Hoplitai too weak ?

[Watchman]

The main difference between a "spearman" and a "swordsman" is that the latter has the sword as his primary close-combat weapon, the former as a backup sidearm. Guess what the former does when the latter manages to get "past the point" ?
Geniuses. I'm getting tired of having to reiterate the obvious like this.

Anyway, closely spaced spearmen in general and pikemen in particular have the benefit of multiple "enaging ranks" - at least two for long-spearmen, something like four for pikemen. Anyone wanting to get to grips with the pikemen themselves somehow needs to negotiate himself through *several* successive walls of uncomfortable closely spaced spear-tips, all the while trying not to get tangled up in the shafts themselves... IIRC, the Romans for their part regarded the feat as near-unachievable and just did like everyone else, ie. traded ground for time until the pike line became disjointed, hit rough ground etc. which created openings to exploit.

In straight hand-to-hand fight I'd imagine hoplite-style shieldwall spearmen would do fairly well against Roman legionaries - more reach, overlapping shields, tighter formation giving at least 3-to-2 local advantage, at least two first ranks can engage. The stumbling block ? Pilum. All javelins do bad things to shields, major among which is getting stuck in them and weighing them down. Heavy high-penetration "shield-killers" like the Italic pilum take that to the next level - even if the shieldbearer is lucky enough not to get nailed by the meter-long iron shank when the thing punches a hole in the shield, he now has that thing projecting to his side of it which obviously rather inconveniences the effective use of the whole shield plus what, two or three kilos of spear dragging it down...
And even for shieldwall infantry the hoplites were *particularly* dependent on their shields.