weaponry and armor: Rome ARMING SCENES A common feature of ancient Greek heroic poetry was the “arming scene,” a description of the hero putting on his armor and gathering his weapons before entering battle The Homeric Iliad has many such scenes Book of the poem describes the Trojan Paris arming for single combat with the Greek Menelaus According to this description, Paris first “covered his legs with greave of good make and fitted with ankleclasps of silver; after this he donned the breastplate of his brother Lykaon, and fitted it to his own body.” Then “he his silver-studded sword of bronze about his shoulders, and then his mighty shield On his comely head he set his helmet, well-wrought, with a crest of horse-hair that nodded menacingly above it, and he grasped a redoubtable spear that suited his hands.” The poet’s vivid descriptions of the opulence of the metal and often of the history of the various pieces indicate a hero of elevated status—these heroes are rich and from illustrious families The descriptions serve to build tension in the narrative as well: The weapons hold potential for death and destruction, but only battle itself would reveal the outcome In the Iliad the arms of a hero hold talismanic powers, and fierce battles rage over the bodies of fallen warriors, with each side trying to strip the dead hero of his weapons The narrative technique of including an arming scene before battle, used to such good effect by Homer, is not unique to Greek poetry but appears throughout literature and art, from antiquity to the present They range from the somewhat comic scene of King Saul arming David before his battle with Goliath (I Samuel 17: 38–40 in the Bible) through medieval epics such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to modern depictions of historical battles in literature and film lengths for the different ranks The longest of these spears measured 17 feet and had a leaf-shaped iron tip, a change from the straight-sided tips of earlier hoplite spears To offset the weight of these long spears, and reflecting the added unlikelihood of enemies penetrating the bristling hedge of iron points that the phalanx presented, the shield was reduced from a large, full-body-size rectangle to a smaller, more maneuverable disk The supremacy of Macedonian tactics, which combined this newly re-formed phalanx with peltasts and cavalry, appeared most dramatically at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 b.c.e., when Philip’s army defeated the forces of Athens and Thebes, and even more dramatically during Al- 1169 exander the Great’s campaigns against the Persian Empire in the last years of the 330s b.c.e By the Hellenistic Period, the period after the death of Alexander in 323 b.c.e., Greek armor had become light and tactics more fluid Soldiers abandoned greaves and increasingly adopted a helmet with a more open face, the so-called pylos helmet instead of the older, more closed Corinthian style The new helmets increased the soldier’s field of vision, made breathing easier, and weighed less, and these advantages seem to have outweighed the reduced protection afforded by the open face The old Corinthian style continued to appear on vase paintings, however, and seems to have been an iconic symbol of the warrior tradition extending back through the Classical Period to Homeric times ROME BY MICHAEL M SAGE Little can be said about Roman arms, armor, and other military equipment before the middle of the sixth century b.c.e Literary sources offer scant evidence, and the site of Rome has provided few archaeological finds of a military nature There are a few fragmentary pieces of metal protective equipment and a number of spearheads, which point to the importance of the javelin The middle of the seventh century b.c.e saw a profound change in military equipment in central Italy, especially to the north of Rome in Etruria Again, there is little evidence at Rome, but given the close cultural ties of Rome and Etruria, there is every reason to suppose that the same developments took place at Rome Greek heavy infantry equipment of the hoplite type appears in Etruria, probably under the influence of the Greek colonies of southern Italy This hoplite equipment consisted of a metal helmet, a metal cuirass (body armor) made up of back and front plates, and the hoplite shield The hoplite shield was usually a convex circular device, feet in diameter, made of a wooden core with metal facing, usually of bronze The arm was inserted through a curved metal band, and the hand gripped a strap on the rim of the shield This holding mechanism distributed the weight of the heavy shield along the length of the arm, allowing the shield to be held for long periods The usual offensive weapon of the hoplite was a heavy thrusting spear with a short slashing sword as a secondary weapon By 550 b.c.e the literary sources show that the hoplite style of fighting had been adopted at Rome Despite the artificial character of the descriptions that survive, it is clear that at Rome, as elsewhere in central Italy, there was a greater variety of equipment than in Greece Especially important is the reference to a type of shield later known as the scutum The construction of this shield is described in detail by the Greek historian Polybius (ca 200–ca 118 b.c.e.) It was feet long and 2.5 feet wide, made of two wooden boards glued to each other Its convex outer surface was covered in linen topped by leather It was rimmed with iron and had a central iron spine