Collections: Reconstructing the Roman Pectoral

This week we’re going to look a specific piece of early Roman military equipment, the humble bronze pectoral, which it turns out is surprisingly tricky for us to confidently reconstruct, in part because the period of its use that most interests us (the run from c. 264 to c. 146 where Rome is winning its first big overseas wars) is a relative gap – fancy word, ‘lacuna‘ – in our evidence, making it really difficult to correlate what our literary source (Polybius) is telling us to the physical evidence we have (both preserved examples and artwork). This was, we are told (by Polybius) the armor of the common Roman soldier in the period of their greatest wars, yet on some level we do not really know what it looked like. Not with certainty, in any case.

In particular I am going to argue that the most common reconstruction of this armor, as a single bronze plate suspended usually by leather straps over the chest, is probably wrong and that the armor more likely existed as a complex harness, simplified in brief literary description down to just its core element. But as we’ll see, this is going to be a zone of what I term ‘real uncertainty’ – a situation where without new evidence coming out of the ground, we simply cannot know for sure.

So this is not just an exercise in working through how to reconstruct one specific kind of equipment, but also how historians engage in questions that exist in a zone of really low confidence.

But first, as always, affording a full panoply of heavy infantry equipment as is the duty of any propertied Roman citizen is expensive! If you want to help me waste spend my money on reproduction ancient military equipment, you can support this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Polybius

Our first stop is Polybius. Polybius wrote in the mid-second century (that is, the 140s), but his history covers the period from 264 to 146 and his description of the pectoral is placed relatively early in the narrative, in 216, as part of a larger explanation of the Roman military system. There is thus immediately a question as to if the details Polybius is giving are correct for 216 or for the 140s when he wrote. In practice, the answer must be something of a mix: Polybius has sources that reach back and might give him details appropriate to the period (he seems to have the writings of a military tribune to use for this description of the dilectus), but it seems likely that his description of the pectoral comes from observing it. Consequently, while I suspect that Polybius’ description of who is required to wear what may be accurate for 216, he has clearly seen the pectoral and understands it to still be in use in his own day (indeed, at other points in this extended passage, he explicitly notes things that used to be one way but had changed by his own day).¹

That’s handy, because Polybius is the only source that describes this armor. Later historians – Livy, Plutarch, etc. – seem broadly unaware of it and it really does seem like the pectoral was in the process of going extinct when Polybius was writing (for reasons below). So we have one description of the armor, but at least it is by an eyewitness. Here it is (Polyb. 6.23.14-15, trans. mine):

The many [hoi polloi, “the common folk”] taking a bronze plate a span [c. 23cm] on all sides, which they place over their chests and call ‘heart protectors’ [καρδιοφύλαξ, very literally ‘heart protector’], finish their armaments. However those worth more than ten thousand drachmas [= the first class of Roman infantry], instead of the heart-protector wear mail coats [αλυσιδωτοί θώρακες, “hooked [or chain] cuirasses” which we know is the Greek way to say ‘mail coats.’]

And…that’s it. From later authors (Varro, De Ling. Lat. 5.116; Plin HN 34.18) we get the Latin name for this armor, pectorale (pectorale, pectoralis (n) for the Latin nerds), thus the English term ‘pectoral’ but no more details of its construction.²

Crucially, this armor doesn’t show up on any highly visible Roman military monuments. The reason is fairly simple: the earliest really visible Roman military monuments are the Pydna Monument (168) and the so-called Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (late second century) by which point the pectoral was already on the way out. Ancient artists tend to prefer high status equipment and so with the pectoral on the way out (though likely still very much in use in 168) and the poorer, lower status armor, they didn’t depict it, instead preferring to use mail armor to signal Roman soldiers (specifically, mail is used on the Pydna Monument to signal ‘these are Romans’ in contrast to Macedonians or Gauls).³

As a result, scholars initially didn’t have a lot to go on except Polybius’ description – the archaeology, as we’ll see, doesn’t really get sorted out until the last 40 years or so. So they reconstructed on that basis. A ‘span’ (σπιθαμή) is a ‘natural’ unit, the distance between the thumb and the little finger at full extension, which is conveniently more or less half of a cubit (the length of a forearm out to the end of the middle finger), which eventually becomes formalized in Attic measurements (which Polybius tends to use; other places might have slightly different measures for the same terms) as 23.1cm and 46.2cm respectively.

