MAKING A GREEK MUSCLE CUIRASS
By Andrew Yamato
Photos by Andrew Yamato except where noted
An edited two-part version of this article was originally published in issue XVII.1 and issue XVII.3 (February and June 2024) of Ancient Warfare magazine.
The bronze muscle cuirass. A marvel of metalworking, a milestone of artistic sophistication, and an icon of the Ancient Greek hoplite. It embodied its wearer’s status – and quite possibly saved his life. One of the finest surviving examples is on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where I live. Working with the guidance of master medieval armorer Jeff Wasson in his Queens workshop, I set out to make an accurate replica of it.
Wearing my finished cuirass at the “Military Through the Ages” timeline event at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. (Photo: Kevin Hedgecock)
Military reenactors don’t tend to get taken very seriously. Perhaps it’s our adjacency to cosplayers and LARPers on the spectrum of historical hobbyists, or perhaps it’s the inherent silliness of playing at war for fun. Regardless of how conscientiously reenactors may seek authenticity in our impressions, professional historians tend to regard us (at best) as enthusiastic consumers of history, with little to contribute except informal public education. In fairness, this is understandable for modern impressions, for which documentation is comprehensive and expertise largely a matter of research. The situation is a bit different for ancient reenactors, however; as we grow more numerous and organized, we’re increasingly gaining a place at the grownups’ table with what’s become known as “experimental archaeology.” By donning accurate panoplies and testing weapons and tactics which would otherwise exist only in academic theory, we are increasingly recognized by open-minded scholars as having unique perspectives on many fundamental yet uncertain aspects of ancient warfare. Reenactor Dr. Paul Bardunias, an entymologist by profession, has indeed emerged as an expert on hoplite warfare based on his scientific approach to physically reconstructing hoplite combat. In the tradition of the great Peter Connolly, many of us have made contributions to the material culture of antiquity by developing new theories, patterns, materials, and constructions for armor, weapons, and clothing; our collective project is to set an ever-higher bar for the historical accuracy and relevance of the hobby.
Medieval armorer Jeff Wasson started out as just such an ambitious reenactor himself. In seeking to recreate a mounted knight to the highest possible standard, he became a world-renowned armorer and a prizewinning jouster. I first met Jeff at a historical timeline event on Long Island in October 2021 – the first outing of my hoplite group “The Greek Phalanx.” He was impressed with the tube-and-yoke corselets I’d made and we arranged for me to visit his workshop in Queens. I was hooked from the moment I walked into his airy workshop, an arsenal of armor and armor-making tools he’s made over the decades, all with a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. I had never done metalworking before, but eager to spend time in such a happy place, I immediately offered my services as a weekly apprentice. After six months of learning to help make medieval armor, Jeff asked if I wanted to try making something for myself. Well, now that you mention it…
The model and inspiration for my cuirass at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Public domain)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the world’s largest collections of ancient Greek armor, a centerpiece of which is a 4th century BCE Apulian muscle cuirass widely considered to be the finest surviving example of its type. (Comprising the boot of Italy, Apulia had been heavily colonized by Greek settlers since the Mycenaean era, and by the 4th century was a prosperous and fully integrated part of Megálē Hellás.) The cuirass is notable for its excellent state of preservation and its exquisitely rendered anatomical detail. In the slight droop of its pectorals and the prominence of the belly and external oblique muscles, it captures the fleshy reality of a mature man’s strong but mortal body. It is an embodiment of ancient Greek artistic sensibility at its most refined, and its development tracks the evolution of Greek aesthetics more generally.
The History of the Bronze Hoplite Cuirass
As exemplified by many kouroi figures depicting nude young men, art in the Archaic era (c. 800-500 BCE) modeled the human form rather stolidly, in the Egyptian manner: stoic features, ramrod straight posture, stiff arms and legs. The torsos of these figures have a minimalistic, almost abstracted idealism – an aesthetic closely reflected in the embossed anatomical features of the bronze “bell” cuirasses so ubiquitously worn by the hoplites of this era. Surviving examples and artistic depictions of this typology generally feature 1) a smooth silhouette tapering to a narrow waist before flaring into the wide skirt or “bell” which gives the typology its name; 2) stylized swirls indicating pectorals and shoulder blades 3) an inverted “U” defining the ribcage; and 4) sharply defined vertical indentations on the abdomen and small of the back. In maintaining this more or less standardized form for nearly three centuries, the bell cuirass appears to have been a fixed totem of tradition, figuratively and perhaps literally handed down from generation to generation of hoplites as the proper panoply for fighting the relatively ritualistic battles of the Archaic era.
