Thread by @BretDevereaux

Alright, Twitter, this video recapitulates something in the public-facing Roman/Italic military equipment talk that has been bugging me for a while, so we're going to talk about the pectoral cuirass and why it never looked like how it was certainly drawn for your textbook. 1/

https://twitter.com/rogueclassicist/status/1678384666280165376

First, let's talk about how we go about understanding ancient arms and armor. A lot of what we're trying to do is correlate literary descriptions of things with artistic representations of those things with surviving archaeological examples of the same thing. 2/

Literary sources on equipment alone can be really deceptive; they sometimes outright lie (see all of the Greek authors saying La Tene/Gallic/Celtic swords are all very bad and bendy; total BS).

So you line up literary sources with the real thing to fully understand it. 3/

Polybius is our main source describing the pectoral cuirass and his description (Polyb. 6.23.14) is *extremely* brief: he just says it's a bronze breastplate a span (c. 23cm, distance between thumb and pinkie at maximum, '4' below) square worn over the chest. 4/

And that description is *exactly* how it gets shown in textbook artwork: as a single small bronze plate over the chest, suspended by leather straps.

Like this artwork used in Roth, Roman Warfare (2009), borrowed from Osprey, 5/

While we're here, those scuta are wrong (wrong boss type, no spina), that lorica hamata isn't very good and the 'one greave only' thing is only speculative for the Republic. It is really frustrating that a textbook on Roman warfare opted to borrow that illustration to use. 6/

But remember, we want to correlate the literary description with a physical actual armor and ideally artwork of it being worn in order to understand it.

Now given that everyone is just copying Polybius, you might think he's all we've got.

No! This is a well-attested armor! 7/

(Just not in Roman contexts)

Pectorals - suspended metal chest-plates that only cover part of the chest - are common in Italy starting in the 8th century (Polybius is writing in the 2nd) and go through a series of design evolutions. 8/

In particular, while those very early pectorals were suspended by leather straps, starting in the sixth century those get phased out by hinged shoulder plates, initially one and then eventually two with matching side plates. 9/

That design evolution means it is also a mistake to take small square or circular pectorals from the 8/7/6th century and project them on to second-century Romans. There is no reason to suppose those designs were still in use - they stop showing up in the record! 10/

Instead, by the fourth century, the design we have is what I prefer to call a 'pectoral cuirass' (term not my invention). It's clearly culturally 'Samnite' but we see it in artwork in Campania too. And it's archaeologically attested; inc. both subtypes we have c. 65 of them. 11/

(Probably more unpublished).

*This* is almost certainly the pectoral of Polybius. It consists of two shoulder plates, two side plates (both fairly small), plus a front- and back-plate, which come in two designs - the more common triple-disk and the less common anatomical. 12/

It's worn as a complete harness, which you can see here clearly on this fourth century Campanian squat lekythos in the British Museum (1986,0403.4): 13/

It artwork, this cuirass is almost always shown (I'd say always - I'm not *aware* of an exception, but there probably is one) with a broad bronze belt, which you can see that guy also has up there.

That's archaeologically attested too; we have a TON of them. 14/

(The belt also appears without the cuirass in artwork, but not the other way around. It may have been something of a tacti-cool fashion statement for elites to wear their broad belt when not fighting, just to signal their warrior-elite-ness.) 15/

Now a lot of these pectoral cuirasses end up on display in museums (looking at you again, British Museum 1856,1226.665 ) without the connecting plates, because those were small and easily over-looked in early, careless excavation (or looting). 16/britishmuseum.org/collection/obj…

But when we find these in secure provenances, the breast and back-plates again basically always (unaware of exceptions) recovered with at least some of the connecting plates. And in artwork, they're almost always there. 17/

An uncommon but not rare subtype changes out that triple-disk chestplate design for a more rectangular plate shaped to look like muscles (both the triple-disk and this type are riffing off of the Greek muscle cuirass, artistically), an 'anatomical cuirass. 18/

Peter Connolly called it a 'rectangular anatomical cuirass' but they're not always neat rectangles.