That leads to the most common thing we see in artistic reconstructions and reenactor kit: the pectoral is reconstructed as a brass or bronze plate, usually about 1-2mm thick (the normal thickness for breastplates), 23cm by 23cm square. Since obviously it needs to be attached to something it is often shown backed in leather, with leather straps around the waist and over the shoulders holding it in place. I am going to call this reconstruction – a single plate, 23cm square, on a leather harness – the ‘traditional’ reconstruction.

That size lets the pectoral cover most of the chest, but it does nothing for the belly, sides or shoulders. On that basis, I have very often heard scholars regard it as a very minimal, almost token defense, unlikely to do much at all to protect the men wearing it. And again, before there was much archaeology to work with (or before finds had been analyzed, arranged chronologically and had their development worked through), you can see how this is the most logical extrapolation of what Polybius is saying.

But I do want to note some things here. Polybius’ description of this armor is extremely brief. He does not even bother to explain what Roman mail armor is like at all – no description, for instance, of its length (to the knees) or shoulder-doubling or the front-closure mechanism. If it weren’t for period depictions of mail, we would probably reconstruct it without these elements. As for the pectoral, all he says is that it is a span square and the Romans have a funny name for it. Which is to say it is entirely possible that Polybius is leaving out some details here. Which brings us to:

The Development of the Italic Pectoral

This, of course, is the point at which we naturally turn to archaeology to provide us both physical examples of this kind of armor and also visual representations of it. And he we run into an immediate problem: the third and second century feature a near total lacuna of Italic armor, in both artwork and preserved examples. The problem is frustrating in its elegant simplicity: the Roman military system – terribly efficient and in its way, anti-aristocratic – coincides as it expands with the end of aristocratic ‘warrior burials’ wherever it goes. Thus as Rome during the fourth and early third century goes about consolidating control of Italy, the amount of nice tomb paintings with aristocratic warrior in procession or burials with arms and armor drop to basically nothing. The Roman army is removing the evidence we might have for the Roman army. Astoundingly frustrating.

The evidentiary record begins to pick up a bit in the second century with more artistic depictions of Roman soldiers as the Roman state engages in more monumental depictions of its soldiers (noted above), but by that point mail rather than the pectoral is the ‘national armor’ of Rome’s armies (even though the pectoral is likely in use) and pectorals never appear. The really strong archaeological record for armor will have to wait until the imperial period, when the permanent stationing of Rome’s armies on the frontier of the empire means they sit in one place long enough for us to recover bits of armor.⁴ Weapons show up more often than armor (pila more often than any other type of weapon, a testament to their disposability) and we get a lot of helmets (for reasons not entirely clear to me), but functionally no body armor from this period. The best we can do are tiny fragments of metal rings for mail and even those are rare.

Worse yet, as mentioned before, the pectoral was going extinct in this period. Notably, when our evidence improves massively in the first century BC and AD, the pectoral is nowhere to be found. No source mentions it as still in use in that period, no artist depicts it, no finds of it are recovered. Polybius is thus our last source for this armor, suggesting that by the start of the first century, it had been wholly replaced by mail. No shock, mail is awesome (if expensive). But that means we cannot look for later examples to help us understand what Polybius is saying.

But we can can look at earlier ones.⁵

The Italic pectoral seems to have arrived from the Middle East in the 8th or perhaps 7th centuries (sometime between c. 750 and c. 680). This form of armor, a more or less flat metal place (as opposed to an enclosing breastplate of the sort we see in Greece around this time) has Middle Eastern precedents (we see Assyrian soldiers in artwork wearing similar armor), though how exactly it made it to Italy is unclear – Phoenicians seems most probable, but uncertain. In either case, by the seventh century, these pectoral armors are quite common over all of Italy, including Latium (where Rome is) and Etruria. The armor at this point generally consists of two bronze plates (a front plate and a back plate), which might be rectangular or circular, about 20-25cm wide (or tall; sometimes these are even smaller than this) and which were connected by leather straps. We generally call these ‘rectangular’ and ‘single disc’ pectorals. When decorated (and they very frequently are), they usually feature either geometric designs (often rectangles within a rectangular cuirass) or animal designs, either punched into the plate or embossed.

