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A ‘javelin’ (the word derives from the Old French javeline) is a light, thrown, short-range missile weapon. They have been used in combat since ancient times. Warriors in Greece during the Bronze Age hurled javelins, and later, in the Classical period, Greek city-states complemented their hoplite heavy infantry armies with peltast javelinmen recruited from barbarous Thrace.
The word’s English pedigree, in various spellings, is long. ‘And Saul thought with the iauelinge to sticke Dauid fast to the wall’ is how it appears in Myles Coverdale’s eponymous 1535 Bible.
It found its way into the Shakespeare poem Venus and Adonis in 1592: ‘With javelin’s point a churlish swine to gore.’ In the next century, it turned up in John Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost: ‘[O]thers from the wall defend/With Dart and Jav’lin,’ wrote the English poet.
Arguably, the most significant such weapon in history was the Roman legionary’s pilum, a heavy javelin consisting of a long, slender iron neck secured in a stout shaft. Its penetrating power was excellent, and, if embedded in an opponent’s shield, the neck might bend because of the considerable weight of the pilum, rendering the shield useless, while also making it impossible to toss the weapon back at the Romans.
Two pila (plural of pilum) were ordinarily carried by a legionary, and these were cast in a volley with those of his fellows to disrupt an enemy formation, before the legionaries closed with swords to complete its destruction. The pilum, along with the gladius (a short sword), were the basic infantry weapons with which Rome’s legions conquered its empire.
More recently, a US-made anti-tank missile, the man- portable FGM-148 Javelin, has seen extensive use in Ukraine since early 2022, where it has earned the nickname ‘St Javelin’ from its Ukrainian operators.
