There's a rather good six-part series of blog posts that Bret Devereaux did about how iron and steel manufacture worked in the pre-modern world that can be found here: https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/

As part of it he notes that the investment the romans made into their legions was really quite incredible. Towards the end of part two he notes that the armaments of a legion of 5000 might amount to nearly 50 tons of iron, representing eighty thousand days of labour to make the charcoal alone. They completely deforested vast swathes of land to fuel their empire.

If we take a gladius to be 700g of iron, 3.5 of those tons would be in the swords. But a spear head isn't actually that much lighter. I've seen estimates of medieval spearheads at about half that. Let's say it's 300g, and you can save 2 tons of iron by going to spears. That's just 2 tons out of about fifty! Not really a huge saving in the grand scheme of things.

"a long stick is kinda intuitive". People train for years to master spears in traditional martial arts. Skill levels equal, a man with a spear will eat alive a man with a sword.

If you are talking about massed spears then you might be right that it doesn't take as much training. I've never been in a massed spear formation, so i can't really say. I imagine a good deal of training is needed to have a maneuverable formation with them.

If we are comparing apples to apples, an army equipped primarily with swords is using them in a packed formation close to the enemy. They are stabbing utilities. How is that "trickier" than stabbing with a spear? If anything, I would imagine executing maneuvers would be less tricky. Which is probably a big reasons Romans favored swords. They sacrificed range, for better maneuverability.

So, a bit like Mordor.

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It's not that a sword was prohibitively expensive, it's that peasants don't have disposable income. Even today, it's estimated that 56% of Americans can't cover a $1,000 expense with savings, and they didn't have credit cards in the classical and medieval period.

A sub completely unrelated to history: asking subs likes r/AskReddit or r/NoStupidQuestions. A sub where people are not specialist... this one.
This is the non specialist sub. The professional specific is r/AskHistorians

hey, what sub Reddit can I ask the general population, not specialists, about their insights on an unspecified historical events?

Excellent and accurate description!

Roman swords were also smaller than medieval swords, and meant for quick, close quarters, shove and stab combat. Even in movies and shows, they like to show roman legionnaires dueling, slashing with their swords, parrying and cutting.

The reality is the roman heavy infantry was a machine. The line moved forward. The enemy were presented with a wall of wood and iron and leather as the Legionnaires shoved forward with their shields, moving in to press up against their enemies. This restricted the space, making it difficult for the enemy to wield swords or axes or spears in the tight quarters. The small gaps in the shield wall were used to strike the enemy, the gladius' design was perfect for close up thrusting attacks. They'd simply shove and stab until the enemy were wiped out or broke and ran, advancing slowly all the while. Anyone who was simply woulded or knocked over would be trampled by the advancing shield wall, or dispatched by the men in the back ranks.

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I'm an anonymous poster on the internet, and I'm actually full of a steaming pile of manure.

Which Roman writer wrote this?

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Meteorite iron has a specific percentage of nickel, and iron from the earth has almost none, among other distinctions (sometimes iridium).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_dagger

As far as the Earth being covered by them, if we didn't have a water cycle and weather, the surface of the Earth would look like the moon. Civilization has only been experimenting with melting nuggets such as copper and tin for a few thousand years.

I wish I had a good source for that but, I don't.

When copper became useful, surface copper was taken first before deep mining was used. Same with tin and iron. If Iron weapons were made before and iron mine was operated, they used surface iron.

If you liked those have a look at these! Fiction - Mick Herron - Slow Horses in The Slough House series - an anti-Bond masterpiece laced with sardonic humour Fiction - Len Deighton - Funeral in Berlin - shame they chose The Ipcress File for a remake rather than this Non-fiction - Bill Fairclough - Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series - a raw noir sui generis novel Non-fiction - Ben Macintyre - The Spy and The Tr…aitor + A Spy Among Friends - must reads for all espionage cognoscenti

All else being equal, more reach means more likely to come out the winner, you only need one poke. But all is not equal, longer blade is also heavier and harder to maneuver where it needs to go. That's why length of blade depends on quality of steel, with better quality you can make it longer without compromising weight and strength too much. But if you don't have the quality you end up with a slow club that just isn't that good to use. Romans couldn't have made something like a rapier if they wanted to, their metallurgy wasn't up to snuff.

Las medulas is a great example of roman industrial scale. A gold mine sluced the entire mountain away. It is now a unesco heritage park.

Also a spear requires little to no training to use effectively. A long stick is kinda intuitive.

A sword however is trickier, fighting effectively with one requires a lot more training so for people that can't rely on a big military industrial complex it is a less useful weapon

I'm no pro, but reading about Roman history they had gigantic mines where they used slaves to extract resources. I think I remember reading that large portions of Spain were mines. In the book SPQR it states that they generated so much pollution from this that the ice in Greenland shows a noticeable increase in pollution around that time (100 BC-ish onwards).

They also conquered so much territory that I'm presuming they took swords/minerals from those regions. Those people would have had their own mines and the Romans now had access to them too.

Yes, i did but in context with medieval militia i wanted to make sure that was clear

For those of you who didn't do the 5-day hike through what is basically a swamp: there are hundreds of pyramids and other structures still covered with earth. Hansen is right to ask for more help, they spent years digging at the massive Temple of the Jaguar and have uncovered only parts. Those causeways can still be seen but it doesn't help that it's so remote, that five day hike starts at the edge of civilization.

>those "standing" forces were citicen called to the eagles with their own kit

Exactly why I hi-lighted "could afford to have."

Did you read anything OP wrote beyond the title sentence?

>Ok, I'm not a historian, just a history enthusiast, and not a pretty knowledgeable one at that, so correct me if I say anything wrong. Anyway, I always heard that one of the reasons why swords are so iconic in pop culture is the fact that they were really expensive to produce and tended to be more useful as backup weapons, specially in the middle ages. That's probably one of the reasons the weapon became so associated with the archetype of the noble knight, which helped it become so iconic.

I understand that, in the time of the Roman Empire, swords would be much more useful as a main weapon, because armor wasn't so advanced, but that doesn't explain how did they manage to outfit most of their soldiers with gladii. I mean, they're still swords, they still require a lot of material and a lot more work to be made than, say, a spear, which is already an amazing weapon.

Well, basically, they made a bunch of swords. It's a testament to Rome's administrative and economic power at the time that they were able to do that. They didn't always do it and the number of equipment produced as well as its quality fluctuated throughout the years but basically they were in a position few other empires, kingdoms and states were where they could produce so much equipment for their army. They still had soldiers who were equipped less well than the rest, most soldiers did not have armor, and for most of Rome's history, soldiers had to pay for their gear out of their own salary rather than being issued from the state, though that did happen for a period.

That being said despite most soldiers having a sword the spear always was the main infantry weapon for pretty much all armies, or if not a spear, some sort of pike or other polearm, pretty much all the way until firearms were widely adopted.

It’s mentioned in Dan Carlins “Death Throes of the Republic” if you want to do some digging, I can’t remember exactly the episode though.