Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[Sean Manning]

Its good to have an unambiguous reference to Greek linen armour from that period. Its a shame there is no way to tell what sort of garment was meant by stoles. The idea of matching cloaks to identify conspirators makes sense.

I found another use of stolas/spolas in a military context. Its from Agatharchides's work on the Erythraean Sea (our Red Sea) which survives in excerpts by the Byzantine writer Photius. Fragment 20 says:

For the war against the Aithipoians Ptolemy recruited 500 cavalrymen from Greece. To those who were to fight in the front ranks and the vangard- they were a hundred in number- he assigned the following form of equipment. For he distributed to them and their horses garments of felt (stolas piletas) which those of that country call kasas that conceal the whole body except for the eyes.

Agatharchides wrote in the second century BCE, and the war was probably in the first half of the 3rd century BCE. Duncan Head suggests that kases (accusative plural kasas) is an Egyptian Greek word for some sort of thick garment.

Liddell and Scott seem to think that spolas and stolas are versions of the same word (see here). My source for this is Duncan Head, “Ptolemy III's Felt-Armoured Cavalry,” Slingshot 247 (2006).