Bret Devereaux

I should add that I'm not disputing infantry fighting with heavy loads. I mean, thureophoroi were fast-moving 'medium' infantry, and the thureos is freakin' heavy. But they pretty clearly *did* that. My guess is just that they were plenty tired afterwards.

The common thureos in the Hellenistic period is not particularly heavy at all, unless you're talking about the really big ones (as big or bigger than the Roman scutum). But most thureophoroi were handling a pretty light shield.

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...

So the Kasr el-Harit shield is notoriously unreliably published (unless I've missed a new study of it since its alleged rediscovery), but is reportedly thinner (and with less taper) than the Dura Europos scutum it allegedly outweighs. Material/method matters!