Shields?

[/Bean\]

Ooh some sources, goodie.

Who was criticising the team?

Oh, and does that mean that the Romans shouldn't be wearing red? I've written this before searching out your sources, oudysseos, so sorry if it does say in there. I was always under the impression the Romans had the red military tunic after they turned into a proffessional army, even if the shields were not red.

Why is it, then, that Romans are always depicted as red? I presume their must be some strong evidence, for they are even red in EB; whose knowledge I trust. Once again if the answer was in one of your sources, oudysseos, I apologise.

[alatar]

If I rember right, there is not much about the colour, and in EB1 as they had to chose a colour, they just went with red.

[oudysseos]

Oh no Bean, you're grand! No need to apologize. It's John who's a bit rude.

If you're interested in tunic colours, go to romanarmytalk.com and do a search. It's amazing how intense those guys get about this stuff, but there'll be lots of sources. And some familiar names as well.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Ooh some sources, goodie.

Who was criticising the team?

I thought, the OP (original poster) ? ... Nevermind.

Oh, and does that mean that the Romans shouldn't be wearing red? I've written this before searching out your sources, oudysseos, so sorry if it does say in there. I was always under the impression the Romans had the red military tunic after they turned into a proffessional army, even if the shields were not red.

Why is it, then, that Romans are always depicted as red? I presume their must be some strong evidence, for they are even red in EB; whose knowledge I trust. Once again if the answer was in one of your sources, oudysseos, I apologise.

It means nothing whatsoever about colour: it explicitly says that anything about colour is dubious at best but basically a big X. For all that is apparently known the Romans dressed up in Pyjama-style Pink.

[antisocialmunky]

Its not really that there isn't evidence. There's friezes depicting roman soldiers. The problem is that no one knows how exactly to intepret it. http://www.larp.com/legioxx/tcolor.html has some(yes its a site for larpers but it links to pictures of friezes). There's ones depicting, red, blue, yellow, white, etc. No one even knows if there was a required tunic color. If we went back in time and asked someone, they might just say 'we wear the colors we like."

However at the end of the day, whether there was or wasn't a required color for tunics, the real 'uniform' of the later legionaires come from similarity of equipment.

[machinor]

I remember reading that an ancient author writing about the wars of Vespasian against Vitellus told about 2 soldiers taking the shields of fallen enemies to get behind enemy lines and demolish their siege machines. So there seems to have been at least some kind of common "heraldic" elements within a legion. However I do not know the exact source. I'll look that up.

[Prussian to the Iron]

thats very interesting. well this means that there must have been some sort of semi-uniformity at east, with several different selections.

[SwissBarbar]

which, I guess, is exactly what we will see in EB. Same shield-shape, same type, but different colours

[desert]

But red dye was pretty expensive, right?