Linothorax vs Spolas

[Nikanor]

If you ask me, i believe they could have worn the original felt version under their bronze ones some times, still this doesn not make it a specific kind of padding. It is a hat that made it into a helmet, like a number of other greek hats.

Hi Gianni. I am also of the same opinion and I would not jump to call the Pilos (or other hats worn in civilian fashion for the most of it) as armour-padding hat since padding of the helmet was the most easy and obvious case of inner padding:
- Take a civilian conical/rounded-type hat, add a bit of pillow-like fabric or leather or... sponge and fix it tight on your head and then wear your helmet on top so that it can move slightly over the hat in a case of crushing hit so as to absorb the hit
The advantage of that is that after the battle you take out the stuffing and use the hat when marching under the sun.

But the interesting question lies as following:
Certainly the Pilos-shaped hat is the most common hat you can find around in most European and Asiatic cultures and its civilian use is not related to military - yet in most cultures the hat is indeed associated with the military. So did the popularisation of the Pilos-hat civilian fashion develop out of the need to have a hat to stuff for the
helmet? Given that Pilos-hat does not protect much from the sun and rain but fits nicely in the helmet stuffed as much as you like it, I would guess that there is a some evidence for this, though we may never know.

Now it is also interesting to note that that the longer conical Pilos, stuffed with some padding and placed under the helmet would eventually take a shape similar to the Phrygian (side-less) cap. Historians up to late 19th century did not even distinguish much between them two. Another observation is that the stuffed Phrygian cap was both a civilian and a military cap (usually the side-stripes version) and then ended up giving the bronze Thraecian-type helmet - while the similarity of Pilos helmet with the civilian Pilos hat that had also found a military use under the helmet points as the only thing missing being the middle step, i.e. a padded Pilos used as protection in its own right. Unlike the Phrygian cap which was covering better the head, a Pilos stuffed hat would not be an excellent cover, not in this shape (even the Phrygian one, it seemed to be worn in war mostly with the side-stripes and longer back-neck) - but certainly I would stuff my Pilos and tie it on my head had I lost my helmet rather than going into a battle with nothing. Common sense. Still none would depict me in art with my... make-shift pilos helmet and there is no case that all of soldiers of a unit would had lost their helmets and thus forced to make make-shift helmets out of hats - thus becoming an event worth of recording.

Howeveer, I think (correct me if I am wrong) that in later Byzantine sources, the byzantine troops (the main heir of the hellenistic-roman fashion) wore too stuffed fabric hats underneath helmets and when in trouble wore only the fabric stuffed hats. Not convincing but all chances are this was the case in ancient times too rather than not.

Cushioning for armour? I'm all for it. Evidence for a subarmalis-leather jerkin or other separate garment worn under it, and also used as armour in its own right?

How often do we find fabric and layered leather objects? What is the number of preserved medieval armors in comparison to the preserved medieval subarmalis? Did medieval writers spend a lot of time describing subarmalis in comparison to the top armor?

Well that is the chance of finding a subarmalis. I do not expect to find it just like that. I just refuse to accept "no/minimal padding" on the basis of physics and biology and then I take the "most probable" case. Otherwise I would as well accept that at least a 30% to 40% of hoplites went to the battle naked below the waistline and about 90% of them wore no shoes when pushing with all their strength on their shields and against the enemy over hard ground full of small stones and lots of dust.

Every time that spolas or similar words are used in literature, they are worn in their own right, and never mentioned worn under other types of armour. Xenophon is far from such an example.

This could be due to a case of definitions. Maybe a spola indeed was meant to be worn in its own right but then maybe inner-padding could as well be a spola-alike, simply not mentioned as spola. Writers tended to describe the basics, i.e. what appeared to the eye.