phalanx was nearly impossible to break from the front and could be destroyed by anything that reached its side or rear, including broken ground.
The Macedonian version was never intended to win battles alone. It fixed the enemy line while heavy cavalry found the decisive point. Hellenistic successors who used the pike phalanx as the arm of decision, without comparable cavalry, lost to Roman legions that could exploit a break in the line — the lesson Polybius draws explicitly.
What the evidence supports
The Macedonian phalanx projected several ranks of pike points.
Polybius describes the sarissa and calculates the projection; sarissa butt-spikes and points have been excavated at Vergina and elsewhere.
Depth was tactically variable and deliberately so.
Eight ranks was conventional; Epaminondas used fifty at Leuctra; Thucydides records varying depths within a single line.
The intervals a phalanx actually kept in combat are not established.
The Hellenistic tactical manuals give figures for open and close order, but they are idealised drill-book numbers. What frontage a real phalanx occupied as it crossed broken ground and closed with an enemy is reconstruction.
Polybius diagnoses the phalanx's structural weakness.
In his comparison of the phalanx and the legion he argues the phalanx is irresistible on ground that suits it and helpless on ground that does not — and that battles are rarely fought on ground of one's choosing.
Terms
- sarissa
- The Macedonian pike, five to six metres, two-handed, counterweighted by a butt-spike.
- syntagma
- A tactical sub-unit of the Macedonian phalanx, conventionally 256 men in a 16 × 16 block.
Primary sources
Polybius, Histories 18.28-32
The classic comparison of the Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legion.
Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander
The phalanx as one arm of a combined system.
Asclepiodotus, Tactica
A Hellenistic technical manual on phalanx drill and intervals.
Battles
479 BCE
Plataea
The largest hoplite battle of the Persian Wars, which destroyed the Persian field army in Greece and ended the invasion.
371 BCE
Leuctra
A Theban army under Epaminondas broke the Spartan phalanx in open battle, and with it the assumption that Spartan infantry could not be beaten.
338 BCE
Chaeronea
Philip II defeated the combined armies of Athens and Thebes, ending the independence of the Greek city-states as a system of competing powers.
333 BCE
Issus
Alexander's first battle against Darius III, fought on a narrow coastal plain that neutralised Persian numbers, and after which the Persian royal family fell into Macedonian hands.
331 BCE
Gaugamela
The decisive battle of the Persian war, fought on ground Darius had chosen and prepared, and after which the Achaemenid empire had no field army left.
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.