Imperial Cuirasses in Latin Verse: From Augustus to the Fall of the West*
While a great deal has been written over the years about the arms and armour of the ordinary Roman infantryman or cavalry trooper, the equipment worn by the emperor and his senior officers has been relatively neglected. The present article, however, will not attempt to "reconstruct" the armour of a Roman general or imperator of the imperial era. Rather, it will attempt to analyse the way in which such figures are depicted in Latin verse. Thus we hope to provide a record of ideas rather than facts, a synthesis of whatever may be gleaned from the pages of writers that are rarely, if ever, used for Roman military equipment studies. For this reason, one would do well to ignore, in the main, Greek allusions to cuirasses in literature dating to "Roman" times. Of course, an investigation of such references would provide an interesting study in itself, but it is one which should be undertaken separately. Similarly, it matters little what prose-writers such as Tacitus, Suetonius, Ammianus and the "scriptores" of the Historia Augusta (which we shall assume to be the work of one author, as the present state of scholarship on the topic dictates) wrote about imperial cuirasses. In any case, the few references that Roman historians do make to the emperor girt for war rarely give any indication of the type of cuirass worn by their imperial subjects. Still, instances where the prose- writers mentioned above do allude to imperial cuirasses will be duly noted, mainly for the sake of completeness.
The cuirass most readily associated with a high-ranking Roman officer, or indeed the emperor himself, is the Hellenistic muscle or moulded cuirass, which is sometimes referred to as the lorica anatómica1. The emperor and his senior officers,
Abbreviations follow the "Liste des périodiques" in L 'Année philologique. In addition : Loeb = Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA and London ; Budé = texts published by the Société d'Édition de "Les Belles Lettres" under the patronage of l'Association Guillaume Budé, Paris ; OLD = Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. Glare, Oxford, 1986 ; Lewis & Short = C.T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary, Oxford, 1879 ; RIC = The Roman Imperial Coinage, 10 vols, ed H. Mattingly, et al, London, 1923-1994. The author wishes to thank Associate Professor B.W. Jones of the University of Queensland for valuable advice on the interpretation of certain sections of Latin verse, Mr A.W. Collins for taking the time to proof read the text, and the Comité de rédaction of l'Antiquité classique for suggestions that have improved this article.
1 On these cuirasses, see P. Connolly, Greece and Rome at War, Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ, 1981, p. 54-58, and H.R. Robinson, The Armour of Imperial Rome, London, 1975, p. 147-152. Robinson, who classified the available corpus of military equipment from the imperial era, failed to identify any Roman muscle cuirasses. He believed that all recovered muscle cuirasses are of either an Etruscan or Hellenistic origin (p. 147). See also P. Couissin, Les armes romaines, Paris, 1926, p. 265-266, 337-339 and 439-442 ; and M. Feugère, Weapons of the Romans, trans. D.G, Smith, Stroud, Glos., 2002, p. 22 and 98.
L 'Antiquité Classique!! (2004), p. 127-148.
