A “barbarian” shield in a roman hand: the variety of uses of hexagonal shields in the roman army in the first to the third centuries A.D

For the first time in Russian historiography, this article analyses all possible fields of application of hexagonal shields in the Roman army of the period of the Early Empire. Traditionally, in historiography, hexagonal shields among the Romans rarely became an independent object of study and were considered, as a rule, episodically in the context of cavalry, guard units or parts of auxiliary troops. The source base of the article were monuments of Roman art created in the 1st - 3rd centuries AD: frescoes, coins, reliefs of military tombstones and triumphal monuments. Based on these pictorial sources, the author comes to the conclusion that the scope of application of hexagonal shields by Roman soldiers in the period under consideration was quite wide and included ceremonies, field battles, as well as various earthworks. Also, despite their supposed Celto-Germanic origin, almost all main categories of Roman troops, including legionaries and sailors, were periodically equipped with such shields. Based on this, the author suggests that the gradual rejection of “traditional Roman” weapons in the Roman army and the departure from the dominance of the Italk weapons tradition began not in the 2nd-3rd centuries AD, but already in the 1st century AD, which allows us to look at some aspects of the development and evolution of Roman military affairs during the Principate period from a slightly different angle.