The word appears in literature as early as the plays of Plautus ( Casina, Rudens).
However, gladius in Latin refers to any sword, not only the sword described here.
Joxi gladius 7.2.5 free#
Look up gladius in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. A soldier generally led with the shield and thrust with the sword. Conventionally, soldiers threw pila to disable the enemy's shields and disrupt enemy formations before engaging in close combat, for which they drew the gladius. Finally, in the third century AD the heavy Roman infantry replaced the gladius with the spatha (already common among Roman cavalrymen), relegating the gladius as a weapon for light Roman infantry.Ī fully equipped Roman legionary after the consulships of Gaius Marius was armed with a sword ( gladius), a shield ( scutum), one or two javelins ( pila), often a dagger ( pugio), and perhaps, in the later empire period, darts ( plumbatae). The Mainz gladius replaced the Hispaniensis during the Roman campaigns in Germany and the Pompeii gladius replaced the Mainz during the Pax Romana and the early centuries of the Roman Empire. Over time, the Romans improved the weapon depending on how Roman battle units waged war and also created a number of variants. From the 3rd century BC, however, the Romans adopted a weapon based on the sword of the Celtiberians of Hispania in service to Carthage during the Punic Wars, known in Latin as the gladius hispaniensis, meaning " Hispanic-type sword".
Linguistically, within Latin, the word also came to mean "sword", regardless of the type used.Įarly ancient Roman swords were similar to those of the Greeks, called xiphe (plural singular xiphos). Gladius ( Classical Latin: ) is a Latin word properly referring to the type of sword that was used by ancient Roman foot soldiers starting from the 3rd century BC and until the 3rd century AD. Iron of varying degrees of carbon content, pointed, double-edged
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