A Guide to the Exhibition Illustrating Greek and Roman Life

by British Museum. Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities

The Greeks had established customs in raising trophies, and these were strictly observed. The trophy was an assertion of victory, and was accepted by the vanquished and left inviolate by them. But it was contrary to usage for the victors to repair it, or to make the supports of anything more durable than wood. The native Roman practice was to fix captured armour in the house, like trophies of the chase. The built trophy was borrowed from the Greeks, but it was not necessarily erected on the battlefield. At Rome there were many trophies commemorating provincial victories, and the custom was continued in the representations of spoils on the triumphal arches and other monuments of the Imperial age. A marble relief of pieces of armour from one of these monuments is reproduced in a cast (No. 236). The arms are mostly Roman, but the dragon-standard and loose tunic belong to the Dacians, a barbarous people who made trouble on the north-east frontier of the Roman Empire in the second century after Christ.

Fig. 92.—Roman Manipular Vexillum,
from the Trajan Column.

Fig. 93.—Silver Coin of Valens (364-378 a.d.) showing the Emperor holding the Labarum, TRIUMPHANT OVER BARBARIANS.

Standards.—Military standards were not much used by the Greeks, but in the Roman army, which was a regular institution, not a temporary levy of citizens, they were elaborately developed. The eagle was the standard of the legion. It was a gilt image of the bird with spread wings, holding a thunderbolt in its claws. Marks of military distinction bestowed upon the legion—crowns, wreaths, and medallions—were carried on the staff which supported the eagle or on the eagle itself (fig. 109, p. 105). Smaller standards belonged to the companies of the legion (maniples or centuries). These were originally banners (vexilla) mounted on spears, with honorary wreaths and medallions attached to the shafts. A cast of such a standard is exhibited (No. 237). The cross-piece represents the bar on which the banner was hung, the sloping and vertical members at its ends are derived from the cords which fastened the cross-bar to the pole. The other standards shown in fig. 91, figures of birds or animals carried on a plain shaft, are also represented here, in the bronze boar (No. 238). Such standards were probably used by detachments of the legion. The regimental emblems were chosen or bestowed for various reasons; some legions had several badges, and the same badges are found with several legions. The boar is known to have belonged to the 1st (Italica), 2nd (Adjutrix), 10th (Fretensis) and 20th (Valeria Victrix). The bronze hand (No. 239) may have been part of a standard, but its poor structure rather indicates votive use. An open hand was the proper standard of the maniple, the Roman company of two centuries, which, indeed, derived its name from this device (manipulus, a handful). The Roman explanation, as recorded by Ovid and others, was that when Romulus first organised his men by hundreds, he gave each company a standard consisting of a handful of twigs or grass on the point of a spear. In any case the maniple took its name from the hand, and the hand is often represented as the standard of the maniple; fig. 92 is taken from the Trajan Column. The cross-bar, which originally carried the banner, and its hanging tassels are shown in this standard, as in No. 237, but the more important part of the cord, which fastened the bar to the shaft, has been omitted from the design. This fortuitous pattern of a cross was eagerly recognised by the early Church as a military emblem of Christianity, and the famous labarum, the miraculous standard which Christ gave to the Emperor Constantine on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge, was a cavalry vexillum of the Roman army with the monogram of Christ emblazoned on its banner (fig. 93).

The pieces of armour are described in the Catalogue of Bronzes to which reference should be made for fuller details. The Catalogue numbers are painted on the objects.

(185) Bronzen aus Dodona in den Kgl. Museen zu Berlin, p. 13, pl. 2; (201) Friederichs, Kleinere Kunst, 2197; (208) Cat. of Bronzes, 877; Benndorf, Ant. Gesichtshelme, p. 15, pl. 3; for the class see Curle, A Roman Frontier Post and its People, p. 179; (221) B.M. Excavations in Cyprus, p. 16, fig. 26; (236) Cat. of Sculpture, 2620; (237, 238, 239) reproduced by Daremberg and Saglio, Dict. Ant. s.v. Signa Militaria.

Weapons.—The weapons of offence, which are exhibited in Table-Case E, differ from the majority of the antiquities shown in this room, in that many of them were made at a remote period in the history of Greece and Italy, some even dating from the beginning of the Bronze Age, when the use of metal had not long supplanted that of stone. In a few examples from the island of Cyprus, the metal is almost pure copper. It is therefore not strictly accurate to call these weapons Greek and Roman, for they were made a thousand years before those nations began; but they come from the lands which were afterwards inhabited by the Greeks and Romans, and are valuable as representing the development of arms in those parts of the world, and as being the work of the primitive races in whom the Greeks and Romans had their origin.

Fig. 94.—Primitive Bronze Spear- and Dagger-Blades, from Greece and Cyprus (Nos. 241-4). 1:4.