Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…That’s, I think, the key thing. One of the fascinating things about your work, you study Roman life life in the ancient world, but also the details, like we mentioned, you are an expert in armor. So what kind of, maybe you could speak to weapons and most importantly, armor that were used by the Romans or by people in the ancient world. I do military history. So I mean, the Romans specialized in, I mean, early on they have pretty random armor, and it’s not standardized. I mean, remember, there’s no factories in the ancient world, so nobody’s cranking out 10,000 units of exactly the same armor. Each one is handmade. Now, there can be a degree of standardization, even as early as Alexander, there was a certain amount of standardization, but each one is still handmade, and that’s important to keep in mind, each weapon, each piece of armor. Armor develops over time to fit the tactics. So the Greek hoplites, are very heavy armor. The Roman infantrymen early in the public is lighter. Eventually they get this typical sort of chain mail shirt, helmet shield, the classic sort of Roman legionary, I would say, is the one of the first and second centuries AD, so the early Roman Empire, and this is the guy who wore bands of steel arranged in sort of bands around their body. So it looks almost like a lobster’s shell, right? And this is a thing called the lorica segmentata. So it’s solid steel, which is very good protection, but it’s flexible because it has these individual bands that provide a lot of movement. And then, you have a helmet, you have a square shield that’s kind of curved, and you have the short sword, the Roman gladius and that’s the classic Roman legionary. Later, more things develop. My personal relationship with armor is I got, really by accident, involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that was used, especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the linothorax, which apparently was made only out of linen and glue. So this seems a little odd that that’s not the sort of material once you want metal or something, but we had clear literary references that people, including Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander mosaic found at Pompeii that shows him wearing one of these funny types of armor. The catch is none survived. It’s organic materials. So we don’t have any of them and archaeologists like to study things that survive. So we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze, Roman armor made of steel or sort of proto steel, but this thing, this linothorax was a mystery. And one of my undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartel, had a real, well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander. As one should.…

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