"Animation shows the ‘reactionary’ evolution of Roman tactics" Topic

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Very nice presentation although some clarity might have been applied by showing the 30 maniple legion and the 10 cohort Legions. Ave Roma!

Hmm, interesting stuff. I was reading an article the other day, though (Tactical Reform in the Roman Army by MJV Bell), which suggested something rather different from what the video claimed: i.e. that the maniples were designed to fight the hill tribes of central Italy and the cohorts the more organised armies as Rome expanded. But the Samnites and Latins in the same regions Rome was fighting also used phalanges so that can't be the only real reason.

Bell in fact claimed it was the other way round: that the maniples had been successful against the regular troops of Magna Graecia, Carthage and Greece who constituted many of Rome's most dangerous opponents before the first century BC. Where it came completely unstuck was against enemies who didn't fight in regular, organised formations: guerrillas in Spain, the light infantry armies of Numidia, barbarians at Arausio, etc. and that it was these enemies that the cohort system was designed to repel.

Indeed he further suggests that cohorts and maniples coexisted for rather longer than is sometimes supposed, with cohorts perhaps forming an alternative tactical unit to the maniple further back into the second century BC and the maniple perhaps surviving even as far as Sulla's wars against Mithridates.

After all, for all that the maniple system is famous for its three lines, the distinction between hastati and principes is a little arbitrary and both could happily be mixed into a larger unit: combine four maniples of hastati and principes and you have one cohort. The triarii don't fit neatly but since they're only really a reserve unit anyway and are probably the least numerous of the Roman troops they don't need to.

The more I read on the subject the more I'm becoming convinced that at a tactical level the switch from maniple to cohort really only involved issuing triarii and velites with standard equipment, and grouping maniples together. Obviously there were other major changes going on at the same time which affected the logistics of the army in a big way but I suspect the change from maniple to cohort was much less radical than sometimes seems to be believed.

Tom,
You`re right I think.
I`ve seen the video and it is rather sweeping about the need for big formations to overcome later, more formidable and organised enemies – and as you say, it doesn`t make sense when you consider the probelms faced by the early reformed legions at battles like Arausio.
Something George Jeffrey remarked about in his book on Napoleonic tactics, was that grand tactics is an extension of tactics and this has some parallel here I think.
It is a mistake to believe that minor tactics (the manoueuvre of centuries and maniples) somehow disppeared with the Marian reforms.
On the face of it, larger organisations might make administration and large battlefield manoeuvres easier, but once these larger formations were broken down into subunits to carry out delegated missions, then one should realise that something of the "old" structure of minor tactics was retained.
But apart from the standardisation of troops types; the administrative and logistic advantages it gave, the cohortal system would have given options for larger sub-units to be deployed & ployed for action or manoeuvre and as it transpired, they needed this much earlier in Gaul.

The research that i did when looking at the Roman Samnites wars it looks like the Romans took the maniples from the Samnites sometime in the 2nd Samnite war, but as there is so little information on when, who or what we are never going to know for sure.

Yes, thought I`d read it too that the Romans had adopted the manipular system form the Samnites.