Quote Originally Posted by Andy1984 View Post
I don't see what point your trying to make... for as far as I know there was a significant diversification in the methods to stop cavalry. There is off course the shield wall/pike formation as we know it, but scythes were also used. Other ways to stop cavalry involved deploying minor pins on the ground (a metal tool consisting of four minor pins with one upwards directed). Charging cavalry would make these metal devices jump up and rip open the soft belly of the horses. If I'm not mistaken, these devices were found on the British islands, even in EB's timeframe. And then I don't even mention the more exotic ways of fighting cavalry (missile fire, elephants, using fire/artillery or anything else to make the horses panic)...
The same goes for the way in which cavalry is deployed. Charging with long (or shorter) spears, relying on speed or just trying to strike terror in the hearts of your opponents who never saw a horse or a chariot,... Cavalry could be used in stationary situations (as those clibinarii and cataphracts), but also rely on their missile/harassing powers. I wouldn't say cavalry tactics are 'basically the same', but rather heavily depending on both socio-cultural aspects (the aspect of honor for barbarian warlords and their chariots) as well as on military needs and the situation the cavalry is involved in.
Ummm, okay.

Look, when you boil it down to the essentials cavalry basically comes in two main flavours, light and heavy. The former is the short that shoots stuff at you and stays out of contact, the latter the sort that tries to trample you fat (and usually poke you with something sharp while at it). The division is of course often blurry and the minutiae of the equipement and methodology naturally varies wildly by time and place, but the fundamentals are the same.

As far as countering them goes, the basic solution to the lights is to shoot them to bits (foot missile troops tend to be able to put out more massed and longer-ranged fire plus don't have the big vulnerable horse to complicate things, so it's normally not that difficult to do in a straight firefight) while the heavies stop dead in the face of unyielding close-order infantry. And of course if you have cavalry of your own, that can be used as a mobile counter. If the opportunity exists creative battlefield engineering and traps (including field-expedient stuff like caltrops - "jump up to rip the horses' bellies" indeed... ) could be used to shape the battlefield and set up potentially devastating surprises for the opponent's mounted troops. And so on and so on.

And the Romans were pretty well aquainted with all of this stuff, having themselves used and had it used against them only too often in their many wars. As far as the Chinese go they'd have little in the way of novelty to offer for Roman tacticians; their cavalry method was more or less directly copied off the Central Asian nomads, and any Roman commander who had a basic grasp of the techniques used to counter the horse-archer/cataphract tag team (say, from fighting the Parthians or Sassanids) would be on fundamentally familiar ground.

So, yeah.