Impression questions

[Crispvs]

Caius Marius,

I think that the brass helmet you were thinking of was the Imperial Gallic type 'I', which would be mid to late first century, although there is no reason to think that a few old ones would not still have been in service in the second quarter of the second century AD.

For the time being I would also caution against trying to mount a crest on a cross braced helmet, simply because those which have survived show no evidence of how a crest would have been fitted or even that crests were still worn. It is entirely possible that centuriones came again to depend on tinned or silvered helmets for field identification, possibly embellished with enamel or the forerunners of the settings found on some late Roman helmets. They would still have had their long greaves and vine sticks too. As to feathers in helmets, sadly the truth is that the use of feathers in feather tubes at the sides of helmets to identify rank is what is known as a 'factoid' - a bright idea that someone once had which has been passed around for so long that most people now regard it as fact. In fact there is no evidence to show that side plumes were a rank indicator. No helmets that I know of identify the owners as having sub-centurial ranks. There are even tantalising suggestions that side plumes may in some cases have acted a unit identifiers (all of the Imperial Gallic type 'I' helmets so far identified were fitted to take a central crest and side plumes and one has an inscription showing it to have belonged to a soldier of one of the Adiutrix legions. The stele of Gaius Castricius Victor, also a soldier in one of the Adiutrix legions, shows him wearing a helmet with a central crest and side plumes).

Crispvs