Some Sarauter revisionism

[PMBardunias]

Even if the vertical placement of the porpax was adjusted by the same factor,the position of the shield on your body when you hold it in fighting position, again it is clear from hundrets of representations that this positioning was such that you could comfortably rest your shield on your shoulder in a natural position.

Hey Giannis, I think we are largely in accord. The one issue I have with the idea that it was resting the shield on the shoulder that determined the porpax position is that you should always rest the shield on the shoulder at it's apex- otherwise the inner rim is resting at an angle against the shoulder. This certainly explains the porpax being slightly off-center, but brings up questions when it is either on center or more than slightly off set.

I often notice it in some re-enactors with centered porpakes and antilabes away from the rim that when forming a shield wall each one is directly behind his own shield,not leaving mush space for the man to the right to get covered,and actually with much space to the left. And because the shield is big enough,it gives the impression that it offers better protection for the individual,but simply doesn't justify the sources

I'm glad you said this and not me, because I hate telling people that there very expensive shields are perhaps innacurate :wink: I agree with what you said about maximizing overlap. Perhaps homogenizing shield size is the driving force. I, and 6'3", would hate to stand next to a 5'3" hoplite with a proportionally smaller aspis!

This begs the question of why the porpax is in the center in the first place since most/all later double-grip shields have the grips flanking the center in a manner that actually makes far more sense for a shield meant to protect an individual. Much of the left half of the aspis is wasted for individual protection- implying that it was for more than protecting just the man behind it.

If we turned the arm in the correct position the antilabe would get much nearer to the rim.

I agree that the hand should probably be quite close to the rim. I moved it that way and the shield still lays in roughly the same way, but I did not want to be accused of overmanipulating the image to make my point.

Might I venture to suggest the simplest explanation is the obvious one? .....the off-centre porpax allows a man to deploy a slightly larger shield for a given forearm length.......and note that it is only slightly off-centre at that - too much unbalances the shield too much.

There has to be some reason that the man cannot simply have his arm in a central porpax and move the antilabe closer to the mid-line. Only if the form of the aspis required a set distance between elbow and rim, or other such geometric concern, does moving the porpax rather than the antilabe make sense.