Pilum

Built to Be Thrown

Before a Roman soldier closed in and drew his gladius, he had one more thing to use: the pilum.

The pilum was a heavy throwing weapon, roughly as tall as a man, but built the Roman way — a thick wooden shaft joined to a long, thin iron shank ending in a small sharp point.

Two ancient Roman pila: long, thin iron shanks ending in small pyramidal points. — Two Roman *pila*. The wooden shafts are long gone; what survives is the long, thin iron — a small pyramidal point at one end, a socket for the wood at the other. Reichsstadtmuseum, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Photo: José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro (cropped) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

What Made It Different From a Spear?

Mostly that long iron shank. On some pila it slotted into the wood with a socket; on others it was a flat iron tang bound to the shaft. Either way, that narrow iron section is what makes a pilum look wrong for a spear once you know to look. We try to show the socketed type at Bethlehem Revisited.

A plain spear was a general-purpose tool — you could thrust with it or throw it. A pilum was made to be thrown.

What Happened When It Hit?

It could wound an enemy directly, but hitting his shield worked too. The weight behind that thin iron point could drive it clean through a wooden shield, and a pilum stuck through a shield made the shield clumsy — sometimes clumsy enough to throw away.

You may have heard every pilum was designed to bend on impact so it couldn’t be thrown back. Some could bend, but “they were all built to do it on purpose” is probably too tidy. The real job was getting the point through.

Did Romans Use Plain Spears Too?

Yes. The Roman army was full of different troops carrying different weapons — auxiliaries and cavalry often used ordinary spears rather than the pilum. So a Roman at Bethlehem Revisited carrying a plain spear isn’t wrong; spears belong in the Roman story too.

The pilum itself, though, belongs to the legionary: the weapon he threw a heartbeat before the lines crashed together.