This is one of our sling bullets from the battle of Perusia. Last year we explored how Roman soldiers would write messages to the enemy on their sling bullets. Experts have found this inscription difficult to read, and a number of possible interpretations have been proposed over the years. Thanks to close examination by the project team, we have come up with a new reading that is more plausible and far ruder.

You can find out the answer from our latest podcast (warning: strong language in both Latin and English):

There were lots of great guesses. @JAugust7 rightly guessed that the message was a rude one, and makes the plausible suggestion that it was about Fulvia, one of the major figures in the siege of Perusia.

Something mean about Fulvia? https://t.co/a03tp7oS1o

— Julia August (@JAugust7) December 14, 2016

@llewelyn_morgan was the runaway winner, correctly reading the last word as OCTAVI, and then going to the Ashmolean in person to see the rest:

@cornwell_hannah @LoveArchaeology @wmarybeard @holland_tom C Caes Octav?

— Llewelyn Morgan (@llewelyn_morgan) December 15, 2016

@cornwell_hannah @AshmoleanLatin Well I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked! But still foxed by the Latin. It doesn't read FELLAS, does it?

— Llewelyn Morgan (@llewelyn_morgan) December 16, 2016

Special mention goes to @perlineamvalli:

A sort of 'whssshhhhtttt!' as it goes past your ear, unlike the 'weeeeeee!' of the Burnswark shot https://t.co/boLuue9Qw7

— Per Lineam Valli (@perlineamvalli) December 16, 2016

for making us laugh. You can find out about the whistling sling bullets from Burnswark here. They are a great example of how sling bullets could be a sophisticated psychological weapon, as well as doing physical harm.

You can see this bullet in our new displays in the Ashmolean’s Reading and Writing gallery.

Two recently-installed tombstones in the Ashmolean Rome Gallery: ANMichaelis.214 and AN1947.285

Here you can listen to Prof. Alison Cooley speaking with Dr Jane Masséglia about the two stones, the people they commemorate, and about the little surprise hidden in one of the inscriptions:

Visitors were offered a series of free activities, including tours with Alison Cooley, workshops on how to read a Roman tombstone with Janie Masséglia, lectures from Keeper of Antiquities Paul Roberts, and Roman object-handling with Hannah Cornwell. The AshLI team members were all helped by postgraduates from Warwick and Oxford Universities, who all showed their dedication to their subject by wearing Roman costume.

Colleagues from the Ashmolean Education department ran a craft session involving inscription-writing attended by more than 200 children, Helen Ackers guided groups around the Roman portraits in the Cast Gallery, and professional Living History expert Tanya Bentham offered Roman story-telling and costume demonstrations. Young actors from Gruffdog Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar also dropped in to give a lunchtime performance in the grand setting of the Randolph Gallery. At the end of a very busy day, with each activity being repeated several times, the museum estimated that around 1500 people had taken part directly in the day’s events.

[See image gallery at blogs.ashmolean.org]

At the town of Perusia, forces loyal to Mark Antony found themselves besieged by the troops of Octavian, the young man who went on to become the Emperor Augustus.

Around the modern town, archaeologists have found large metal bullets from Roman slingshots, used in the siege. Many of them were decorated with images or text, as messages to the enemy. Some name the intended target, and some tell the unlucky recipient who sent it.

Slingshot of Atidius, Chief Centurion of the 6th Legion, Ashmolean Museum ANFortnum.V.242.

AshLI’s Jane Masséglia and Hannah Cornwell take a closer look at one example, which is now on display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

So, for a Roman soldier, owning the bullet with your name on might not have been such a strange idea after all:

In our third podcast, we look at an unusual funerary inscription on display in the Ashmolean’s Randolph Gallery. It was set up for a speculator, an intelligence officer who was stationed in Britain. After his service was finished, he did the intelligent thing and went back to sunny Rome, where his friends set up an inscription on his death.

