clipeus

Borrowed from Latin clipeus.

clipeus (plural clipei)

1. (historical) A shield worn by soldiers of ancient Greece and Rome.
2. (architecture) An ornamental disk of marble in this shape.
3. (entomology) Part of the exoskeleton of an insect between the carapace and mandibles.

• Pulices, spicule

• clupeus, clypeus, clipeum

The origin is uncertain, perhaps from Proto-Italic *klupeos.^[1] It may be from Etruscan.

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [ˈklɪ.pe.ʊs]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [ˈkliː.pe.us]

clipeus m (genitive clipeī); second declension

1. a type of large round shield, properly: a type of round shield that was convex (bowl-shaped), at least around 0.9 m in diameter, and was gripped at the edge, with a fastening for the forearm in the middle

   Near-synonyms: parma, scūtum

   • 29 BCE – 19 BCE, Vergilius, Aeneis 2.225–227:

     “At geminī lāpsū dēlūbra ad summa dracōnēs
     effugiunt saevaeque petunt Trītōnidis arcem
     sub pedibusque deae clipeīque sub orbe teguntur.”

     “But the two serpents escape by gliding [away] to the highest temples [of Troy], and seek the citadel of the fierce Tritonian [Minerva], [where] they shelter beneath the feet of the goddess and under the disc of [her] shield.”

2. disk of the sun
3. vault of the sky
4. (New Latin, archaeology) oval or other types of shields adopted in the Roman army of Late Antiquity after the Crisis of the Third Century

• There exist definitions of Roman material culture words that were adopted by modern archaeologists to categorize archaeological finds. They are not to be confused with authentic Roman usage of the same words. In particular, the definition for clipeus notably differs, where for the Romans it was an ancient type of shield, while the modern archaeological definition applies clipeus mainly to late Roman oval shields, which were apparently not called clipei in Late Latin, as they did not meet the definition of being perfectly round, concave and being of the ancient type believed to have been used at Troy. Instead, those late antiquity shields were likely called scūta, from whence the Romance word for "shield" naturally derives.

Second-declension noun.

• “clipeus”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “clipeus”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891), An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• "clipeus", in Charles du Fresne du Cange, Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• “clipeus”, in Gaffiot, Félix (1934), Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
• “clipeus”, in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898), Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers
• “clipeus”, in William Smith et al., editor (1890), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London: William Wayte. G. E. Marindin