Cloak

Clothing for Bad Weather

Roman soldiers didn’t spend their lives under a warm Mediterranean sun. The empire ran from the deserts of the Middle East to the cold, wet frontiers of northern Europe, and soldiers needed something to put on when the weather turned.

One common military cloak was the sagum.

What Did It Look Like?

The sagum was about as simple as clothing gets: a large square or rectangle of woolen cloth. No sleeves, no hood. The soldier wrapped it around his shoulders and pinned it, usually with a brooch called a fibula. Arranged one way it covered most of the body; pushed back, it left the arms free.

Wool was the right material for the job — warm, and still some use even when damp. The plain shape helped too: a finished piece of wool became a cloak with almost no tailoring.

A carved stone tombstone: a Roman legionary standing in an arched niche, a large woollen cloak sweeping from one shoulder across to his other arm, a sheathed sword at his hip. — The legionary Flavoleius Cordus of *Legio XIIII Gemina*, on his tombstone at Mainz — carved before AD 43, when the legion moved on to Britain. His *sagum* sweeps from one shoulder and folds over the far arm, the way Roman art shows soldiers wearing it. Landesmuseum Mainz, inv. S 116. Photo: Martin Bahmann (cropped) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Did All Roman Cloaks Look Like This?

No. Romans had several kinds of cloaks and outer garments, some with hoods for the rainy northern posts.

But the hoodless sagum was the one linked with soldiers. Roman art shows military figures again and again with a cloak fastened at one shoulder. It wasn’t only practical — a military cloak marked a man as a soldier, and officers wore showier versions.

Our Cloaks

Our soldiers at Bethlehem Revisited wear plain unhooded wool cloaks based on the sagum — actual rectangles of cloth, not modern coats dressed up to look Roman.

That makes it one of the easiest pieces of our kit to explain. A Roman soldier and a volunteer standing outside on a freezing night are working on the same problem, and they reach for the same answer.