The Draco standard

[Renatus]

Also, we should not press our sources too much - I'm no supporter of 'absence of evidence', but I am familiar with sources from this period that simply 'don't state the obvious'. o when Arrian or Ammianus do not mention windsocks I'm not overly bothered by that.

Well, I would be, if no one else mentioned it either. What we have to guard against is a kind of perverse logic that says that, if the ancient sources do not mention it, it must be so because they must have regarded it as too obvious to mention.

What came first, the chicken or the egg, or in our case, the windsock or the draco?
We don't know is whether these windsocks/dracones started out as an attempt to make a dragon or a snake battle standard, and only then someone found that they performed as a wind-banner as well, or the other way around. Right now, seeing such windsocks/dracones being shaped also as wolves, dogs, even fish, I'm inclined to go for the functional purpose of windsock first, and only then for the artistic shape that resulted from windsocks being used as battle standards.

Now, I would take the opposite view: that the serpent-tail was adopted because, like flags, pennons, streamers, etc., it caught the wind and spread out, making it more conspicuous as a rallying point in battle. If (and, in my opinion, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, it is a pretty big 'if') the draco acquired an additional function as a windsock, this would have come later.