Detail of Alexander the Great wearing a linothorax, from the “Alexander Mosaic” from the House of Faun, Pompeii. Photograph by G. Nimatallah / De Agostini / Getty

Intellectual life thrives on mystery. When it comes to ancient Greece, one of those mysteries is the linothorax—the flimsy-looking, hip-length armor that you see warriors wearing on Greek vases. (Linothorax means, literally, “linen chest.”) Why go to war, archaeologists have wondered, in what looks to be a linen minidress? While a linothorax lets you show off your muscular legs to great effect, it hardly seems like practical protection against the enemy’s swords and arrows. And yet, judging by how frequently linothoraxes are represented in Greek art, they were extraordinarily popular among soldiers in ancient Greece and around the Mediterranean between 600 and 200 B.C. Because no linothoraxes have survived—linen doesn’t last—no one knows why.

About eight years ago, Greg Aldrete, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, decided to get to the bottom of this. At the time, he was teaching a course on the history of ancient Greece; among his students was a young man named Scott Bartell. Bartell was so obsessed with Alexander the Great that he got an Alexander tattoo; he was also fascinated by the linothorax, Alexander’s preferred armor. One day, Bartell went to a local fabric store, bought a lot of linen, made his own, and presented it to Aldrete, asking for help in making it more accurate. “It was when I went to look up some info for Scott that I found out that the linothorax is a kind of mystery armor,” Aldrete said. “There are lots of literary attestations that it existed—there are descriptions from Egyptians, Romans, Persians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Macedonians, tribes in Spain, really all over the Mediterranean basin—and we have images. But no one really understood how well it worked or how it was made. We decided to try to reconstruct it.”

Aldrete assembled a crack team for his linothorax project: Bartell, himself, and his wife, Alicia Aldrete. They started by searching out images of the armor. At the university library, Alicia looked through all hundred and fifty volumes of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, a vast reference work that catalogues Greek vases from around the world. They compiled a database with almost a thousand images of linothoraxes, taken from vase paintings, wall paintings, sculptures, sarcophagi, and figurines. From the images, they derived a linothorax pattern, like the sort of pattern a tailor might use. They built prototype linothoraxes out of cardboard, focussing on the little details. “We discovered that a lot of the features that look sort of random are actually highly functional,” Aldrete said. “There’s a little tab on the back of the neck which looks ornamental, but it actually protects you perfectly if someone tries to strike you with an axe.”

There’s considerable debate about what, exactly, linothoraxes were made of. (The texts that mention linothoraxes, like the Iliad, don’t include how-to instructions.) Were they actually made of linen, or could they have been made of leather? Did they have metal plates sewn into them? For that matter, were they sewn together or glued? Glued, or “laminated,” linen, Aldrete knew, was a common ancient-Greek material: scraps of it have been found at Greek archaeological sites, and the Greeks constructed their theatrical masks out of it. Almost as if to prove that linen, all by itself, could be effective as armor, Aldrete’s team decided to go the laminated-linen route. They bought old-school linen from a local artisan weaver, who grew, spun, and wove flax into linen herself, without chemical additives; from art supply stores, they bought rabbit glue, which some oil painters use to prime their canvasses. The ancient world had a number of very advanced glue recipes, including recipes for waterproof glues, but rabbit glue, Aldrete reasoned, was made the same way today as it was back then: “Take a rabbit, take the skin, scrape off some of the stuff, and dry it into a powder.”

In Aldrete’s basement, the team built a giant slab of laminated linen and tried to cut the fabric according to a pattern, the way a tailor would. It was too tough. “We tried scissors, we tried a bolt cutter,” Aldrete said. “Finally, we had to use an electric jigsaw that’s used to cut through metal—obviously, that’s not what the Greeks did.” Chastened, they took a different approach, assembling each piece from individual layers of linen. Agrippa, the Aldretes’ black lab, salivated over the rabbit glue—“from his perspective, we were making tasty chew treats,” Aldrete said—but, once he was shooed away, they were able to make a number of full-size linothoraxes, complete with decorations, including a Gorgon.

Aldrete’s students ran and did exercises in the linothoraxes. The armor turned out to be lightweight and cool in the sun, softening, over time, to conform to each wearer’s body shape. “I’ve worn a lot of different armor—Roman armor, chain mail—and this is much more pleasant,” Aldrete said. Still, the most pressing questions weren’t about comfort. “The university has lots of rules against weapons on campus, so, because of all the bows, arrows, swords, axes, and so on, we couldn’t work there,” Aldrete said. Instead, they set up shop in the back yards of students who lived in rural areas. They used two-by-two panels of the linen armor and shot at them with arrows, tracking their angle and velocity. (They also, for fun, attacked the armor with swords and guns.) “We found that a twelve-milimetre-thick linothorax would have protected you from any arrow you would have encountered from about 600 B.C. to 200 B.C.,” Aldrete said. It wasn’t until the second century B.C. that better metallurgy—which allowed for sharper arrowheads—rendered the linothorax obsolete. (More powerful bows were also a factor.)

Aldrete feels that his work brings him closer to the physical realities of the ancient world. Making your own linothorax can only tell you so much about what the real armor was like. But, by the same token, it forces you to confront the fact that everything in the ancient world was handmade and, therefore, variable. In ancient Greece, he pointed out, “the state wasn’t supplying you with weapons; you had to produce your own.” In fact, the popularity of the linothorax may have stemmed from the fact that you could make one at home. “There’s one Greek vase that shows, on one side, a bunch of women weaving, and, on the other side, a woman handing armor to a man who’s putting it on to go to war. You don’t need expensive metals, or a blacksmith, to make a linothorax. Any farm could produce them. You can envision wives making them for their husbands, mothers making them for their sons,” he said. “In debates about ancient armor, that’s one of the flaws. People say, That’s wrong. They forget that everything was a handmade, artisan object. No two are going to be alike.”

In the past few years, word’s gotten around about the linothorax. (Last year, the Aldretes and Bartell published a book about the project: “Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery.”) Hoplite reënactors in Greece have contacted Aldrete with offers of collaboration. A documentary crew filmed him shooting a linothorax-clad Bartell with an arrow. A game designer e-mailed to ask whether a linothorax might be tough enough to stop a zombie’s bite. (“I ended up saying, Yes, it would,” Aldrete said.) He doesn’t expect linothoraxes to replace metal armor in the popular imagination any time soon: in the ancient world, bronze armor was more “sexy and prestigious” than linen armor, and that’s true in Hollywood, too. Still, the Wisconsin linothorax, by suggesting what the “basic, default version” of the armor might have looked like, has made the ancient world feel a little more real. Aldrete has moved on, in the meantime, to another project: “I’m looking into the practical aspects of how they sacrificed bulls in the ancient world. We have images of people whacking these animals with axes and hammers, but where do you hit it, and how?” Since recreating those sacrifices isn’t a possibility, he’s been reading up on slaughterhouses.