Three types of design are common on the grave-reliefs. In one the soldier stands in his armour facing the passing throng. In a second he is mounted and riding over a prostrate enemy. In a third we see him with his horse before him, starting on his long journey to the shades. Such monuments occur most frequently on the frontiers. The great legionary camps on the Rhine—Xanten, Bonn, Mainz—have furnished the best examples. But other well known specimens are preserved at Cologne, Wiesbaden, Creuznach, Worms, and Verona. In England the Museum of Colchester possesses an interesting tombstone of a centurion of the Twentieth Legion, while further north, besides several examples at Chester,[1] there is the grave slab of the standard-bearer Flavinius, probably from Corbridge on Tyne, now set up in the Abbey Church of Hexham. As a whole, the reliefs that have come to us from the forts along the wall of Hadrian are rude in execution and add little to our knowledge of the subject.
The collections of weapons and arms are very poor. Graves yield little that can help. The ashes of the Roman soldier were laid to rest with vessels of glass and earthenware; it was only the barbarian warriors who had their arms placed beside them. The few objects we do possess have been gathered from marshes, from wells, from rivers. A considerable proportion of them have been dredged from the bed of the Rhine. Speaking generally, we may say that more has been obtained by chance finds of this sort than by systematic search. Iron objects recovered near the surface in the course of excavations have too often been reduced to shapelessness by corrosion, or have been allowed to become disintegrated through lack of knowledge how to preserve them. The exploration of the legionary fortress of Carnuntum in and after 1899, however, incidentally resulted in the gathering of a collection that is of high importance for the study of Roman armour. The objects, which are more than one thousand in number, and which consist of portions of weapons and armour, most of them in a fragmentary condition, were found on the floor of what appears to have been a storehouse. The only body of material obtained by excavation, which can at all compare with that from Carnuntum, is the collection which has been obtained at Newstead. Unfortunately we are not yet within sight of any proper classification of Roman armour and weapons such as would enable us to approach this question satisfactorily. Over the wide extent of the Empire, with its many races, there must without doubt have existed local usages and fashions
1 Haverfield, Catalogue of the Roman Inscribed and Sculptured Stones in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester.
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