Late Roman troops: \"normal\" vs. elite

[Nathan Ross]

Would it be likely for a Roman soldier in a palatina unit to wear a basic helmet and mail armour while his collegue in the same unit would have worn a gilded helmet and scale armour?

Apparently there's a remark in the Theodosian Code that 60% of helmets produced by state fabricae should have gilding and decoration - possibly these were intended for the palatine units, while the undecorated ones went to the limitanei?

Unfortunately I can’t find the detail of the arch of Diocletian showing that specific soldier you’re talking about.

Here it is, in the version by Karen Dixon, Late Roman Army, p.99:

[attachment=4743]ArchofDiocletian.jpg[/attachment]

(there's a redrawn version in Travis & Travis' Roman Body Armour that I think shows differences in the scale armour.)

Regarding the muscled cuirass debates, I still find it troublesome what to believe. (To which monuments are you referring specifically?)

I started a brief thread about this topic a while back: (Musculata: Late Roman Legionary Armour?), but it didn't get far. There's some more discussion in Late Roman Officer and Lorica Musculata.

Do reliefs and monuments always show what a Roman soldier looked like exactly at the time? Or are they merely showing Roman soldiers in the way people would expect (or want) a Roman soldier to look like at the time?

That's partly my point - earlier monuments usually showed segmentata, which however widely worn it actually was, was clearly what the public of the day thought that Roman soldiers wore. Later monuments show musculata in the same way - so while it may not have been ubiquitous, people at the time probably thought it signified a legionary soldier. Other details on these sculptures are quite individual and characteristically late Roman, so the armour is probably not just 'archaicising'. Scale and mail shirts of the day appear to have looked quite different to a muscle cuirass, as we see on the Diocletian and Galerius arches.