Leather Armor? (NO HOLDS BARRED!!)

[tlclark]

None of the various leather hardening techniques provide anything that will resist a weapon point unless it is too thick to be flexible. You can't have flexible leather that will resist any sort of threat on the battlefield. So any depiction of a flexible musculata cannot have been intended for combat. Unless you have evidence that a cuirass was sometimes worn over mail like in the Middle Ages. Even using this medieval combination, none of the "cuiries" they wore were flexible.

Well Dan, it seems you have more experience in this matter, but I have to offer two points. First, your standards may be arbitrary. It's not whether it was insufficient according to our standards, it was whether it was better than the next reasonable alternative at the time, factoring in such issues as design and aesthetics, which were not trivial matters for the officer class.

Second, we have already conceded the point that these may be largely ceremonial, which I think is probably the case during the Antonine period and later.

However, I recently reviewed the "leather Segmentata" thread (recommended to me by Graham Summer) and I was amazed at how many examples of functional leather armor there were in the archaeological record. I think objections to leather armor are therefore largely arbitrary.

This is a lot like the thread about the sufficiency of mail in retarding arrows and projectiles. Some were saying that mail was inadequate while others were arguing that it was adequate. Often times people would quote the number of times it failed or not compared to this test or that and it always struck me that they always looked at things in a very different matter than I would. For example, let's say tests proved mail insufficient in 9 out of 10 times. Not very good to most people's reckoning. Then I think, well, if the alternative is NO armor, then the failure rate is 10 out of 10. In that case, 1 out of 10 success rate looks REALLY good!

The failure rate of munitions during the first gulf war was over 80% according to my brother who designed precision munitions back then. When they reported that on the press the public was aghast. Back at my brother's office the engineers were popping the champagne corks, that was better than they had ever dreamed! Expectations matter a lot.

If as I suggest over in the padded armor thread, the pteruges indicate the the subarmalis was really very similar to the late hellenistic linothorax, then the cuirass would add an increase, no matter how modest, to an existing set of very successful armor.

(Maybe this is why we don't see any leather cuirasses! They were too easily damaged and discarded like the outer layer of some armors today.)

At any rate, I didn't come to this decision easily. Matthew Amt would be happy to believe otherwise as well. I have no dog in this fight. I'm not a missionary looking for converts. I just can't explain the evidence better in any other way.