An early 6th century kouros at Delphi.
A bell cuirass breastplate found at Olympia. (Public domain)
A 6th century bronze figure in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
A late archaic bell cuirass replica based on the aforementioned bronze figure. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Hildebrandt)
The second change we see in sculptural depictions of late 6th Century bell cuirasses is that the abdominal muscles are now rendered more realistically, as soft sectional bulges rather than a single sharp vertical line; this corresponds with a contemporary evolution in Greek art toward more naturalistic depictions of the human body. Around the end of The Persian Wars, we see the first vase depictions of what can truly be called muscle cuirasses. Vestigial decorative features (e.g. pectoral swirls) are carried over from the bell cuirass on early transitional pieces, but the overall contours of the armor are now recognizably organic, with sensitively rendered musculature. By the middle of the 5th century, the aesthetic shift is as clearly articulated in armor as in the monumental art rising in Golden Age Athens: Classical Greece celebrates the human form, no longer just symbolically as votive or monument, but as a dynamic expression of humanity itself, and even the glorification of specific living individuals. The sensual vulnerability of flesh is part of what makes it beautiful, and the newest, most coveted armors – muscle cuirasses and anatomical greaves – now take the precise form of the specific bodies they are custom-made to protect.
5th century Greek statue in the British Museum.
A 4th century Athenian grave stele in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens featuring an an idealized muscle cuirass.
The 6th century rise and 5th century ubiquity of the organic tube-and-yoke cuirass is beyond the scope of this article, as is the probable trend away from body armor altogether by the Peloponnesian War. To some extent, both phenomena reflect the larger, longer, and more distant campaigns being fought by expanded hoplite levies unable to universally afford the full bronze panoplies of their Archaic ancestors. Given the relatively small number of surviving muscle cuirasses, it is likely that they were indeed quite rare. It is often supposed that the muscle cuirass grew in popularity in the 4th century, and it is true that virtually all of our surviving examples date to this period, but because they are almost exclusively found in Italy, this may not reflect a general hoplite trend so much as the more extravagant tastes of Megálē Hellás – both Greek colonists and Italian natives – which maintained a tradition of panoply tomb burials long abandoned in mainland Greece.
Making the Cuirass
So exactly how were these things made? How comfortable were they in battle? How well did they protect against the weapons a hoplite might face? These were some of the questions I set out to answer with my replica. As any good reconstruction starts with research, I made a number of visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to photograph the original cuirass from every possible angle. It is fortunately displayed disassembled, allowing close inspection of both the breastplate and backplate. The exemplary condition of the cuirass is rare, with even small details like hinges, loops, and the thickness of the bronze plate itself being clearly discernible. Most importantly, the shape is undistorted, unlike the many cuirasses which appear to have been ritually “killed” by flattening (or simply crushed by the millenia).
The matched breastplate and backplate of my model cuirass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Choosing a raw material for the reconstruction entailed some compromises. We don’t know exactly how Greek armorers acquired their bronze sheet, but they almost certainly left this to dedicated bronze smelters. This process involved melting down pure copper, probably from Cyprus, along with tin most likely imported from what is now Afghanistan. The molten bronze was perhaps then poured directly onto polished stone to cool in as thin a sheet as possible before being hand-hammered to the desired thickness for armor. Although Jeff has indeed forged medieval armor from smelted “bloomery steel” (the subject of a 2017 NOVA documentary) I happily skipped this first stage to start my project with the modern convenience of homogenous plate.