And you can see how an archaeologist looking at these pectorals from the seventh century might be thinking, “ah, I see exactly what Polybius was talking about: a bronze plate a span square!” Except, of course, the sixth century is not the second century and these pectorals keep evolving.

Now, in significant parts of Italy, especially Etruria, these pectoral armors begin to be replaced in the late sixth century by Greek-style armor, especially for elite, high-status warriors. In particular, the Etruscans love the tube-and-yoke (linothorax) armor when it shows up and it swiftly becomes a marker of elite status, though pectorals do occasionally show up in Etruscan art, albeit less frequently, but they are certainly petering out. Annoyingly, at roughly this point the archaeological record for Rome specifically also dries up, so it isn’t clear exactly what armors are popular in Rome in the very early Republic (our literary sources assume Greek-style armors, which may be right, but they are guessing and deeply anachronistic in their assumptions).

However in central Italy, in the Apennines Mountains, the pectoral persists and undergoes some significant design changes. Around 600, we start to see changes to the strap mechanisms holding the armor together: one shoulder strap is replaced with a pair of bronze plates connected by a hinge. The resulting harness gets pretty complex, as you can see in the figure of the Capestrano Warrior (c. 550), where the harness that holds the pectoral also supplies a scabbard (suspended at the chest) for the sword and there is a clear contrast between the metal hinged plate (over the right shoulder) and the more reddish-colored leather straps (of which there are three, two wide and one narrow) holding the harness and scabbard together.

In the early fifth century, this design is both enhanced and greatly simplified with the emergence of the first ‘triple disc’ pectorals. These are so named because the front plate (and back plate) take the form of three discs in a triangular arrangement, though I must stress this is a single plate with three circular designs on it in a roughly triangular shape, not three individual circular plates. Indeed, earlier archaeologists supposed that the ‘triple disc’ cuirass must have evolved in two stages from the disc pectorals discussed above and posited a ‘double disc’ cuirass, which turns out not to have existed.

These triple-disc breast- and back-plates were joined together not by leather straps but by a simplified version of the hinged plate system used in the sixth century disc pectorals, except now there are four connecting plates: one each over the shoulders (each of them hinged) and one at the sides (without hinges). These plates also get a bit wider, providing relatively fuller coverage over the upper body and the armor is supplemented by a wide bronze belt worn around the waist which protects the lower abdomen. You can see the full armor clearly in artwork:

In the second-half of the fourth century (so 350 onwards), we see these triple-disc cuirasses joined by another type, particularly on the western coast of southern Italy (so the area south of Latium), the ‘rectangular anatomical cuirass.’ This takes the existing triple-disc harness structure, with its bronze belt and connecting side and shoulder plates, but instead of the triangular triple-disc cuirass, it substitutes rectangular breast- and back-plates, with the designs on these invariably mimicking the musculature on Greek muscle cuirasses, although – because these plates are smaller than Greek breastplates (which wrap around the body) – the muscles depicted are visibly smaller-than-lifelike. In short, the artistic form of the muscle cuirass is being copied, but this is not an effort to mimic the actual muscles of the man wearing the armor.

To give a sense of size, recovered triple disc cuirasses range from 27-32.5cm tall and 26-28cm at the widest, while the rectangular anatomical cuirasses range from 29.5 x 37cm tall to 25 x 30cm wide for the front plates.⁶ Combined with side and shoulder plates that tend to be 5-8cm wide and a wide bronze belt (7-12cm wide, 70-110cm long, ~1mm thick), these really do cover most of the upper body, albeit with gaps, and are something closer to an articulated breastplate than they are to the small ‘heart protector’ of the Capestrano Warrior.

And you may note that a rectangular plate over the chest of c. 30cm by c. 28cm is not very far from Polybius’ description of “a bronze plate a span on all sides” and better yet is far more likely to have actually be in use in the third and second centuries for Polybius to see.

