Late Roman belt

[Medicus matt]

In your opinion, what would be easier to wear over a squamata, a wide one or a narrow one?

Dunno, don't wear it...awful stuff.

However......

Why would you need to wear a belt (other than your sword belt)over any armour at all? The chaps on the Dura synagogue frescos don't seem to need one.

Like most re-enactors, I always wore a belt and seperate sword belt when wearing mail for no other reason than everyone else did. I told people that the wearing of tight belt helped with the weight of the mail but then, when I started wearing rivetted/solid mail rather than butted, the weight stopped being an issue anyway.
Then Stuart 'Monkeyboy' Davies pointed out that it's very rare to find someone in an early medeival (410-1066) context depicted as wearing anything other than a sword belt or baldric over mail; I looked, expecting to find plenty of examples and discovered that he's right.
You CAN find some if you look for them but they're often ambiguous and they're quite rare.

So, I tried wearing mail without the tight belt and found that it makes no difference to the feel of the weight, and that the free movement of the mail actually makes it feel more comfortable and less restrictive.
Then I thought about it. For mail to be as effective as possible, it needs to hang free. When it's hanging loose, the gap between each link and it's horizontal neighbour is kept as small as possible and has much better energy absorbtion properties.

So I don't wear one now.