Muscle Armor effectiveness

[Dan Howard]

And the linothorax was not more effective. The linothorax was a quilted linen garment that was about the equivalent of a subarmalis.

The "glued hardened linen" stuff you see on TV didn't exist. That was called a Spolas and it was made of leather like 2 inches thick.

We don't actually know any of this. There are no surviving examples and no texts telling us how they were made. All we know about the spolas is that it was made of leather and was probably the tube and yoke shape that we see in illustrations. We know even less about their linen armour but if we look at how it was made in other regions and time periods then it could be anywhere from 10 to 30 layers thick. It almost certainly was thicker than a subarmalis though, which doesn't need to be more than half a dozen layers to serve its purpose.