But they are *about* a span square and so almost certainly what Polybius is describing. 19/

Though a span-sized chest-plate would be at the small end of the preserved examples, which tend to be 30-35cm by 25-30cm, not 23cm by 23cm. Still, the 'span' (σπιθαμιαῖος) is not an exact unit. It's *about* a span square. Fair enough. 20/

These were not, as per the video, thin armors, stiffened with leather. The belts tend to be about 1mm thick and the breastplates range from 1-2mm. Which is the normal range for breastplates in the ancient world; these are as thick as a muscle cuirass. 21/

In practice with all of the pieces what you have basically an 'articulated breastplate' - exchanging some coverage for a bit less weight and a lot more mobility (you can bend!), which may have better fit Italic and Roman fighting styles. 22/

The Romans end up loving flexible armors (mail, scale, lorica segmentata) but ditch rigid armors (muscle cuirass, tube-and-yoke cuirass) so a fighting-style preference for greater joint-mobility isn't a way-out-there-idea. 23/

What drives me bonkers here is that this basic description of the armor has been well known for a while. There are a lot of these well-preserved in museums (NAM Paestum has a bunch), they're all over fourth century artwork. 24/

And the scholarship on this isn't exactly new either. Peter Connolly was studying these in the 1980s (P. Connolly, "Notes on the Development of Breastplates in S. Italy" (1986)). More recently, Michael Burn's 2005 PhD thesis is a comprehensive list of exemplars. 25/continues...

...that's M. Burns, "The cultural and military significance of the South Italic Warrior's Panoply" (2005).

There's also, by the by, a really good discussion by Harrison and Armstrong on manufacture in the 2021 JRMES ("The armorer's craft"). 26/

Now there is a catch, because of course there's a catch and that catch is the third and second century. The reason we have good evidence for this armor is 1) artwork of warrior elites in Campania and Samnium and 2) warrior burials of the same. 27/

And here's the thing: both of those stop with the Roman conquest of the region at the beginning of the third century.

That's a trend in Italy, by the way: the coming of Rome means the end of warrior burials and a drop in artwork of warrior elites. 28/

It creates this obnoxious lacuna in our evidence where just as the Romans are uniting the peninsula, the evidence for arms and armor drops to *almost nothing* and only starts to recover in the second century. 29/

By the time we can see equipment clearly again, it's clear everyone in Italy is fighting with a pretty standard Roman/Italic koine of equipment: montefortino helmets, scuta, mail armor, the gladius hispaniensis, etc. Equipment standardized. 30/

Burns argues (persuasively, I think) that this started earlier ("The Homogenisation of Military Equipment under the Roman Republic" Digressus Supplement I (2003)).

But the gap is bad news for the pectoral, because it gets phased out before our evidence comes back. 31/

The culprit here is almost certainly mail (the lorica hamata) displacing the pectoral cuirass as a better form of what is basically an articulated breastplate. I've written on this ("The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor" Chiron 52 (2022)). 32/

But evidently the pectoral cuirass was still around, worn by Romans who couldn't afford mail, in Polybius' day. And we have no reason to believe it wasn't in the same basic form - shoulder and side plates, broad belt - that it was in the fourth century. 33/

It might have been! But Polybius might also - and I think this is more likely - have been describing just the central plate of the armor, in half a sentence before moving on because he doesn't care all that much about this outdated armor poor Romans wear. 34/

Now it is striking that *poor* Romans wear it: this was an elite armor in the fourth century. But the harness nature meant these things could be resized, so there may have been a lot of 'used' pectoral cuirasses floating around as elites moved to mail. 35/

Also, Harrison and Armstrong (cited above) argue that even in the fourth century, these pectoral cuirasses are shifting to a simplified mass-production process (with elaborately decorated versions for elites); that trend might have continued to make it more affordable. 36/

But the idea that these were regularly a single small plate suspended by leather straps? There's basically no evidence for that at all. *Far* more evidence for a complete system of shoulder/side plates, plus unattached belt. 37/

Assembled that way, the pectoral cuirass was a pretty substantial armor. Not as good coverage as a muscle cuirass (much worse than mail), but hardly the barely-functional square plate you see in *way* too many recreations and reenactments. 38/

In any case, the pectoral cuirass was, by the time Polybius saw it, very much on the way out. Polybius is, in fact, our last evidence for it (I am aware of the 'Numantia pectoral' which is almost certainly not Roman). Mail was the new, incoming thing. 39/

Now I don't blame the enthusiasts for reproducing and describing what they see in their textbooks. But I am at the point of blaming textbooks and Osprey volumes and all of that who are still reproducing the little square plates, which were not a thing in the Roman Republic. /end

And I suppose let me @EquipmentRoman with the hope that a third edition of the Bishop and Coulston may perhaps expand on the second editions not-wrong-but-very-very-brief discussion of the evidence for the pectoral (and maybe take the 'Numantia pectoral' out!)

@EquipmentRoman By the by, if you are reading this and thinking, "but then where *should* I go for the best single-stop source on Roman military equipment that is up to date?" the answer is...@EquipmentRoman , the 'Bishop and Coulston' (after the authors).