Bronze Age Greece On A Shoestring Budget

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by malloyd

And 2/3 of the cost is bronze greaves? Are greaves really twice as valuable in a fight as all the rest of your armor put together?

Real greaves are an exceptionally intricate piece of armour. The knee and thigh have a very complex shape, and any failure to match it brings pain. In addition, Greek greaves were usually sprung on. The only alternative was to just cover the front of the shins ... but that doesn't seem to have been very popular in the Classical and Hellenistic worlds. In GURPS terms, just protecting the Front lets you halve cost.

In that example, I think the helmet should have +9 CF for single-piece construction. A One-Piece (+9 CF) Bronze (+3 CF) Light Plate Skull (20%) would be $2600 plus a bit for padding. But maybe in the Hellenistic period someone in Macedonia started to make multi-piece helmet bowls ...

The first time and place where we have detailed figures for the price of different types of armour is England in 1300. We have very little evidence of the cost of Greek hopla, just that in the archaic the men who served as hoplites were not much poorer than the men who served as cavalry, and that the class expanded over time due to a combination of economic growth and reduced expectations about kit.