Coincidentally, acoup.blog recently also covered the pilum https://acoup.blog/2023/11/24/collections-roman-infantry-tac...

The interesting thing I learned about a year ago: "Pontius Pilate", the infamous New Testament governor who sentenced Jesus to death and inscribed his "INRI" plaque, has a name which is invariably presented untranslated.

So I could already tell what "Pontius" meant but I needed to look up the translation of "Pilate". It turns out that his name literally means "the Javelin-Armed Bridge". And that's a very interesting symbolism indeed, if you sort of mentally substitute that phrasing everywhere his name is mentioned.

Just a thought.

Wikipedia notes the following:

> His praenomen (first name) is unknown;[21] his cognomen Pilatus might mean "skilled with the javelin (pilum)", but it could also refer to the pileus or Phrygian cap, possibly indicating that one of Pilate's ancestors was a freedman.[22] If it means "skilled with the javelin", it is possible that Pilate won the cognomen for himself while serving in the Roman military;[20] it is also possible that his father acquired the cognomen through military skill.[23] In the Gospels of Mark and John, Pilate is only called by his cognomen, which Marie-Joseph Ollivier takes to mean that this was the name by which he was generally known in common speech.[24] The name Pontius suggests that an ancestor of his came from Samnium in central, southern Italy, and he may have belonged to the family of Gavius Pontius and Pontius Telesinus, two leaders of the Samnites in the third and first centuries BC, respectively, before their full incorporation to the Roman Republic.[25] Like all but one other governor of Judaea, Pilate was of the equestrian order, a middle rank of the Roman nobility.[26] As one of the attested Pontii, Pontius Aquila (an assassin of Julius Caesar) was a tribune of the plebs; the family must have originally been of plebeian origin and later became ennobled as equestrians.

I've never seen a video illustrate to me why the pilum was genius better than that. The guy even shows that, even if you did have a free hand, you're still pretty f'd. Also, to see the long tip bend to make it even harder never occurred to me. I've seen videos long ago on history channel illustrate fake ones they made that were much shorter and was baffled why I would drop my shield.

Thank you for posting that.

Thanks for the link. Amazing penetrative power. More importantly, I had no idea how difficult it would be to pull a pilum out.

>I had no idea how difficult it would be to pull a pilum out.

Its one of the important roles historically accurate reenactment plays in figuring this stuff out. The acoup article also mentions that you can hold a pilum in your shield hand with your thumb for a short time but it being really uncomfortable.

Impact also bent the tip enough to make it impractical to throw it back.

The acoup.blog article mentions that this was likely a side effect. And given how expensive they were to make, that makes sense to me. Especially if the theory about when in a fight they were used is correct.

Its length and the tip being wider then the rest was likely enough to prevent reuse