Linothorax vs Quilted linen vs spolas

[MeinPanzer]

Paul,you have just posted the two sides of the same vase,there. Just in case you didn't notice it. Exekias painted one of the two completely naked,which means that his armour was stripped of him,perhaps by Hector. There is no base to say he was depicting something new to him.
Alcaeos is peaking of bronze greaves,a basic part of early hoplite gear,and especially of hollow shields ,which is a standard epithet of the hoplite shield. Homer may refer to hollow shields occasionally and rarely in fact,for his are usually just round and "great".
And let me point out some differences in reliability between "Homer" and Alcaeos. It is generally accepted that Homeric poems are a mix of older and newer additions and there is not even enough evidence that Homer was one person. Also his two poems were by far the most popular in the Greek world and most probably had many variations from time and place,or even singer and occasion. So it is very logical that we cannot rely on these poems to reconstruct armour of any age.
Let me say that Alcaeus is rather different. He's a specific person that lived in specific time and wrote many things,even if they haven't survived as well. These facts,together with the fact that at any given age of greek art,the past is represented in contemporary clothes/armour makes Alcaeus much more relyable than Homer to link armour described by him with the time he is writing. So we have all vases of the time,say 600 bc showing homeric heros in bell cuirasses,corinthian helmets and hoplite shields,and even fighting in phalanx(!) and at the same time we have a poet that's MAYBE talking of a homeric scene. Why should we believe that he's basing his description on Homer when no other form of art does it?
In the end,homeric or not,Alcaeus' fragment is much more important than you make it appear,Paul.
Similarly,some of Homer's armour may belong to the 7th century bc,including the "hollow round shields" and "linothoriktoi" heroes.
Khaire
Giannis

Giannis, you have to separate in this instance art and literature. Classical Greeks portrayed Homeric heroes armed with contemporary arms because they had no or little idea about the appearance of the arms and armour of the Mycenaeans who lived almost a millennium before them. This is why, until "classicization" of arms in Homeric and mythical scenes appears around the Hellenistic period, Homeric scenes often reflect in detail the arms of the day in which a piece of art was created.

Literature, however, was totally different, as we can see in our received version of Homer's poems. To give the classic example, the mention of boars' tusk helmets in the Iliad shows that vestiges of ancient forms of arms could survive in the oral tradition for centuries to be set down in the written versions of these stories. Most literate Greeks were very familiar with the Iliad, if they had not memorized it, and so details like the arms described would be very familiar to later authors. If I understand Paul's argument, he is stating that Alcaeus' linen cuirasses could have been a poetic trope which he drew from the Iliad to make his Homeric description more Iliadic, and so it would not reflect his contemporary world.