Greek warfare was spear warfare. From the Archaic period through the Hellenistic, the primary weapon of the Greek soldier was a long pole with a sharp end — eight feet of it for the classical hoplite, twice that length for the Macedonian phalangite. Battles were won by the formation that pushed forward longer with its spears intact. Everything else — swords, shields, armor, even tactics — existed to support that basic geometry.
Dory
The eight-foot thrusting spear of the classical Greek hoplite. Held overhand, projecting forward over the rim of the aspis, used in tight-rank thrusts at the faces and necks of opponents in the enemy phalanx, the dory was the primary weapon of the Greek soldier for nearly half a millennium. The weapon and the formation around it — the phalanx — defined an entire way of war.
The dory had iron heads at both ends: a leaf-shaped primary point at the front and a bronze butt-spike (the sauroter) at the back. The sauroter was both a counterweight and a backup point if the primary head broke off in combat. Cornel-wood shafts gave the spear stiffness combined with flexibility. Whole weight ran 2 to 4 pounds — light enough to wield through an hour of fighting, heavy enough to drive through bronze armor at close range.
Sarissa
The eighteen-to-twenty-two-foot pike that defined the Macedonian phalanx and made Alexander's conquests possible. Philip II of Macedon's military reforms, in the 350s BC, lengthened the standard Greek hoplite spear into something that more than doubled its reach — a weapon so long it had to be carried in two pieces joined by an iron sleeve, weighing 12 to 15 pounds, requiring two hands and forcing the user to wear a smaller forearm-strapped shield (the pelta) instead of the classical aspis.
On flat ground, the system was nearly invincible. Five ranks of points all projected beyond the front of the formation, presenting an opponent with a hedge of iron tips at distances no hoplite phalanx could reach. Combined with Macedonian heavy cavalry, the sarissa-armed phalanx broke Greek city-state armies, the Persian Empire, and the kingdoms of central Asia in less than thirty years. Its eventual defeat came not from a better weapon but from a more flexible system: the Roman legion.