Recreating a legionair beginning 3rd Century

[Nathan Ross]

What Robinson classed an Aux Cav E. Current thinking is though, it was actually an infantry helmet.

It's questions like this that make the 3rd century such an interesting period to study! If I'm not mistaken, until fairly recently it was believed in some quarters that legionaries of the era commonly wore no armour at all - based, I suppose, on the fashion for representing figures this way on grave stelae, and the lack of archeological evidence for armour etc. Nowadays the pendulum seems to have swung the other way, and the consensus for the 3rd century 'look' is very heavy armour, manicae, greaves, 'Neiderbieber' helmets... This, I'm guessing, is mainly due to the proper study of the Dura Europos finds, and the dissemination of that study - remains of all the above items, together with fragments of (Newstead?) segmentata having been found there, together with the famous shields (I confess I'm a bit unsure of what was or was not found at Dura, however, as I can't afford to shell out for Simon James' 'Final Report' book, so most of what I'm going on is hearsay!)

It might be rather obvious, although hasn't been mentioned yet - a good basic resource for the period is the recent Osprey title 'Imperial Roman Legionary: AD 161-244', which I think summarises 'current thinking' fairly well. It's a bit cursory, and doesn't have any clear reconstruction drawings of armour or helmets, just Angus McBride's paintings, but that's the limitations of the Osprey format I suppose.

There are, though, several excellent reenactment groups doing the early 3rd century, as has been mentioned - Quinta in the UK, Populares Vindelicenses and III Italica in Germany, being auxiliary and legionary impressions respectively - which attests to the period's growth in interest and add greatly to what we 'know' about it (Quinta's scale armour experiments, for instance - although I'm still unsure about those coifs )

What still remains mysterious, however, is the later third century... the aforementioned Osprey book has a pretty good rendering of a late-ish legionary, but it's still a big grey area - at what point did the switch to ridge or segmented helmets occur, and did anything come between them and the more recognisably 'Imperial' (as in Italic/Gallic) Neiderbiebers etc? There's a fair bit of pictorial evidence, but much of it shows strange and unattested types of equipment- I'd be interested to see whether the light which has recently fallen on the earlier part of the century might some day extend further...