To hear more about the man and his friends, and to see the stone in detail, click below.

After some clever sleuthing from classics-lovers and amateur epigraphers, we published the solution and the story behind the plaque on our blog.

Now you can listen to members of the AshLI team talk about this little inscription, from inside the Ashmolean’s Rome Gallery, in the second podcast in the project’s new series.

Click here to launch the podcast in a new window.

(c) Ashmolean Museum

Bronze votive plaque from1^st-2^nd centuries AD. H. 4.9cm, W. 7.1cm, D. 1cm. Ashmolean Museum AN2001.1, on display in the Rome Gallery.

Latin:

Deo / Herculi/ Marus tribunus / legionis XX fecit

 English translation:

‘For the god Hercules, Marus, tribune of the 20th legion, made this.’

Click here to launch the podcast.

A more detailed discussion of the plaque, with full bibliographic references, will appear in the new catalogue of the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions, which will be freely available online before 2016.

Following an opening lecture from Warwick’s Dan Orrells, the teachers took part in three 45-minute teaching sessions in the Ashmolean. Dr Zahra Newby led a session on ancient art, focusing on the Cast Gallery, Rome Gallery and newly refurbished Greece Gallery. The teachers were among the first to see the new displays since they opened at the end of October.

Dr Zahra Newby leading a group through the new Ashmolean Greece Gallery

Professor Alison Cooley and Dr Jane Masséglia led a crash-course on how to read inscriptions and how they might be presented to students, using material from the Rome and Randolph Galleries. Alison took charge of the monumental inscriptions in the museum’s Arundel collection, showing how epitaphs give information about Roman families, professions and social aspirations, while Janie focussed on everyday objects, like the sling bullets from the Roman Civil War inscribed with messages for the enemy.

Alison Cooley telling the story behind a Roman ash chest of an imperial freedwoman in the Randolph Gallery

Jane Masséglia talking about the importance of Roman plumbing, in the Rome Gallery.

Dr Clare Rowan and Dr Chris Howgego gave the teachers a chance to get even closer to their material with a coin-handling session in the Heberden Coin Room. For many, the chance to hold a real tetradrachm was one of the highlights of the day.

Dr Clare Rowan explaining how coins were struck, in the Heberden Coin Room in the Ashmolean

Teachers handling Greek coins from the Ashmolean collection

Georgina Gill from High Storrs School in Sheffield, with an Athenian ‘owl’

Mai Musié, Oxford’s Classics Outreach Officer, and Jo Rice, Head of Ashmolean Education, were also on hand to remind teachers of the variety of talks, teaching sessions and even language-teaching support available to school groups.

Mai Musié, Oxford Classics’s Outreach Officer, reminding the teachers that Oxford and Warwick have a full programme of talks and events to support Classics teachers and students

As long as the Ashmolean has the right objects, Jo Rice and her team can design a session especially for a visiting school group

Following the success of the day, AshLI is now planning a similar event for Primary teachers. As for ‘demystifying’ ancient objects, the team was delighted by one teacher’s comments: ‘I run a course called ‘An Introduction to the Classical World’… I will now definitely add sessions on Inscriptions and Coins; I have previously been wary of both.’

The JACT INSET “Teaching with Ancient Artefacts”, on 22nd November 2014 was free to all participants, and travel bursaries were offered to teachers from the State sector, thanks to the generosity of Oxford Classics Outreach and Warwick’s Institute for Advanced Study. The AshLI team would also like to thank the 8 postgraduate volunteers from both universities who accompanied each group between the sessions and kept the event running smoothly.

