"Pointy sticks" Topic

Having once been an avid ancients player, I eagerly read the Penguin and Loeb translations.
I was mortified to discover that all these learned scholars gave not a fig for the needs of wargamers!
Every single pointy stick was a SPEAR!
They did not differentiate between javelins, pilum, hoplite spears, kontos (what's the plural???), pikes, etc.

They let us down, those so-called scholars!
How was I supposed to know which line in the cheat sheet I was supposed to use???

Then I ran across … darts! Or "martiobarboli" or whatever they were called.

I am outraged!

Kontoi.

Tell me they mentioned "psiloi"!?!

…we wargamers are an arcane bunch.

They are just trying to "spear" you the details.

In Le Morte d'Arthur, Mallory calls every pointy stick a spear as well, including the Knights lances, as well as some very technical language about their use. I had to look up 'feuchtering'.

Actually, it gets even worse when the old translators, especially of the Loeb editions, did try to use words other than "spear". The most notorious example is of course the translation of Polybios' "longchophoroi" (chaps armed with the longche, ie javelin) as "pikemen", which gave rise the myth of Carthaginian pike phalanxes…

To be fair, the ancient authors were not always that precise either, eg Arrian uses kontoi to describe the armament of 50% of his legions vs the Alans. It is usually assumed (but note, an assumption) that he is on this occasion using kontos to mean pilum, rather than a big two handed cavalry lance.

And modern journalists (sic) call anything with armor a tank. We have learned nothing.

DBS303 is quite right on both early translations and the haphazard usage of the originals. And surely the advantage of the LCL is that we can check the actual Greek ourselves? (Not that I speak or read Greek, but I can at least keep track of all the words for pointy sticks for long enough to do the research.)

The LCL translations are hard to follow with the Greek as they tend to be a paraphrase of the original rather than a literal translation.

It kind of goes the other way, too, John.

The Norse sagas (yes, the Penguin books) refer to a halberd. Looking at the footnotes, Old West Norse apparently differentiated between a spear and this "halberd." At this point, it has become tradition to translate the second word as "halberd," though the scholars, and a lot of us folks who don't quite qualify as "scholars" realize that the halberd proper is a post-Viking era weapon. Clearly, there was a difference, or the original Viking writers wouldn't have used two different words, but we don't know what that difference was.

When the Vikings came to Noth America, they fought with natives who used "catapults." The Vikings did know what a catapult was from experience and used the same word (valslongva) for the big siege engines used to break down walls as well as for staff slings. However, it is very hard to imagine a canoe borne raiding force bringing along something like a Roman onager. What did they really have? A staff sling, maybe, or something like a lacrosse stick is my guess.

Wait! Maybe it would be fun to have a Viking vs Skraeling game and give the Skraelings an onager or trebuchet!

Grelber

Surely those references to Old Norse translations meant "battleaxe" for "halberd"? That makes sense to me. Especially the long-handled axes, such as the Norse-Gael gallowglass warriors favored.

It's a problem alright. Poor translators cause confusion and when the ancient sources themselves are vague or misleading, it's even worse. This is a subject Classical academics argue about all the time. It does help to know Greek and Latin for starters, but even the experts don't agree on many things like military terminology.