Linothorax design/construction

[Vishtaspa]

...short of one turning up labelled 'this is a spolas', that cannot happen, can it?

hehe, of course no, such things make researching so exciting!

Hoplites are shown in Tube-and-Yokes.Xenophon tells us their body armour is called spolades...what more do you want? Surely the overpowering logical conclusion is that the two must be one and the same?

but my trouble is that Xenophon don`t call spolades to their (tubeyoke) armour at all, he sais in 3.3.20 "spolades kai thorakes"; IMO thorax is the generic word both for bronze and for tube and yoke, and with spolades perhaps he is referrig another kind of leather protection, (very little srong, as shown in Basias passage). thorax is a word very often attested in texts, spolas a very few times in whole greek corpus, and this is strange for a item so common. I think frecuency can be an argument. As you said, isolated facts are dangerous, for me the evidence sais clearly that something called spolas was made of leather.

Regards!