Roman body armor and fighting techniques.

[Jay Vail]

This Saturday my son and I did some test cutting with, among other things, my unsharpened gladius. It cuts as well as an arming sword or a longsword.

[Brian Brush]

Ben,

"Romans not only easily conquered those who fought by cutting, but mocked them too. For the cut, even delivered with force, frequently does not kill, when the vital parts are protected by equipment and bone. On the contrary, a point brought to bear is fatal at two inches; for it is necessary that whatever vital parts it penetrates, it is immersed. Next, when a cut is delivered, the right arm and flank are exposed. However, the point is delivered with the cover of the body and wounds the enemy before he sees it...
... However, they are given that double-weight shield frame and foil, so
that when the recruit takes up real, lighter weapons, as if freed from the
heavier weight, he will fight in greater safety and faster. But when field
training was ended through negligence and laxity, the equipment (which the soldiers seldom put on) began to be seen as heavy."

- Flavius Vegetius Renatus (in Epitoma Rei Militari, ca. 390)

There are some anatomical issues with what Vegetius says about the thrust. His assertion that it's superior to the cut is pretty naive, at best. There was an article written in Spada II which discussed exactly this. There are plenty of modern and historical examples of people who survived being impaled. When you're examining the ways a weapon is used, you need to consider the situation it was used in; for the gladius, you must consider the phalanx. In such a tight formation, there isn't room for slashing and hacking. Just thrusting over, or under their shields, which puts the points of their swords at their enemies throats.

Also, though Vegetius may say the legionnaires laughed at anyone who cut at them, they feared the Dacian falx, and the falcata of the Celt-Iberians. Both were dedicated cutting weapons. The Romans definitely did not laugh at these weapons, they adopted them, and adapted their equipment to them.

There's a lot more that could be explored here.

[LafayetteCCurtis]

I'm not trying to be a pain, here, but I can't simply let it slide: first we are told by Mr. Curtis that there are precious few sources on Roman martial technique, and then he proceeds to tell us that Vegetius' text is riddled with inaccuracies. Well, if Vegetius' work is full of mistakes, and we have so little apart from Vegetius to compare his work with, then how can it be said that anyone knows that any part of Vegetius' treatise is falacious? It doesn't make any sense.

You're on the right track. Go straight to the sources. Who are you gonna trust? Vegetius, or a modern student or academic? I don't know about you, but I'm gonna go with the guy who was actually around back in the day (and Vegetius was a hell of a lot closer to his subject than anyone, degree or not, living today).

Vegetius may not exactly be a "primary" source with regards to the actual organization and tactics of the Roman troops in his day; his descriptions of Roman troops don't tally well with near-contemporary sources like Ammianus Marcellinus, nor even with any previous period for which we have contemporary or near-contemporary sources (like Polybius's description of Second Punic War legions, Julius Caesar's memoirs, Tacitus's Annals and Histories, or Josephus's account of the Jewish Revolt).

That aside, I'm not saying that we shouldn't trust Vegetius--it's just that we need to put him in perspective by comparing him to other Roman and non-Roman sources. This way it's easy to see how he's actually more valuable for the medieval period (when his recommendations were treated as authoritative by many writers and soldiers) than for the late Roman period (where there is no evidence that his work actually spurred any reform in the Roman army), let alone for earlier Roman periods.

Let's not forget Livy's account of the terrible cutting wounds inflicted by Roman weapons, too. So, while I'm not disputing that the gladius was a powerful thrusting weapons and that the thrust would have been the most natural and practical use for wielding it from behind a wall of large shields, I don't think Vegetius's statement can "prove" conclusively that the gladius was never used to cut. Moreover, close-order fighting as a compact cohort was not the only kind of fighting that Roman legionaries were expected to face. They also sometimes went on raids, scouting expeditions, and foraging trips, in which cases they wouldn't necessarily have been able to avail themselves of the protection of a tight shield-wall--and the more fluid fighting encountered in such situations might have allowed a more extensive use of cuts. Finally, let's not forget that the velites skirmishers were part of the legion at least as late as the early 2nd century BC, and at least on one occasion (against the Galatians) we have an account of Roman skirmishers engaging Galatian warriors with swords--presumably in a fluid skirmisher fight rather than a close-order kind of combat.