Roman Garb for SCA Men

Snorri and Annika at Pennsic 50th, on his 50th birthday, getting ready to go to the Roman Bacchanal. Author’s garb made by himself, wife’s garb made by MK at LARP Essentials. Gigantic amber and quartz necklaces by Ran at A Case of Random.

Warning: This post is adapted from an email I sent to household members in 2024 who wanted to get some Roman garb ready for Gulf Wars 2025. It contains unsupported speculations, sloppy attributions, stolen images, dodgy research, links that will expire and I’ll never update, and copious vulgarities.

Up front: Roman garb is very minimal and not appropriate for cold weather in the forms I’m going to cover here. Also, because it is so minimal (really just a tunica, belt, and shoes), ANY deviations from the baseline are going to stick out like a sore thumb. You can, sorta-kinda, get away with a Viking belt with your 14th Century garb, or get away with Rus pants with your 9th century Norse garb, or a kidney pouch with your Ottoman clothes. You CANNOT get away with, for example, putting on a Skjoldehamn hood over your Roman tunica, or wearing pants at all, or wearing 16th century boots on your feets. You will look ridiculous, but more importantly, you will look incorrect and people will notice. You may not care, but I do, and since I’m helping you with this garb, it’s a reflection on me. Make me proud, kids.

So most of my starting research and patterns come from here:

https://www.larp.com/legioxx/

That’s Matt Amt’s site from 20 years ago (he’s the dude who founded Amtgard) so it’s pretty dated, but the research is still valid. Specifically these pages:

https://www.larp.com/legioxx/tunic.html

https://www.larp.com/legioxx/civcloth.html (bottom half of the page)

https://www.larp.com/legioxx/cloak.html

If that’s too much reading, here’s the rundown of what we’re shooting for, head to toe:

Head: nothing
Torso: tunica of wool or linen (any color EXCEPT white with purple stripes, or solid purple) with small (2″) sleeves or no sleeves. Pinned at neck with fibula. The neck slit is real wide; they’d often slip one or both arms out when they were working, training, shooting, etc. by just unpinning one or both sides and pulling their arms out.
Belt: leather belt at least 2″ wide. The stereotypical Roman belt is called a balteus or a cingulum militaire. It’s a 2″ wide leather belt covered with plaques and often mounts the Legionary dagger, the pugio. The hangy-downy bits in front are called pteruges (ter-OO-jees) and are common, but optional.

_{Picture of a historical balteus yoinked from https://www.romancoins.info/MilitaryEquipment-cingulum.html}

But if you’re not going to portray a veteran of the Legions you won’t wear one of these, plus it’s like $200-$300 for all the fucking parts. There’s really no good commercial options; they’re all a little wrong, and if you’re gonna spend that much you might as well do it right. If you have a good-looking kidney belt that’s fine. If you want to just use a simple piece of wool inkle weaving that’s fine too (I often do).
Toga/Cloak: You guys can skip the toga unless you really want to look formal. It’s five fucking yards of wool at $30 a yard, and is cut in such a way as to be utterly useless for any other purpose.
- You CAN just wear a rectangle cloak, called a sagum, with a pennanular brooch or fibula pin. Try to not wear a blanket cloak that’s been all tarted up Viking-style with embroidery and tablet weave and applique and fur and shit. Plain wool is best; we could maybe justify a stripe or a strip of silk or something, but it’d be speculative.
Legs: bare. I wear basketball shorts of a matching color under my tunicas like a godsdamned savage.
Feets: any kind of strappy sandals is fine. Ghillies is fine. I wear red carbatina as appropriate for a Patrician; you can do whatever. You can wear colorful wool socks if the weather warrants it.
Jewelry: circlets are fine. Rings (LOTS of rings) is good. One or two necklaces maybe.
Pouches: we can make you guys shoulder bags of leather. A plain linen one would be fine too. No Hedeby bags.

What NOT to wear:

Anything on your head other than a circlet
Any jewelry on your arms. No arm-rings, no bracelets, no ridiculous bejeweled brass cuffs like every movie likes to do. Bare arms is considered manly.
Anything that looks even vaguely “gladiatorish” – be careful with kidney belts.
Pants
Any kind of skinny medieval belt with a long dangle. If you wear a ring belt I will murder you in your sleep.
Belt pouches. If you don’t procure an appropriate shoulder bag, then put your stuff into a small leather or cloth drawstring bag and drop it inside your tunica.
Anything with laurel leaves – they’re ubiquitous for Roman shit but none of us rate them in the SCA so that’s a no from me, dawg.
LATE EDIT! Almost forgot this one: BLOCK PRINTING! There’s zero evidence of this kind of textile ornamentation.

