Double hand grips on the aspis

[PMBardunias]

As he said on his own,the arm would have to stuck in the porpax so much that it could not go further. The he would have to pull the antilabe(with the rope) very much in order to tighten all of it.

Its not so much that he pulls the rope, but if the face of the bowl of the early aspis flexed under pressure, then it would tighten all by itself. Initially he would want the distance between porpax and antilabe to be an exact fit for his arm. I'll not that this is not the case for many reenactors. They have too much play in their grip. You can tell because they rotate the hand to an almost horizontal position to tighten it in their grasp just to hold the aspis. I have mentioned this before, but with the proper tension pulling the forarm into the porpax, the system would be similar to the one used to fit artificial limbs snuggly and keep the porpax from sliding up to the elbow.

But please Paul,can you provide a painting where ALL ropes are tightened?

They are very rare, but see below. The one on the left seems pretty tight and also peculiarly it goes under the strap of the porpax. On the right they are either tight or defying gravity.

I point out that those firrings are different from the rest. Theya re not hunging rings. They are far narrower than the rings,which suggests that the rope was not mean to pass through them,but be tied or attached in some other way to them.

I'm not too confident in differentiation rings from anything else at the level of detail we have.

the many rings served to spread the weight of the shield to all of them rather than just two,given that the shield core was rather thin in the places where the rings were attached.

Hey! Its not fair to use that on me. I think I proposed that years ago on the phalanx. No fair using my own previous ideas against me :wink: Its funny how long we have known each other and how many friends I have online who I have never actually seen or heard.