Notably – and this is going to matter in a moment – these fifth and fourth century pectoral harnesses do not appear without bronze belts or connecting plates. You will find these pectorals in museums without those added elements, in many cases because when the first of these armors were excavated (and/or looted) it was done carelessly and so the smaller plates were missed. However, whenever we get these armors with secure provenance or see them depicted in artwork, as Michael Burns notes, without exception, we get the full harness with all seven elements (frontplate, backplate, 2 shoulder plates, 2 side plates, bronze belt). We never to my knowledge ever see them suspected in simple leather harnesses; it surely was possible to do so, but it is unclear that anyone ever did after the introduction of the four-plate harness.

What Michael Burns thinks is happening (revising earlier work by the late, great Peter Connolly), and I think he is right, is that Southern Italic peoples are responding to the increasing presence of Greek muscle cuirasses coming in through Greek colonies in Southern Italy. But rather than just copying the muscle cuirass, they seem to have innovated from their own single-disc pectorals (which didn’t always cover a whole lot of the chest) to the triple-disc to create a kind of ‘exploded’ muscle cuirass. Initially, they do this by taking their own armor form, the single-disc cuirass, and expanding it out into a full ‘exploded’ breastplate, but eventually, in the fourth century, there’s enough artistic crossover that designs that use a rectangular plate and intentionally mirror Greek artistic tropes appear alongside triple-disc styles (which do not go away). It is worth noting that some of these triple-disc and rectangular anatomical armors are wonderfully decorated with complex designs, but many of them are very minimally decorated, especially as we get into the fourth century, suggesting a demand for a cheaper, no-frills version of this protection.

And then in 290 the Romans win the Third Samnite War and take control of the non-Greek parts of Southern Italy. And as noted above, when the Romans incorporate a given part of Italy into their ‘alliance’ system, for reasons that are not entirely clear to us (but the pattern is very strong), warrior burials, ritual weapon depositions and aristocratic artwork of warriors stop. Which means right around the year 300, our evidence for the Italic pectoral tradition simply vanishes. Really, we basically have an expanding bubble of darkness, radiating out from Rome (which is also probably how the Roman conquest felt to the Samnites), blinding our ability to track the development of armor in Italy.

So by the third century, we do not see any pectorals, because we don’t see much of anything (except helmets; we continue to see those) for quite some time.

Except…

The Weird Exception We Need To Dismiss

The one odd exception to this is a pectoral disc found in the siege camps at Numantia.⁷ It is 17cm wide and circular, with a pattern of concentric circles and a large central knob and for quite some time if you went looking for an actual Roman pectoral this is what you would find.

The problem is that it isn’t Roman, it is very obviously Spanish. This spent a century not getting noticed because archaeologists working on ancient arms and armor tend to be very geographically specialized, so folks working on Roman and Italic arms and armor are not likely to be very familiar with the arms and armor of the fifth century Celtiberian Meseta. But if you are familiar with that, it is very clear that this is not a Roman pectoral at all, but a Spanish one, despite it turning up in a Roman camp.

First, while Italy had single-disc circular pectorals these had been replaced in the archaeological and artistic record in the fifth century by the larger triple-disc pectorals discussed above. Moreover, those earlier single-disc Italic pectorals don’t feature raised concentric circles as part of their normal artistic motifs. The more often have animals on them, or punch-holed simple geometric designs. They were also flat and did not feature central knobs.

But you know who did have pectoral harnesses with circular central plates featuring raised concentric circle designs and prominent central knobs? The Celtiberians, who are the people who lived at Numantia, where these camps were. Now the tricky bit here is that these pectorals are also – as far as we can tell – long out of use in the Iberian Peninsula as well: they persist through the fifth century, but fade out at the beginning of the fourth.

But whereas it is a little difficult to imagine a second-century Roman soldier decided to bring a piece of armor with him to Spain that had been out of use in Italy for something like four centuries, it is a lot easier to imagine the same Roman soldier in Spain might have looted a temple or a tomb (or simply struck a burial while entrenching his camp) that contained a fifth or very early fourth century Celtiberian disc-harness and that this soldier then looted the shiny bronze plate, later to be (for whatever reason) discarded in the camp.

