Relief depicting Persian spearmen Metatron, for those who don’t know of him, has made many excellent videos on YouTube regarding historical events and peoples. He specialises in Japanese and Ancient Roman history, but regularly answers questions on other historical periods. In one of his videos, he gives his view of why the Romans used swords instead of spears, as most warriors and soldiers did in antiquity. He proposed that the Romans chose swords instead of spears because of the equipment of the opponents that they fought. Most of them, he said were barbarians rather than the armoured men of later eras. He rightly stated that the Romans would have quickly adapted their army to an armoured threat if they had to face one. He gave an example of the Roman legions quickly employing the manica (arm guard) in response to the Dacian falx. While he makes a good point about Roman adaptation to the threats they faced, the hypothesis that the Roman soldiers fa...