Replica Roman Helmet vs Originals?

[Robert Vermaat]

Hi John,

Didn't the Notitia Dignitatum specify certain armories as specialising in "arms decorated with silver and gold"?

Indeed it does. It refers, agonizingly, to the state factories (‘fabricae’) where arms & armour (amongst other items) were produced by semi-free (the tendency towards free) craftsmen for the army in a state monopoly. The craftsmen who added the gold and silver to the helmets were called ‘barbaricarii’, and the amount of precious metal to be added to these helmets were very limited. Both adding too much or too little carried a death penalty.

Hi Crispus,

"the common legionnaire who made only slightly more than a peasant at the time."
I'm not sure I agree with you there. After all, wherever a fort sprang up, a village appeared next to it almost immediately, hardly likely to happen if there was not money to be made off the soldiers.

I agree with you here, just adding to this view the fluctuations in policy of soldiers’ pay. The army varied in paying the troops, while deducting money for equipment, or paying them less and providing the cost of that equipment. We see this policy alter back and forwards throughout Roman military history. At times, the soldier would have had plenty of money for that vicus to appear, as they would have created a market for civilians who produced all the goods the soldier needed. But also, there would have been times when the state provided much of that, and I imagine that the economic basis of a vicus would be much smaller. Perhaps this is why, for instance in The Netherlands, such vici are in decline.

In all likelihood most work was done by independent workshops with contracts to supply to the army, which some manufacturing and much repair work being done by soldiers themselves, prior to the setting up of the state fabricae in the third century AD. It is fairly clear that the people who worked in these workshops felt it important to produce pieces which took time and demonstrated their skill, even if there was a good deal of standardisation in the decorative forms chosen. Although we do know of the use of dies to produce multiple copies of some of the same things, the modern notion of mass production does not seem to have applied to any ancient item which I have seen.

Agreed. Even though these fabricate come as close to mass production as possible, we have yet to find two helmets that are exactly alike.