Reconstructing the Roman Pectoral

So that is the shape of our evidence: with the Numantia pectoral removed (because it is not Roman at all, but Celtiberian), we have no examples of this armor from the third or second centuries B.C. What we do have is a tradition of pectoral armors which lead to the emergence of the triple-disc and rectangular anatomical pectoral harnesses in the fourth century, which we lose sight of in the general lacuna for most non-helmet military equipment in the third and second century. When our evidence returns, they are gone but we have this report by Polybius that poorer-but-still-propertied Romans in the heavy infantry (so not the poorest Romans fighting, those are the velites or do not serve at all) wear a bronze pectoral plate about a span square over their chest.

That admittedly quite poor evidence base leaves us with really just two options, both of them somewhat unsatisfactory.

The first option, the one taken – so far as I can tell – by the great majority of modern artistic reconstructions, is to simply read Polybius and reconstruct exactly what he says. That gives these Roman soldiers a single metal plate, typically shown mounted on a leather backing with leather straps, about 23cm square. This is, in a sense, the philologically elegant solution: it assumes nothing not in our text. The problem, from an archaeological perspective, is that this effectively requires arguing one of two cases: either first that sixth century pectoral – with its simple leather suspension – somehow survived in Italy for four centuries to be observed in action on the battlefield by Polybius in the mid-second century without leaving any other evidence at all. Not one piece of artwork, not one surviving example in the intervening period, despite the fact that we have sixty-seven fifth and fourth century examples of the later pectoral types (45 triple-disc and 22 rectangular anatomical cuirass types). That could be right. But it is a heroic assumption.

Alternately, the argument would be that the Romans at some point developed their own version of the pectoral, probably based off of the rectangular anatomical type, which discarded with the wide bronze belt, the shoulder plates and the side plates and so consisted only of a breastplate and a backplate. The problem here is simple: as Michael Burns notes in his survey of Italic pectorals, that configuration never occurs in artwork or in archaeology where site and provenance are secure. We do not have a single example of those later Southern Italic pectorals – the types that emerge after the more complex harness structure discussed above – dispensing with those pieces. Could they have done? Of course. But as of 2005 (and so far as I know, to the present), we have no evidence that anyone ever did. This solution thus requires conjuring into existence an effectively unknown armor-type. That could be right, particularly given how bad our evidence for Roman arms and armor in the Early Republic is. You can even imagine, if we had evidence of it, how we’d explain it: the broadening participation in the Roman army leads to poorer Romans to take up the Samnite cuirasses (that is, triple-disc and rectangular anatomical cuirasses) they have seen, but to jettison the ‘extra bits’ to make it cheaper and more affordable, effectively reversing a few centuries of armor development to create a stripped down breast- and back-plate only version. That’s what we’d posit, if we had some, but we don’t have some and I would argue that it runs against the rules of evidence as practices in archaeology to conjure into existence an unattested variant of an object-class (which does not developmentally link to anything else you can see) simply because it would be convenient. That is not how we assess coins or pots, I do not see why we would do it with armor.

That leaves another option: Polybius is describing the Southern Italian pectoral harness we can see, but doing so incompletely. It is not hard to imagine how the Romans will have picked up this armor: they spent the period from 343 to 290 fighting the Samnites in Campania and the Samnites are the major users of the triple-disc cuirass and Campania is where we most often see them in artwork. If the Romans weren’t already using this armor (and remember, we have no evidence at all of what armor the Romans are using in c. 300), they could certainly pick it up.

