Why change to the Spatha?

[Tarbicus]

What use is a badly balanced one?

If it still hurts your enemy, incredibly useful. I'm asking, are we transplanting modern quality onto the ancients, where it's well known that even the Vikings had to, on occasion during battle, step away from the fight to find a rock so they could straighten their sword again. And the Viking sword was basically a spatha. The exceptions cost the modern equivalent of at least £150,000.

It's like the ding-dongs about the hardware we wear; they 'must' be thicker gauge, and 'must' be capable of holding out for a re-enactment season. But the reality of the actual ancient hardware is that often it wasn't quite paper thin, but..... not all that far off, comparatively.