Roman Military Personal Equipment - Torso Armour

Torso Armour

Not all troops wore torso armour. Light infantry, especially in the early Republic, wore little or no armour. This was both to allow swifter movement for light troops and also as a matter of cost.

Legionary soldiers of the 1st and 2nd centuries used a variety of armour types. Some wore mail shirts, while others wore scale armour or lorica segmentata or laminated-strip cuirass. This last type was a complex piece of armour which in certain circumstances provided superior protection to the other types of Roman armour, mail armour (lorica hamata) and scale armour (lorica squamata). The testing of modern replicas has demonstrated that this kind of armour was impenetrable to most direct and missile strikes. It was, however, uncomfortable without padding: re-enactors have confirmed that wearing a padded undergarment known as a 'subarmalis' relieves the wearer from bruising both from prolonged wear and from shock produced by weapon blows against the armour. It was also expensive to produce and difficult to maintain. In the 3rd century, the segmentata appears to have been dropped and troops are depicted wearing mail armour (mainly) or scale, the standard armour of the 2nd-century auxilia. The artistic record shows that most late soldiers wore metal armour, despite Vegetius' statement to the contrary. For example, illustrations in the Notitia show that the army's fabricae (arms factories) were producing mail armour at the end of the 4th century. Actual examples of both scale armour and quite large sections of mail have been recovered, at Trier and Weiler-La-Tour respectively, within 4th-century contexts. Officers generally seem to have worn bronze or iron cuirasses, as in the days of the Principate, together with traditional pteruges.