Bret Devereaux

I did not find the thureos to be light after even five minutes of serious fighting in close. I kept having to straighten my arm and support it with my knee because it felt like my shoulder was on fire. But I’m aggressive as fuck.

What thureos were you using? But yes, aggressiveness will affect that sort of thing.

I *believe* it was built to historical spec. It was considerably smaller than a scutum, probably as wide as armpits and going from above the knee to my throat. I kept chafing my wrist on the inside of the boss, and solved it by tying a bit of felt around it.

We're not as super-well informed about the design of the Thureos, esp. thickness as we'd like. Most reconstructions assume that the thureos follows the thickness pattern of the scutum. Thing is, the scutum is a lot thinner on the edges than in the core...

...(Plb. 6.23.2). The Kasr-al-Harit shield is normally the guideline for that sort of thing. But I suspect that means, if you make a Hellenistic thureos as thick as the scutum in the center, you don't actually save so much weight by making it shorter and narrower...

...because those parts of the scutum are the thinnest already and thus don't have the bulk of the mass. So while it ought to be lighter, I'd guess it's not massively so - and taking 20% of the mass off of the scutum still leaves you with a 10-12lb shield.

Yes, I'd guess approximately 10lbs might be about right. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more, varying upon thickness, method of construction, material, and actual size/shape.

In an ideal world, we'd have for Greek and Roman shields what we have for Gallic ones (also Iberian caetra) - a few sets of bosses where the rivets still connect to the handles, giving a fixed, clean way to measure thickness at the core.