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Roman military training
(lemmy.world)
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Everything is serious except for the pic. The pic is just some re-enactors goofing off, lmao
Actual Roman techniques for dodging and warding blows involved very minimal and utilitarian movement. Conservation of energy and all that, plus the fact that they would be fighting in fairly closed ranks. Interestingly, some of the techniques involved leaning into the enemy's blows - shying away could expose unarmored fleshy bits, while inclining your body or your head could help take the blow on the armor.
Interesting! Do you happen to have a primary source? I'd love to read more.
Fuck me, I swear to the gods the internet is in decay. Or search engines, at least. Sorry, but I can't find where I read it, in part because 90% of the fucking results for primary sources anymore aren't the easy online versions that used to exist, but all fucking paywalled or just advertisements for translations. If I come across it, I'll be sure to message you. I might paw through my physical (non-primary source) books at some point, but I have no clue which would have mentioned it.
Vegetius's De re militari seems to be somewhat on point, and though in a brief skim and search I couldn't find specific instruction to lean into an attack, this was interesting:
Thanks for that archive link to De Re Militari, btw, I'm saving the webpage as an HTML because of how fucked the internet is getting nowadays. That's the exact site I used to reference it by Back In The Day