Gambesons in roman times?

[Nathan Ross]

The first two of your images are likely depicting scale armour with pteruges. The vertical lines were carved and the details of the individual scales were painted. The one with the diamond crosshatching is likely depicting mail..

Scale armour did not form vertical columns like that. If they were painting scales onto it anyway, why first go to the trouble of carving those vertical bands into the stone?

The relief with the two armoured legionaries shows the lefthand man wearing what is surely mail (incised 'dots'). The righthand soldier is wearing something different - what else would create diagonal bands like that?

The diamond-patterned cuirass on the Spilt sarcophagus shows a 'dot' at the centre of each diamond. The sculptor is obviously able to represent all sorts of patterns and textures - if he wanted to show scales or mail he would have done so.

We have plenty of depictions of mail armour, scale, segmented armour and no armour at all. These images are showing something different. We may not know exactly what they are intended to represent (and they surely don't all show the same thing), but that does not mean that the pictures are 'wrong' or the intended objects did not exist.

Why would you think it is textile armour when there is no precedent for it?

What else would it be? We know that textile armour existed in the Roman world - (Seutonius Galba 19: "He did however put on a linen cuirass, though he openly declared that it would afford little protection against so many swords" Loricam tamen induit linteam, quanquam haud dissimulans parum adversum tot mucrones profuturam) - we just don't know what it looked like or how often it was used. Suggesting that these artistic depictions might represent something like that does not seem at all far-fetched.

Artistic depictions are useless because they can never be interpreted in only one way.

Everything can be interpreted in more than one way.

Look at the archaeological finds misdated (or redated) by hundreds of years. Look at the helmets 'reconstructed' to look like all kinds of bizarre things, the vaunting hypotheses built on tiny fragments of fabric of leather. Archaeological evidence is as open to interpretation and misinterpretation as anything else.

The truth is we do not know a great deal about the Roman army, or any other ancient army. What we do know - or think we know - is a compendium of interpretations based on cross-referencing various types of evidence: archaeological, literary and artistic. Accepting only one of those types and rejecting the others is liable to lead to a very partial view indeed.