Metallurgical analysis of Greek helmets indicate that ancient bronze was approximately 90% copper and 10% tin. This alloy is commercially available today, but only as small and expensive plates which would require a tedious process of assembly by brazing. A far cheaper and easier alternative would be standard yellow brass – an alloy of approximately 67% copper and 33% zinc, available in large plates. Brass is, however, a later discovery, more associated with Roman armor, and it has a more pronounced yellow color than ancient bronze. I found an acceptable aesthetic compromise in “commercial bronze” – an alloy of 90% copper and 10% zinc that is technically still a brass, but with the warmer reddish tone of bronze, and available in large sheets. Based on visual inspection of the several muscle cuirasses at the Met, the published weights and thicknesses of other examples, and Jeff’s seasoned estimation of what would work best, I ordered a 10’x 2’ sheet of 18 gauge (1.2mm) commercial bronze – enough for two cuirasses. (With the aforementioned qualification, I will henceforth refer to the metal of my cuirass simply as “bronze.”)
Using my photographs as references, Jeff drafted a full-sized paper pattern for the breastplate and backplate based upon front and side tracings of my torso. We taped the pattern to my body to check and adjust fit before transferring it to the bronze and cutting out both pieces with a bench shear. After roughing in the anatomical details with a permanent marker, I was ready to start hammering.
Like most ancient Greek armor, the muscle cuirass is simple in design. A breastplate and a backplate, each hammered from a single sheet of bronze, flanged or hemmed along the edges and joined by a combination of hinges and tie loops. The complexity and artistry lies in achieving a sinuously organic shape, following the prominences and depressions of an athletic torso. The biggest curves are those of the pectorals, so it was there that my first hammer blows fell. Placing a leather shot-bag on a wooden stump under the bronze plate to absorb the impact, and using a wide-domed hammer to move as much metal as possible without creating sharp indentations, I “sank” in the pecs in a process so named because one is literally sinking the metal below its initial plane, stretching it out thinner. (This process is also called “dishing.”)
Hammering a metal sheet invariably causes its edges to curl upward. You want this to work in your favor, as was the case here: as I sank in the pecs and the belly, the sides of the breastplate curled around to create the basic shape of a torso. Indeed, it soon became necessary to occasionally push the sides and shoulders out by hand to maintain the right shape.
Jeff Wasson demonstrates how to raise an armhole.
The next step was to turn the breastplate over and “raise” the armholes. This process uses a form congruent to the desired shape – in this case a large iron ball stake, although the ancients could probably have used a wooden form – to support the metal adjacent to the hammering point. (Until the planishing process much later, you never want to directly pinch the metal between hammer and form, which thins it out.) Moving in passes over the length of the armholes with a rawhide mallet to avoid sharp indentations, each blow compressed and thickened the metal along the curvature of the form, essentially shrinking away the edge and creating a convex shape around the side of the pectorals. The basic shape of the breastplate was now established.
Shaping the anticlastic curve of the waist on a valley stake.
The most difficult contour to create on a muscle cuirass is the area around the waist, where the torso tapers below the pectorals before flaring out again over the external obliques and belly. This is what’s known as an “anticlastic” curve – that is, where two curvatures move in different directions from a given point. (Another example would be the shape of a simple leaf, curling down along a stem while its blades curl upward.) Because metal doesn’t want to move in two directions at once, anticlastic curves are difficult to achieve – especially with modern metal stamping technology – and most makers don’t bother trying.
To achieve an anticlastic waist, I used a steel “valley” stake, so called because its shallow U shape supports the metal at two points. Placing the breastplate’s midsection face-up across the stake, and again working in passes, each rawhide mallet blow shrank away more metal to impart a more heroic silhouette. Because this longitudinal waist depression curves in a different direction than the breastplate’s lateral curvature around the body, each mallet blow gradually pushed the sides open (i.e. flattening the breastplate) and I had to periodically pause to bend it back by hand over a bar. This was slow, tiring work, requiring many passes and many re-bendings – and it became harder as I went.
Annealing with an acetylene torch to soften work-hardened bronze.
Copper alloys become more rigid and brittle the more they are hammered. “Work-hardened” bronze can be softened again by a process called “annealing”, which involves heating the metal to a cherry-red color (approximately 700 degrees F, 370 degrees C), relaxing its molecular structure. Lacking a proper ancient forge, we used an acetylene torch for this process.
