Greaves

Armor for Your Shins

Shins are remarkably good at finding things to run into, even when nobody is trying to kill you. On a battlefield it gets much worse. Greaves put a hard layer over the lower leg, where a shield didn’t always reach.

Roman greaves were shaped to fit close around the leg, protecting the shin without wrapping it in a heavy tube of armor. For an officer like a centurion, they had another useful quality: they looked impressive. A pair of polished greaves helped mark a man who was supposed to look in charge.

They weren’t standard issue for every soldier, and their use changed over time. We’ll leave those complications to historians.

But for our centurion, they serve both purposes nicely: protect the shins and make sure nobody mistakes him for the new recruit.