The Rome Gallery, Ashmolean Museum

On a shelf in the Ashmolean’s Rome Gallery, eagle-eyed visitors might spot a tiny bronze plaque, with a rectangular body and triangular handles (a shape called a tabula ansata). At only 5cm tall, a dark greeny-brown and covered with dots, the plaque isn’t much to look at. But on close inspection (squinting helps), these dots form the letters of a Latin inscription. See how many you can make out before scrolling down:

Dot-to-dot decoding

The dots were made by hitting a round-tipped punch with a hammer, and have left the back of the plaque covered in tiny bumps. The punched letters are a bit wonky, don’t quite fit onto the plaque (the middle line spreads out onto the handles), and, worst of all, someone wrote ‘HERCULL’ instead of ‘HERCULI’ (even the Romans made spelling mistakes). But there has also been some care taken to centre the text, to make sure that words are not split up over line-breaks, and even to include little serifs which imitate fancier stone-carved letters. A serif (from the Dutch ‘screef’) is the small mark that can be added to the end of letter-stroke, giving a neat finish to the lines and, on stone, making it easier for the stonemason to compare the height of each letter. On our little tablet, smaller dots have been added, making little stems on the letters to make them look smarter. You can see these very clearly on the first letter of each line.

By Hercules!

As in the majority of Latin inscriptions, some of the words have been abbreviated to save space, effort and material. On our tablet, the abbreviations have saved 11 letters, and lots of punched dots. In full, it says:

Deo / Herculi/ Marus tribunus / legionis XX fecit

‘For the god Hercules, Marus, tribune of the 20th legion, made this.’

It’s a short inscription which tells us that the plaque was nailed up as an offering to Hercules by a Roman army officer stationed in Britain. Offerings like these were a way of asking or thanking the gods for support. It’s no surprise that Hercules, famous for his strength and courage, was the god of choice for Marus, the military man.

Since he tells us that he was a tribune, Marus was probably of equestrian rank, but the relatively modest scale of the bronze plaque suggests that he was one of the mid-ranking officers. Although the 20^th legion spent much of its time stationed at Chester (Roman Deva), in north-west of England, near the border with Wales, the plaque was supposedly discovered on the opposite side of the county, at Benwell, near Newcastle and the Roman fort at Condercum. It’s possible that Marus set up this offering to Hercules while the legion was on active service near Hadrian’s Wall.

XX, VV, ??

In either AD 61 or AD 8, the 20^th legion (or ‘LEG XX’ as Marus puts it) was rewarded for its bravery with the special honorific title Valeria Victrix. To keep things short, the 20^th Legion Valeria Victrix often appeared in inscriptions as ‘LEG XX VV’. This was precisely the abbreviation we found in April 2014 when the AshLI team used special imaging software to read a disappearing inscription on an altar in the Ashmolean’s Ark to Ashmolean Gallery (here).

If Marus didn’t bother to include ‘VV’ on the plaque, it might mean that it was made before the legion was awarded the title, and could give us some clue to its date. But the letters might also just have been left out to save space. After all, Marus didn’t even have enough room to include his full name. The famous clay antefix on display in the British Museum,was made long after the legion got its new name, but still only has the basic ‘LEG XX’. Because our bronze plaque made its way onto the antiquities market without a proper archaeological record of where it was found, we may never really know exactly when it was that a Roman soldier went to Newcastle and punched Hercules…

c. 1^st-2^nd centuries AD (?). Ashmolean Museum AN2001.1. H. 0.49, W. 0.71, D. 0.1. On display in the Rome Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum.

A more detailed discussion of the plaque, with full bibliographic references, will appear in the new catalogue of the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions, which will be freely available online before 2016.

Looking Blank

On display in the Ashmolean’s Ark to Ashmolean gallery stands a red sandstone altar. On three of its sides there are relief designs: a six-petalled flower, a jug and a libation-dish, each within a square frame. At first sight, the fourth side appears to be blank.

But closer inspection reveals faint traces of letters. This square frame once held the Latin inscription that gave details of the man who set up the altar, the god he dedicated it to, when and why. Unfortunately, since its discovery in the seventeenth century, the text has become illegible. But with a combination of modern technology and old-fashioned archival research, AshLI have produced a new reading.

