A very common preconception is that the pilum was meant to bend after piercing a shield, thereby disabling it. If that's what you were expecting based on the ti

A very common preconception is that the pilum was meant to bend after piercing a shield, thereby disabling it. If that's what you were expecting based on the title, the article takes a couple dozen paragraphs before it gets to the point: > ...it is often asserted that the purpose of the long shank was to bend on impact, making the weapon impossible to throw back. Which is tricky because our sources don’t quite actually say this...[my] own view is that bending was possible, but was not the purpose of the long-shank design ...[which is] both shield penetrating (it can strike a man behind a shield) and shield disabling (the weapon is really heavy and quite hard to get out of a shield easily even if it doesn’t bend).