Bret Devereaux

A sleeve which, I feel compelled to note, shows no signs of rivet holes or any kind of attachment system. I'm not sure I'd be on board with only using friction to hold together my 19-21 foot long, 4.05kg primary weapon. 25/more

So in practice a two-part sarisa isn't impossible, but there is also basically no evidence for it. We have a tube of unknown purpose which might have been involved. The problem here is that many for-the-public reconstructions present the tube as 'known' when it isn't. 26/31

By the by, the major problem with the 'short' sarisa as proposed is that Polybius is explicit (Plb. 18.29) that the front five men can bring their weapons into action. He's also explicit about the same each person takes up in line. 27/31

So, in very short that's how we know how long the sarisa was. The weight of its length was counter-balanced by the flanged butt at the back, along with tapering the wooden haft and using a *very* small and light tip. Which is how a lot of other pikes work so 28/31

I think here the argument from practicality must bear a lot of weight. C. Matthew (2016) argues that Polybius described formation is impossible to carry out, which is baffling given that P. Connolly (2000) *did* carry it off with a renaissance pike troop; note dates. 29/31

So I keep coming back to the fact that the one thing we know about the sarisa is that it worked and presumably worked as described. 30/31

Finally, spelling note: you may see sarisa and also sarissa. Which is correct? Good news - even the Greeks didn't know and our sources spell it both ways. So it's up to you! I use sarisa because twitter is parsimonious with characters. 31/end (but see bibliography)

Bibliography time: the go to summary of the sources on the sarisa is Mixter, "The Length of the Macedonian Sarissa During the Reigns of Philip II and Alexander the Great" Ancient World 23 (1992): 21-29.