Then Polybius comes along in the mid-second century, where this armor is already dying out, largely replaced by mail, but still hanging on here or there – perhaps as hand-me-downs used by poorer Romans. One advantage of the pectoral harness’ seven-part structure is that it is a sort of ‘one-size-fits-no-one’ set that would be reasonably easy to modify or pass down to new users (unlike a Greek-style muscle cuirass, which really needs to be fitted to the wearer). Polybius then, writing about the Roman army as it existed in the Second Punic War (218-201) and, as per Rawson, using perhaps the accounts of some military tribunes, is aware of this armor’s place in the military regulations of that time and so includes it but with only minimal description. As a Greek, Polybius is used to thinking about body armor as a single piece – a breastplate, a tube-and-yoke cuirass, a mail coat – rather than a harness, so looking at a rectangular anatomical cuirass that is, perhaps 30cm by 28cm for its front plate, he describe sit simply as ” bronze plate a span on all sides.” Just as he doesn’t include the details of Roman mail armor’s shoulder doubling, he feels no real need to include the shoulder and side plates of the harness and he may not even be aware that the wide bronze belt has any real armor value at all (early archaeologists made the same error, assessing it as purely decorative, but it would offer some protection).

I think these are the three options we are left with for the pectoral: surprising sixth-century survival in the mid-second century, otherwise un-evidenced recreation of an older form out of the fourth-century rectangular anatomical cuirass or simply that it is the rectangular anatomical cuirass, harness at all, that Polybius has described incompletely. My own instinct is that the latter is probably correct. One interesting thing is that compared to, say, muscle cuirasses, these pectoral cuirasses of both the triple-disc and rectangular anatomical types were probably produced from sheet metal (sheet bronze, in particular), rather than forged from an ingot, which would have made it relatively easier to produce larger numbers of armors – equally if one opted for a style with simple decorations, amply in evidence in the archaeological record. Meanwhile, as noted the design is fairly easy to adjust for size. Jeremy Armstrong and Nicholas Harrison suggest that this in part allowed for “the expansion of warfare in Italy seen in the fourth century and marked by Rome’s wars of conquest” and I think that is right.⁸

Now in the fourth century, that armor might still be restricted to the fairly well-off. But in the late third or early second century, it is not hard seeing how the introduction of an even better but also substantially more expensive armor – mail – might ‘push’ existing pectoral cuirasses (again, of both types) down the socioeconomic ladder as the Roman first census class was required – as Polybius tells us – to acquire mail. The spare armor might ‘flow downwards’ as it were, making the affluent man’s undecorated but still shiny bronze armor of c. 350 the poor man’s pectoral of c. 150. Indeed, there is no reason it couldn’t be the very same piece of armor.

I do not think the evidence allows us to answer this question with confidence, but I do think that simple inertia has led scholars to continue reproducing the ‘traditional’ pectoral reconstruction long after it stopped being the most likely one. Instead, the most likely solution is that the Romans had continued to use, in some form, the full triple-disc or rectangular anatomical cuirass, including metal connecting plates (and perhaps the wide bronze belt) and that what Polybius was seeing was not, in fact, the small decorative chest-plates of the sixth century but rather this armor.

1. On where Polybius is getting all of this from see Rawson, E.  “The Literary Sources for the Pre-Marian Army.”  PBSR 39 (1971)
2. Well, that’s not quite right: Varro states these were made out of rawhide, which is just wrong so far as we can tell – these are always made in bronze.
3. On the Pydna Monument, see Taylor, M. J. “The Battle Scene on Aemilius Paullus’s Pydna Monument: A Reevaluation.”  Hesperia 83, no. 3 (2016). On the so-called Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, see Stilp, F.  Mariage et Suovetaurilia (2001).
4. Plus the substantial finds from Kalkriese, the site of the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest (9AD).
5. The best thing to read on this is actually a dissertation, M. Burns, “The Cultural and Military Significance of the South Italic Warrior’s Panoply from the 5th to the 3rd Centuries BC” (2005) which is available online.
6. These figures are direct from Burns, op. cit., which you should read for more details.
7. Schulten, Numantia: Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen 1905-1912.  Band III.  Die Lager des Scipio, (1927), 50, taf. 44.19.
8. J. Armstrong and N. Harrison, “The Armorer’s Craft: Using Experimental Archaeology to Explore the Production of Bronze Armour in Italy c. 400-300 BCE. JRMES 22 (2021): 43-68. If you are interested in this armor, do try to turn up this article – it has both production methods, but also a lot of images and illustrations of what the triple-disc cuirass looks like.