Linothorax design/construction

[Sean Manning]

Inyigo wrote:-

IMO thorax is the generic word both for bronze and for tube and yoke,

...excuse me if I'm beginning to sound a little irritable, but I have been through this so many times.....

In 550B.C, 'body armour'(thorakes) and 'bronze corselet' are synonymous, but after the introduction of the Tube-and-Yoke, this is no longer true.....when Xenophon uses 'thorakes' when talking of Hoplites, he means bronze cuirasses, and he uses this to distinguish this piece of equipment from Tube-and-Yoke body protection.
Note that in the famous passage at Anabasis 3.iii where Xenophon raises cavalry, since they don't have shields then they should have the best body armour.(see Xenophon, Art of Horsemanship,XII.1 - cavalry should have well-fitting thorakes.Xenophon Anabasis III.4 - he is encumbered by his'cavalry thorakes' and it is ''heavy going" for him keeping up with Hoplites who presumably are wearing lighter 'spolades', or no armour.) But there are not enough 'thorakes' (bronze muscled cuirasses) in the army to equip 50 men (!) so some must make do with spolades and Xenophon clearly means bronze cuirasses when he says 'thorakes'.
Since the majority of Hoplites who wear armour wear Tube-and-Yokes, that only leaves one candidate for 'spolades', especially as a powerful arrow goes through one!!( Incidently, it is not Basias the Arcadian who is killed this way-he is shot in the head- but Leonymus the Spartan........BTW, this and Agesilaus taking wounds'through his body armour' proves Spartans still wore armour( or many of them at least) contra those who would have them running round in those spiffy off-the-shoulder numbers and little else. :wink: :wink:

Unless, as I believe, thorax has both a broad and a specific meaning. Consider how Greeks like Herodotus use the word "Persian" to mean 1) related to the ethnos native to Persis/Parsa, and 2) related to the Great Kingdom east of Ionia. In one sense, a Scythian in Xerxes' army cannot be called a Persian; in the other he can be. Things like this are common: in the 16th century, for example, a rapier could be almost any sword or more specifically a longish thrusting one with a fancy hilt (I think I got this from Sydney de Anglo's [i]Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe[i]). Even people writing dictionaries and martial arts manuals couldn't agree on a precise definition.

All in all, I think a Greek could have called one of these armours either a thorax or a spolas and have been perfectly correct.