Leather Cuirass

[MeinPanzer]

Are you kidding me? Those physiques are ripped...for elder men they're either religious in their work outs, or it's as I said before...glorified.

Can you not read? As I said in that very post you quoted, if an emperor was depicted nude, then he was most surely idealized.

It has nothing to do with common armour types, showing the musculature to that degree is over the top...

We have actual examples of metal muscled armour, and the depictions of the muscled cuirasses being worn by emperors in sculptural art is not at all over the top when compared to those.

as many artists do. Would you want to be the artist that depicts the emperor with flabby arms? I doubt it...you wouldn't have a job for very long.

Why are you even going on about this? This has nothing to do with representations of emperors wearing muscled cuirasses.

No, I said multiple sources...written, archaeological, artistic, or whatever else we have.

So how much and of which of those would you need to accept leather cuirasses? Two artistic and an archaeological source? One artistic source and a written source? Drawing thresholds for acceptibility is silly since if we operated under such criteria, as I said before, we would have to throw out a whole bunch of ambiguous or limited evidence.

You just proved my whole argument. We dont' have textual sources for leather being used as armour until what...late roman...and even then as lamellar! Two completely different types of armour.

What I'm saying is that if we didn't have literary sources on the phalanx, one could doubt its existence at all. The same goes for leather muscled armour- if there are few or no explicit mentions of leather muscled armour, yet a few artistic sources, that is not reason to dismiss it. Besides, armour is so often referred to in such ambiguous fashion (in Greek, thorax can refer to many different styles of armour, for instance) in ancient sources that it is no surprise that we don't have sources specifically referring to leather muscled armour (how many sources actually refer to lorica hamata, again?).

I never said without a doubt.

THEN I can also prove without a doubt that linen was used extensively in antiquity by both greek and roman militaries as a form of armour. We know they used linen. We know they wore pteryges. Gee...1 + 1 = 2.

But you can deal with higher probability vs less, and in the case of the pteryges, it's much higher! In this particular thread, it's less to non-existant

And no one is saying it is anything other than less probable, so what are you getting worked up about?

Linen when it's not wet and in multiple layers is NOT flexible. That's why what you are seeing in your statuary is ART! A distorted reflection of life...and can't be used soley as a source!

What do these two things have in common at all? I'm not following your logic.

How are my standards bizarre? Because I like to have more than one shaky source before I go flapping my gums saying X must be Y because of Z? I believe it's called critical thinking. Not my fault that's a foreign concept to you.

Because you seem to think that if we don't have many different sources from literature, art, and the archaeological record about an item, that there is no evidence for it at all. We have evidence, but as I think everyone can agree, it is simply limited in number, ambiguous, and hard to interpret. It is still evidence, though.

Are you kidding me? If it's part and parcel to the thread, the impression I got was that it's evidence for musculata depicted in art as being flexible, and therefore had to be leather.

I wasn't even arguing about whether the paint represented leather at all. I was just countering your assertion that the sculptor was being contradictory by not carving in the upper edges. I hadn't contributed anything to the thread at all before that.

My issue with your posts originally was this:

Which was in response to my post about leather musculata, not even directed at you...the first paragraph was, but that's it. I even spoke in general terms...you took it personally, and that's why we're at where we are now. You got "whipped" up about the art as much as I have about the leather musculata pandemic. Dems da breaks I guess.

I didn't get whipped up about the art, I responded to a ridiculous generalization in which you dismissed an entire field of study. It was a legitimate response to what was a condescending offhand comment. Then you started arguing against me saying that I was presenting this piece as evidence for Roman leather musculata, when I never posted anything about that at all.