Armor and Weapon Effectiveness

[Flavivs Aetivs]

How can it be tested? If there is nothing to suggest that it even existed how can we even attempt a reconstruction? You don't need to disprove Phil's theory. He has nothing to support it except baseless speculation. The only evidence for Roman leather armour is scale/lamellar, not musculata. Tom Hulit did some testing of leather armour in his PhD, which was also summarised in my book. Mike Loades tested an excellent reconstruction of rawhide scale made by Todd Feinman in his recent Egyptian chariot documentary - but they were Egyptian scales and lacing, not Roman. Todd's reconstructions are probably the closest we'll ever get to actual Egyptian armour.

His theory seems mostly to be based on the extremely heavy use of Musculata in Late Roman depictions of soldiers. In fact there's only maybe 2-3 depictions i can think of where the Romans aren't clad in Musculata, one being my Avatar.