Were they tackling each other like football or something? Just feels like if you’ve got a 20 foot spear pointed forwards, there’s no point in having other people behind you pointing their sticks at the sky.
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There are actually quite a lot of the art of ancient combat we do not know. People who wrote about the battles did so from the generals point of view, not the captains or soldiers. Their knowledge were passed on orally and were lost over time.
But your comparison to football huddles are very apt for at least some periods in time. A spear can not do much against a phalanx charging you down trampling you to death. Even if you manage to hit well with the spear and take down one of them the others do not even need weapons to kill you. So the tactic evolved to having dense groups of people charging each other, often not even bothering with weapons other then for finishing those who fell. The people behind is to push the people in front towards the enemy, sometimes hard enough that the people in the front lines gets crushed to death standing up.
But even when technology and society did not make this the most optimal way of fighting you wanted the phalanxes quite deep. You want to have spares for when the front row falls to enemy fighting, get tired, etc. Quite likely the most efficient armies would rotate people on the front lines so they always had fresh troops in the front few rows.
Another effective technique is for the front lines to pull the enemy through them to be surrounded. Either they would part for charging enemies but blocking their friends from coming through or they would grab the enemy to pull them through. You can actually see this today with well trained riot police. A particularly brave protester who charges the police will find out that this is very easy and find themselves in the back of a police van.
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