Making Pteruges (or at least trying to make Pteruges!)

[Crispvs]

I have heard of these 'boxes of plain pugiones' before. The problem with them is that whenever I track down dig reports and museum catalogues, I normally find the ones I already knew existed and rarely come accross anything truly unexpected. It is true that many more pugiones and sheaths have been found than are on display, but most of those which I know of which do not seem to be on display are still highly decorated. It may be just that they are less complete or the man who did the original decoration was simply not as good as the man in the workshop accross the road. Therefore, when space in a display cabinet is at a premium, it will almost always be the best executed and preserved examples which get displayed. Thus of the five daggers and/or sheaths found in Colcester, only one is on display in the museum. Similarly the Legionary museum in Caerleon displays none of the five daggers and/or sheaths found there but instead features the two from a few miles away at Usk. Corbridge has produced one dagger sheath which features quite an interesting decorative scheme but it is incomplete and this may be why it is not on display in the museum there.

"An argument could be made that the soldiers who carved the Adamklissi metopes embellished themselves in an effort to appear more heroic. If someone was to state… when a solider makes a sculpture of himself he would only make a perfectly accurate impression and if an artist makes a sculpture he must have embellished it, or vice-versa, doesn’t hold water."

I don't think that that is quite the point that most of us have been making. It is more a case of this: the Adamklissi metopes and the Rhineland sculptures were produced away from the main centres where public sculpture was produced and can thus be reasonably confidently thought to have been done by sculptors who were at best locally trained, rather than classically trained. On the other hand you have a highly profficient class of sculptors in the main cities of empire who have been taught in the traditional way in high class schools and workshops which also taught them the 'correct' forms to sculpt things in and the appropriate formulae which should be applied. No one for a moment would suggest them to be incompetents or overly given to personal flourishes which they knew to be incorrect.
What must be acknowledged though, is that what is seen in the Rhineland sculptures tends to prove to be a good representation of what the archaeological record shows us, as, to a large extent, do the Adamklissi metopes. Unfortunately the same thing cannot be said for the places where high class sculpture is found. It is quite resonable to think then, that the best sculptors (ie in Rome and the other larger cities) would have produced work of superlative quality but with a reliance on forms and formulae which had been taught to them in the absence of actual solders in battle gear, whereas the porrer sculptors in the provinces produced work of markedly inferior quality but which, by its depiction of equipment also known from the archaeological record, shows that the sculptors had a good working knowledge of the kit actually worn and carried by soldiers. Therefore, poorly executed provicial sculpture can often shed more light on the reality of the army that magnificently executed public sculpture. It is not the quality of the sculpture that matters so much to the student of equipment but what the background of the sculptor was. For the provincial sculptor without classical training to back him up what he had to go on what simply what he saw.

Moving away from sculpture now, when it comes to making equipment I suspect that subarmali were made in a different factory to mail and so the time taken to produce one would not detract from the time available to make the other.

Crispvs