Once I was satisfied with the overall shape of the breastplate, which now sat snugly and comfortably against my torso, it was time to add the details of the abdominal musculature. Trading in the rawhide mallet for one of Jeff’s custom-made raising hammers, this was a back-and-forth process of sinking depressions from the front and prominences from the back. A light hand here was key; I wanted my cuirass to reflect the anatomical subtlety of the original, with no hard lines suggesting an artificially enhanced physique. The same processes were then used to create a matching backplate.
Defining subtle musculature with a raising hammer.
The backplate essentially echoes the features and processes of the breastplate, with prominences over the shoulder blades sunk from the inside, a deep central ridge sunk from the outside, and the armoles raised to form convex curves closely fitting the body.
The backplate is actually a larger piece of bronze than the front, curling over to meet the breastplate just over the clavicles; this allows it to hang from the shoulders, making fit checks easy.
Getting the edges of the breastplate and backplate to match was a challenge, requiring the inside and outside of both pieces to be hammered separately and together. Temporary steel plates allowed the shoulders to be matched and shaped into their final configuration.
Once I was happy with the fit of the breastplate and backplate, it was time to lock in their shape and rigidity by flanging their edges. Many surviving muscle cuirasses have fully rolled, or “hemmed” edges, but the one I’m copying has pronounced, 90 degree flanges of approximately ¼” depth; while perhaps less comfortable, this style was also more likely to catch a point or blade that might otherwise glance off the armor into a fleshy bit. Fashioning the flanges involved hammering the metal over along the sharp corner of an anvil or other form, careful to evenly distribute the metal where the edge followed a curve or corner.
A few final anatomical details still remained to be rendered. Surmising as much as possible from a close visual inspection of the original’s nipples, I made small, slightly domed ovals of bronze plate for the aureolas, fixed to the cuirass with nipple rivets fashioned from ¼” bronze rod. The belly button required some experimentation with different tools and forms, and I ultimately ended up making a specially shaped steel punch to achieve a natural fleshy effect on a heavily annealed belly.
Belly button practice.
The closures on surviving muscle cuirasses are always some combination of pin-secured hinges and small bronze loops for the attachment of thongs or ties, and indeed this variation has been used as a taxonomy for the entire type. The sides of my cuirass are secured by four hinges, flanked on each side by rings held in place by split pins. It lacks hinges at the top; the flanged shoulders are butted and secured only by leather thongs run through rings. The rationale of this very common arrangement is unclear. I’d originally theorized that the ring ties or thongs were used to hold the hinge together so that the pin could more easily be inserted, but in practice I’ve found this to be awkward and unnecessary. Like so many other odd aspects of the hoplite panoply, the rings could simply have been vestigial elements held over from other earlier types of armor like the tube-and-yoke corselet. Another possibility is that the rings were intended to provide a more flexible closure for mounted use, in lieu of hinges which might break or distort in the event of a fall from horseback.
The four hinges that close the cuirass’ sides were cut from the same bronze plate as the armor itself and formed around a hard steel pin (swapped for bronze pins upon completion). Each had to be shaped to conform to the anticlastic curve of the cuirass at their interior attachment points.
To make the rings, we coiled 1/16” bronze wire around a dowel, cut the coil down the center, brazed each ring solid, hammered them flat, and filed them smooth. The attachment pins were made of thin strips of annealed bronze passed through small holes drilled in the cuirass and splayed against its interior.
It was now time to smooth and work-harden the final shape of the cuirass through a painstaking process called planishing. As opposed to the actual shaping of the metal, accomplished through quite heavy blows with heavy hammers, planishing uses relatively light strikes with a relatively light hammer on a smooth anvil or form to even out bumps on the surface and work-harden the metal.
Light sandings are useful to reveal subtle depressions during the planishing process.
Once planishing was complete, I polished my cuirass with a series of progressively finer grits, ultimately achieving a mirror-finish.
