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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 4045956, member: 72790&quot;]Fascinating thread which prompted me to review ancient weaponry. I think our image of the Roman legionary with his cylindrical and rectangular shield has come as much from the movie industry as much as anything else. Cylindrical but oval or oblong, seems to have been the more common type both earlier and later than the Augustan to Severans period if both sculptural images and those from the coinage are accurate representations of what soldiers carried. As a matter of fact there were probably any number of shapes and sizes from the small pelta shield of Greek auxiliaries (often half moon or crescent shaped at the top) to the massively heavy infantry shield of the Greeks, the hoplon. Even the word shield itself can be translated into several different kinds of shields&nbsp; depending on time period and use. There was the &#039;parma&quot;,&nbsp; a smallish round shield, a word frequently used by Livy, which may be the same as the &quot;Caeta&quot;, a short Spanish shield, also frequently employed by Livy again, and also often by Virgil. Both of these shields frequently are translated into older English texts as &quot;targets&quot; or &quot;bucklers&quot;. It may be this kind of shield likely to have been carried by cavalry and by marines for shipboard use where a full size scutum would not be practical, though they seem to be just as often carrying a smaller oval shaped scutum.</p><p><br /></p><p>I get the impression that the term &quot;clipeus&quot; may have been a more literary or civilian than military term for a shield and scutum the more common term within the military. There is a famous and popular maxim or quip in everyday Latin, &quot;clipeum post vulnera sumere&quot;, that is, to take up a shield, (clipeus),&nbsp; after being wounded, that is to do something too late to do any good. Classical authors frequently refer to the Gallic or Celtic shield&nbsp; which was oval shaped but flat, not cylindrical. I also checked the New Testament for the word translated as shield. It appears there only once (Ephesians 6:16) where the koine Greek is &quot;thureos&quot; which the Vulgate translates as &quot;scutum&quot;. The thureus is described as door shaped and four cornered as opposed to the round &quot;aspis&quot; which gets translated as clipeus.</p><p><br /></p><p>Below are a few images from some of my coins. At the upper left is an early Ptolemaic tetra with a an oblong Gallic shield (at about eight o&#039;clock). Why a Gallic or Celtic shield on an Egyptian piece? To celebrate the defeat of a Gallic invasion of Ptolemaic Egypt about 275 BC. To its right is a round clipeus of an Augustan denarius. Below and to the right is a denarius of Septimius Severus picturing a trophy from a defeated Parthia with two longish, oblong shields attached. At the bottom on the left is a double denarius of Valerian with his rendition of the Lucius and Gaius denarius of Augustus. If it was reissued to imitate the successful reign of Augustus it didn&#039;t work. The last coin is a FEL TEMP REPARATIO of Constantius II with two shields, one dropped by the fallen horseman on the ground and the other in the hand of the presumably Roman victor. I hope to learn a bit more about this necessary military accoutrement in following this thread.[ATTACH=full]1061151[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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