Eagle-eyed Antiquarians

The altar was found intact in Foregate Street, Chester in 1653. By chance, the Chief Master of the Chester Free School, John Grenehalgh, happened to witness its discovery. Recognising its Roman origins, he returned the next day to transcribe its text, but was never confident about the accuracy of his transcription. The altar caused something of a sensation in antiquarian circles at the time, and several other transcriptions were made, each slightly different.

The inscription, already in poor condition when it was discovered, became increasingly worn after the altar was set up in a garden in Chester for some years. It was finally given to Oxford University in 1675 by Brasenose alumnus Sir Francis Cholmondeley, who came from a local landowning family from Vale Royal near Chester, and it became part of the Ashmolean collection. When Ernst Hübner examined the stone for CIL in 1873, he remarked ‘Vidi, sed vestigia tantum litterarum perpauca evanida dignoscere potui’ – ‘I have seen it, but I was only able to make out a very few, disappearing traces of the letters.’ He wasn’t able to read the text himself and had to rely on an earlier transcription by Randal Holme from 1688.

New Technology: RTI

Luckily, the AshLI team were able to use technology unavailable to earlier epigraphers. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) uses a combination of photography and multiple light sources to map the surface of even very worn objects, bringing out marks that are invisible to the naked eye. Ben Altshuler from Oxford’s Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents was able to produce new surface images of the stone, which have confirmed the accuracy of much of Grenehagh’s initial report, but which also support a suggestion first made by Wilhelm Kubitschek  in 1889, that the dedicator of the stone may have been a Spaniard from Clunia, a town in Hispania Tarraconensis.

Click to enlarge

New Reading

Unfortunately, even with the help of RTI, some areas of the text are still illegible: the surface of the stone has become too damaged. But by combining the old records, the RTI images, and knowledge of similar formulae, we now think the inscription reads:

 I O M TANARO
T ELUPIUS GALER
PRAESENS CLUNIA
PRI LEG XX VV
COMMODO ET
LATERANO COS
V S L M

I(ovi) ° O(ptimo) M(aximo) Tanaro / T(itus) Elupius Galer(ia tribu) / Praesens [Cl]unia / pri(nceps) ° leg(ionis) ° XX V(aleriae) V(ictricis) /  Commodo et / Laterano co(n)s(ulibus) / v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito)

‘To Jupiter Best and Greatest Tanarus, Titus Elupius Praesens, of the Galerian voting-tribe, from Clunia, princeps of the 20^th Legion Valeria Victrix, in the consulship of Commodus and Lateranus, willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow.’

A Cosmopolitan Cast

So this altar seems to have been dedicated by an officer of Spanish origin, in the Roman legion XX Valeria Victrix which was stationed during the Flavian period at Chester, near the border with Wales in the north-west of England. He was princeps of a legion, the second centurion in seniority, next in command after the primus pilus. The consuls he mentions give us a date of AD 154. The ‘Commodus’ here is Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus, now better known as the emperor Lucius Verus. His name ‘Elupius’ isn’t entirely certain, but now looks the most plausible among the many previous suggestions, which have included  ‘Elypius’, ‘Elufruis’, ‘Flavius’, and even ‘Bruttius’.

But several mysteries remain: Tanarus is a Celtic thunder god, who appears in other inscriptions in the Rhineland and Dalmatia, but is otherwise unknown in Britain. Why are there no other British inscriptions to Tanarus, and why is a Spaniard dedicating an altar to a god more commonly associated with Germania?

A more detailed discussion of the stone, with full bibliographic references, will appear in the new catalogue of the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions, which will be freely available online before 2016.

Sources Cited

Holme, R. (1688) The Academy of Armory (Chester)
Hübner, E.W.E. (1873) Inscriptiones Britanniae latinae (Berlin)
Kubitschek, J.W. (1889) Imperium Romanum Tributim Discriptum (Vindobonae)