The question of final finish on ancient armor is controversial. On one hand are those who advocate a high mirror-polish on the basis of many surviving accounts of how proud ancient warriors were of their shining armor. On the other hand are those who believe that the “shine” of bronze (or iron) could have been relative, and that a mirror-polish would have been difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain in the field. For me, Xenophon himself settles this debate quite definitely in Cyropaedia 7:1 when he describes Cyrus’ staff “panoplied in armour the same as [Cyrus’]: purple tunics, bronze corselets, bronze helmets with white plumes, and sabres … the arms of Cyrus differed from those of the rest in this only, that while the rest were overlaid with the ordinary gold colour, Cyrus' arms flashed like a mirror.” In other words, mirror-polished armor was a conspicuous luxury, restricted even within famously ostentatious Persian courts to kings and would-be kings. This made abundant sense to me, so I knocked back the mirror-polish with a fine scouring pad to a satiny luster, which I think also imparted a greater weight and solidity to the armor’s appearance.
Working with Jeff’s indispensable guidance and assistance, my cuirass had taken me well over 100 shop hours to complete over the course of nine months. Jeff estimates he could make one himself in less than 40 hours, but of course we work with modern tools; for all their quotidian experience, ancient armorers would undoubtedly have required far more man-hours than either of us (undoubtedly distributed among specialist assistants as well). Considering both the cost of such highly skilled labor and the significant expense of the bronze itself, these cuirasses must truly have been luxury items.
Performance Testing
I finished my cuirass in March 2023, just in time for the “Military Through The Ages” weekend at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. This is the largest timeline event in the United States, and the perfect occasion to test out the newest addition to my panoply before an engaged audience of reenactors and spectators.
The cuirass’ 12lbs/5.5kg weight is borne almost entirely by the hips, making it quite comfortable; I wore it all weekend with no padding aside from a bloused wool chiton. None of my movements were restricted in combat sparring. I had trimmed away a half inch off the bottom quite early in the production process to ensure that I could sit comfortably, but had elected not to go further to allow deeper bends, which would alter the proportions seen on the original and many other depictions. Then as now, this was surely a tradeoff – slightly restricted mobility for greater protection. Not for nothing does vase art always show hoplites donning their greaves first!
Before I’d started work on my cuirass, Jeff had had me practice on a piece of scrap bronze to get a feel for how it behaved under the hammer. After sinking in a couple bulges and flanging an edge, I put it aside, knowing that a work-hardened patch of contoured bronze would come in handy later for testing my cuirasses’ performance as protective armor.
The previous year’s weapons tests had yielded some dramatic insights about what a good solid thrust from a sharp spear can do to linen and leather armor (the upshot is that you don’t want to be wearing it on such occasions), and we were curious to see how bronze armor would compare. After mounting my practice plate against a straw bale, several of us attacked it with spirited overhand thrusts. Because no one wanted to risk their expensive artisanal weapons, we used a beater spear that was less than razor sharp, but the results were still quite conclusive: the strikes all bit, slightly denting the metal, but none had managed to penetrate more than a couple millimeters. (1.2 mm plate is perhaps a bit on the thick side for surviving muscle cuirasses, but it’s well within the documented range, and like helmets, surviving cuirasses tend to be thickest in the parts most likely to be hit.)
Weapons testing at Military Through the Ages.
My bronzeworking practice plate before weapons testing.
The practice plate after weapons testing, showing the worst we could do with a spear.
Surprisingly, my cuirass is actually half a kilo (1.25 lbs) lighter than my far less protective linen and leather tube-and-yoke corslet (of speculative construction), suggesting that the latter was an expedience, probably an economy, but certainly not an improvement — even with regard to comfort and mobility. Many have theorized that it was a desire for lighter armor that caused the decline of plate cuirasses in the 5th century, but the comfortable experience of wearing a properly fitted muscle cuirass suggests that it was actually the expense of such armor that probably accounted for its increasing rarity, particularly given the relatively more modest means of Classical hoplites. While far from scientific, our tests strongly suggest that a plate bronze cuirass remained the best armor money could buy through the Classical era, perhaps supplanted only by the emergence of (very rare) iron cuirasses toward its end.
In every respect and at every level, ancient history depends more on passion than profit for its preservation and relevance. My cuirass is perhaps my single most prized possession, and making it was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. In addition to my ongoing fascination with the men who wore these things into battle, I now have even greater respect for those who made them – artisans who mastered the most sophisticated technology of their day to produce some of its most iconic artifacts. I very much hope that my project will inspire others to pick up a hammer and try their own hand at making a piece of history.