Gambesons in roman times?

[Draugr the Greedy]

All textile armour was quilted. We have around three thousand years worth of examples and they are all constructed in a similar fashion.

Regarding Greeks and Romans wearing it, the evidence is pretty sparse.

The earliest instance is the Iliad and it is supported by a Late Bronze Age find of linen armour at Patras.

Alexander wore at least three different armours on his Persian campaign and one of them was a linen cuirass (part of the booty taken at Issus).

Your above image of Mars can be interpreted a dozen different ways. One of those interpretations is a quilted gambeson but it isn't the most likely interpretation IMO. Don't forget that these things were painted and we don't know how much detail was painted on and is now lost to us.

The term "gambeson" isn't the best one to use because it generally is only used to describe a specific style of textile armour. There were other styles including the "jack" and "jupon". Best to stick to something generic such as "textile corselet".

Edit: this thread is well worth reading
https://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/showth...?tid=22196

Claiming that all textile armour would have been quilted is a bold claim, and I don't necessarily agree with that. Some of the early middle age European sources can just as easily be interpreted as unquilted textile armour.

Regarding the term, a 'gambeson' historically refers to a quilted corselet. It doesn't refer to any specific style of corselet and the 'jack' is simply a later term for the same thing, as is the 'pourpoint', and they were even called doublets in some sources. Referring to a quilted textile garment as a gambeson is not wrong, but of course you can use another word to specify which type of garment it is. 

'Jupon' is not a term for a quilted garment, it's a word for a kind of jacket or overcoat that would be worn over armour in the late 14th century. They could be quilted but they could also be unquilted, and there's examples of both.