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Colours

Also about the colouring we have enough documentation because of the big artistic diffusion. Traces found are showing the white as the favourite colour, but also red, yellow and green are visible on an amount of reliefs, tombstones and cinerary urns.

Pic.10. Relief form a cinerary urn with evident traces of white colouring on the pteruges on the central character (Archeological Museum of Nimes - France).

Functionality

It is easy to think at the pteruges in roman time as just an aesthetic addition, but in the past they could be a piece of the armour and have a protecting function.
I try to give a couple of responses to this clue. In the hellenic gold age, pteryges were the terminal part of the linen protection (linothorax). These protections seems were done by glueing togheter many layers of linen to get strongness. The protection was probably extended to the pubic and the first part of the leg, but this probably was limiting the mobility and creating many troubles to horse riding. It could be possible that in the arcaic times a simple solution was to just cut the linen to get some flaps that were possible to curve. Of course this idea had to be perfectioned, but this is known.
It must be recorded that the examples here reported are just a very small part of the visible examples, sometimes also funny for our modern eyes.

In addition I could affirm that evolved pteruges were possibly used to increase the subarmalis protection. This is a bizarre idea, but in some examples as in the Prima Porta Augustus, the number of overlapped pteruges (up to four) seem to have this function.

Pic.11. Prima Porta Augustus statue. Four layers of very short pteruges are visible on the shoulder. The impression is that they were used to increase the aspect of the subject, but also to help him to support the heavy armour.

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Last Update: 02-ago-2008