Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Bottom line is a one centimeter thick line of thorax. So laminated or even sewn, it doesn't have to be laminated, layer of linen is about as good protection as two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest comparable body armor of bronze at the time. And we're talking fourth century, fifth century BC here. So classical and Hellenistic Greece.
And that would have protected you from, let's say, random arrow strikes on the battlefield. So you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn't have gone through. What are the benefits? Is there a major weight difference? Yes. So the benefits of this are it's much lighter than metal armor. So the line of thorax is about 11 pounds.
A bronze cuirass of comparable protection would have been about 20%. 24 to 6 pounds. A chain mail shirt would be about 28, 27 pounds. It's cooler. I mean, the Mediterranean is a hot place with the hot sun. Even today, a linen shirt is something you wear when you want to be cool. So it's much lighter. That gives your troops greater endurance on the battlefield. They can run farther, fight longer.
It's cheaper. You don't need a blacksmith who's a specialist to make it. In fact, probably, this is interesting, any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these. because they were the ones who spun thread and sewed it into fabric. So I can easily see in a household a mother making this for her son, a wife making it for her husband.
So it's a form of armor you could have made domestically that would have been maybe not the greatest armor, but pretty good, pretty comparable to bronze armor.
I mean, in terms of producing the fabric, I'm sure they could do it 10 times faster than we could, just that's a speed thing. But it's still incredibly labor-intensive. Where I think there's a big difference between our reconstruction and ancient ones is in the glue. So we ended up using a kind of least common denominator glue.
We used rabbit glue because it would have been available anywhere and it's cheap. But in the ancient world, they did have basically the equivalent of super glues. I mean, we found, for example, helmets that were fished out of a river in Germany that had metal parts glued together that after 2,000 years of immersion in water were still glued together. So they had some great glues.
We just don't know what the recipes for them were. So we went the opposite tack and said, well, we're just going to make something that we know they could have made. So it was at least this good. You know what I'm saying?
The process of lamination did add something. So there's actually a huge debate among scholars and actually a sort of amateur archaeologist that was this linothorax thing glued together or was it simply sewn together? Was it composite, partially linen, partially leather or other materials?
And my honest answer is I think it's all of the above because again, every piece of armor in the ancient world was an individual creation. So I think if you had some spare leather, you put that in. If you wanted to make one that was just sewn together or even quilted, stuffed with stuff, you'd do that. Maybe you were good at gluing stuff, you use that. So I think there's no one answer.
We investigated one possibility and because we just had limited time and money and resources. But I think all these other things existed at the same time and were variants of it.
I mean, shifting from just sort of Roman history in general to my research that I've done as a scholar, the theme that runs throughout my scholarship is practical stuff. I'm interested. How did this actually work in the ancient world? So there's people who are much more theoretical, who look at the symbolic meaning of something. I'm simpler. I just want to know, how did this work?
So almost all of my books that I've written have started with some just, how did something work? And I'm trying to just figure out that aspect of it. And that's just, maybe it's a personality thing. I also have kind of a science-y background. So I think I've used a lot of that, even though I'm a humanist and a historian, I use a lot of kind of hard science in my work.
I did a book on floods where I had to get really heavy into vectors of disease and hydraulics and engineering and all that stuff. I think, again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background helps with those sorts of projects.
I should say, by the way, it does drop out of use around Roman times. I think what's going on there is technology. With bronze, it's hard to keep a sharp edge on things, but once you get into metals which approximate steel, you can get sharper. A key factor to penetrating fabric is the edge on the arrowhead, right?
So as soon as you start to get something more like a razor edge, it's going to go through it more easily. Also, there's changes in the bows that are being used. You start to get sort of eastern horse archers showing up with composite bows, which are much more powerful. And so it just becomes outdated as frontline military equipment.
What's interesting is by the Roman period, people are still wearing it, but it's now things like when I go hunting, if I'm hunting lions, I wear this. There's an actual source that says it's really good for hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and stops them from penetrating. One emperor wears one of these under his toga.
It's kind of like a bulletproof vest, but stab-proof vest. So again, it's not to fight in the front line of the legions, but it'll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So it still has those uses where you're not up against top-line military equipment.
Yeah, and I mean that – is any one of the greatest heroes or one of the greatest villains in humanity too? It's like Julius Caesar. He's famous for conquering Gaul. Well, about a million people were killed and a million enslaved in that. So is that – does it make him a horrible person or one of our heroes? Alexander is a combination of two things.
One is he really just was a skilled individual, and he was one of those guys who had it all. He was smart, he was athletic, and he was supremely charismatic. I mean, it's obviously one of these people that would walk into a room and everyone just kind of gravitates to him. He had that magic that made him an effective leader. And secondly, he was lucky because it wasn't all him.
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