Linothorax design/construction

[Paullus Scipio]

We see the tube-and-yoke cuirass coming in use in the 6th c. BC. We have a list of hoplite stuff from Alkaios (should be Alc. fr. 54, I don't own this source myself), where he mentioned "thorrakkes...neo lino".

The "new" type of body armour came into use around 520 B.C., judging by artistic depictions. Alkaios lived on Lesbos, off the Anatolian coast around a hundred years before this armour appears ! Being a poet, and with only a fragment to go on, it is more likely he is harking back to Homeric references to Linen armour.....one thing's for sure, he can't be talking about something that wouldn't come into use for another hundred years !!

which can be interpreted as bleached linen

...or any number of other materials, including leather.....I don't say that it is necessarily though!!

We have sources for the cultivation of flax in Greece and we have trade with foreign regions where flax was grown. For me that is enough to conclude that at least a good part of the tube-and-yoke cuirasses were made of linen.

That is not logical - it begins by assuming 'linen' construction, and then says since they had linen it must be so.Exactly the same applies to leather! :lol: .....they grew wheat and olives too, why not postulate a cloth made of wheat for the construction ?

We have seen in the discussion that Xenophon used "thorax" also for non-metallic cuirasses

Originally, Hoplites wore only one type of body-armour made of bronze,(hence the famous expression 'men of bronze') so originally 'thorakes'=body-armour=bronze cuirass (just like cuirass means metal body armour in English) when body armour made of something else is described, it must be qualified, thus Xenophon's 'thorakes lineoi' = body armour made of linen( similarly, in English, we speak of leather cuirass, or linen cuirass - to distinguish from the original metal one.)

That means logically that the spolas is a form of thorax

=body armour! Leather body armour.

It could also be a form of jerkin which is sometimes shown in vase paintings

Which vase paintings are being referred to here ? There was no clear depiction shown on the other thread.

In Aristophanes "Birds" (933 ff.) the overgarment of a slave was also named as spolas. That could be a hint to a (leather?) jerkin for protection during hard work. Hesiod tells us that peasants wore a kind of leather garment during work

It is not impossible that these references are to old bits of body armour, but I suspect not.
I would postulate that'spolas' did indeed originally mean some sort of leather, protective, workers waistcoat/ jerkin, but that when the tube-and-yoke corselet (leather version) was introduced, what more natural than to call this protective leather garment a 'spolas' too ?

a quilted linen jerkin

...quilted linen is known as armour for Asiatics from other sources as well.