Linothorax again

[Matthew Amt]

I may be covering old ground here, but here goes..

Yeah, we fought a long one about this on The Phalanx yahoo list last year. Heck, dig back through the first 11 pages of this discussion and you'll probably find most of it. Mostly it's a lot of assumptions about what life was like 2500 years ago!

Surely the vastly time consuming and labour-intensive method of creating enough linen to make garments would make the cost of making such a defence hellish expensive?

First, practically everyone back then was involved in the textile industry. Every house had a loom and all the women and kids made thread and fabric, and sometimes the men, too. Clothes were great big pieces of cloth, and wealthier men (i.e., those who served as hoplites) had plenty of clothing. Since only a relatively few men in any area would need a new linorthorax each year, it would not be a huge strain on the system to produce the linen for it. And the coarse, undyed linen for a linothorax would be tons easier to make than the fine decorated fabrics often used for clothing. I don't think it would be as bad as having to replace the family car these days--that almost ruined me last year!

Usually, the gentlemen who served as hoplites don't seem to have been concerned about cost. I can think of dozens of helmets that are cheaper and easier to produce than a Corinthian, and yet the Corinthian was the common style around 500 BC. Frequently very decorated, too! Decorated cuirasses, greaves, shields--that all costs a lot. A few yards of linen is cheap by comparison. Heck, the Greeks seem to have *preferred* doing things the hard way!

We all know how expensive it was for a Roman cloak/tunic etc.

Oh? Papyrus records from the first and second centuries AD seem to show that legionaries were going through 6 to 12 tunics a year. But theirs is a totally different system and economy, no real comparison.

With the amount of animals slaughtered for food as well as for hides, would it not be more cost effective and economic regarding man-hours to make the garment from leather and cover it in the more expensive linen fabric?

But were they eating that much meat? Grain products seem to have been the mainstay of the diet back then. Leather was certainly used for a lot of things. But again, I don't think cheapness and ease of construction was all that big a concern to them.

It would certainly be as robust if more than one layer of leather were used and still look as Aesthetically pleasing and ‘expensive’

Sure, I have no problem with that, and in fact I think it's clear that leather armor was used in some places at some times. But the evidence for the linothorax all points to linen, and we shouldn't inflict our own ideas of "practicality" (or anything else) on the ancients.

Khairete,

Matthew