I’d suggest a plan of concentrating on taking care of tunicas, fibulas, belts, and feets first:

Tunicas need two yards of the base color, and a “long quarter” of another color for stripes. You have to specify to the vendor LONG QUARTER or you might get a “short quarter” or a “fat quarter” which won’t work. Stripes have to be the same material (wool or linen). Wool needs to be PLAIN WEAVE, no patterned wools (herringbone, diamond, etc.)

This is the good stuff here, but it’s fucking $31.50 a yard. Fortunately you only need two yards per tunica:

https://dorrmillstore.com/shop/fabric/date/category/solids

Remember to get two yards of your base color and a LONG QUARTER for the stripes. You can put .25 yards in your cart there for the long quarter, just ensure that you put in the notes “LONG QUARTER for the quarter yard” or whatever when you check out.

Alternatively you can do linen. I have three linen ones and a wool one, but the wool one is BY FAR the nicest. Buy dimensions remain the same. If you can’t swing $70 of wool then do linen.
Fibulas: Thorthor’s Hammer is the absolute shit for these:

https://thorthorshammer.com/romanbroochpage.htm

Remember to get two small ones for your tunica neck, and one big one for your cloak (if you’re wearing one – you should, Gulf Wars nighttimes can be chilly).

Alternately you can rock a pennanular brooch for your cloak:

https://thorthorshammer.com/penannularbroochpage.htm

Avoid the ones with knotwork, but the others are fairly universal/generic enough to pass. We can also make these in my shop with extremely minimal time and effort.
Belt. You have three options:
- Tie a piece of wool inkle weave around your waist
- Wear a leather belt, any color, 2″ wide minimum, with a Roman buckle and tip (we have to make this but it’s zero issue)
  
  The acceptable buckles can be pretty simple. Lots of heel-bar buckles in oval or D shapes:
  
  _{Sketches of 1st through 4th Century Roman buckles from UK finds, from Buckles Through The Ages, Treasure Hunting Magazine, 1986 issues January – December, by Chris Marshall}
  
  So go find yourselves a buckle and strapend. Sadly, my usual supplier, Armour & Castings, doesn’t do Roman. Here are some sources:
  - Raymond’s Quiet Press has some dope shit, as usual: https://raymonds-quiet-press.myshopify.com/collections/roman Just be aware his stuff is all cast, and so if you use a lot of it, it gets heavy as hell very quickly.
  - Kult of Athena has some stuff but it’s all backordered right now: https://www.kultofathena.com/product-category/clothing/belts-baldrics-buckles/buckles-fittings/?_product_culture=roman
  - Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/search?q=roman+belt+buckle
- Throw stupid money at a balteus. The best site, bar none, for the hardware is Clang Armory:
  
  http://www.clangarmory.com/roman%20pics/balteus%2001.html
  
  If you email Mark Berry there, he’s super-helpful putting a belt order together, but you’re gonna spend like $200-$300 on parts – then we gotta assemble (no big deal, honestly). This is all the stuff I bought from him:
  
  The author’s cingulum militaire parts from Clang Armory
  
  Having said all that about the belt, I think if I was trying to do something that was affordable, medium effort, and would look great, I’d buy a dozen apron studs or rivet bosses, and a single apron terminal to use as a strapend, from Clang, and a simple D-shaped solid brass heel bar buckle from Tandy (https://tandyleather.com/collections/solid-brass-hardware/products/round-heel-bar-buckles?variant=31977408659587) and some sheet brass and we’ll make something that will look the part and not cost a car payment. If you don’t have a shop to fabricate a buckle plate in, this here will do fine: https://www.kultofathena.com/product/brass-belt-buckle-with-rivets/ It’s actually just about a dead ringer for the top right hand buckle on the second page of buckle pics above.

4. Shoes. Ghillies work fine, and we know how to make those, but if you don’t: https://www.instructables.com/Viking-shoes/

If you want better, Bohemond has some: https://boots-by-bohemond.myshopify.com/collections/roman-footwear/products/roman-carbatinae-welzheim-shoes Use Angelus leather paints to make them red if you want: https://angelusdirect.com/products/red-paint?variant=308268865 I have to repaint mine about once a year and it takes ten minutes.

I wear his carbatinae painted red, because Patrician-class people apparently wore red shoes: https://www2.classics.upenn.edu/myth/php/tools/dictionary.php?regexp=CALCEUS&method=standard

So my shoes aren’t quite the correct style, but they pass. This is honestly getting really into the weeds on Roman garb particulars, and if you wanna wear some sandals or flippy-floppies or Birkenstocks or red goddamn Crocs no one’s gonna say boo to you about it. Just, please, no Viking turnshoes or later period buckled boots, for my sanity.

That’s it for now. Stretch goals are a Comaccio bag: https://sutor.jimdofree.com/1st-century-ad/comacchio-bag/

or a Pera bag: https://www.larp.com/legioxx/packs.html

but a plain linen shoulder bag would be fine: https://www.etsy.com/listing/720410175/medieval-messenger-bag-pilgrim-linen