Roman Full Plate Armor?

[Matthew Amt]

Here's a question I have then: if they had the awareness of Sarmatian knights, of the Crupellarius equipped from head to toe, and there was no technical prohibition from outfitting a 12th century Medieval knight, but they didn't -- why do we assume it was because of a conceptual lack, and not something like tactical considerations?

Do we not tacitly assume that the knightly panoply was in some way intrinsically more desirable?

The crupellarius was practically a side-show freak, designed to be a real challenge to a single more lightly-armored opponent. (Well, that's an assumption! They might have liked to see pairs of crupellarii slugging it out, but most other types of bouts featured different opponents.) Sarmatian knights and Parthian cataphracts were *nobles*, aristocrats who could easily afford all their own armor. And contact with Parthians and Sarmatians came only after centuries of Hellenistic tradition, and after Roman nobility no longer fought as the heavies in the front rank. So the Romans who could afford complete armor saw no need to wear it, and those who might have liked it in combat couldn't afford it (and the state saw no need to supply it!), and probably didn't want to schlep it on the march. In the post-Roman period, the nobility goes back to supplying the armored warriors, and since they are mounted and can afford anything, armor once again evolves and grows to full coverage.

Generalizations, of course, but that's how I see it. Vale,

Matthew