ANCIENT RELICS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1938, Page 9

ANCIENT RELICS

WHEN BRITAIN WAS COLONY OF ROMAN EMPIRE. EXAMPLES OF POTTER’S ART. Nearly 1900 years ago a potter named Felix, who worked at Montans in the south of what was then Gaul, and is now France, turned out a plate and scratched on it “Of. Felic,” short for Oflicina Felicis (from the workshop of Felix). It was exported to an island on the edge of the world, which had recently been added to the Roman Empire. That island was Britain. Today, the plate, dug up under the Bank of England, lies with 100 other relics of Roman and later ages on a table in the Guildhall Museum. Soon it and the others will be shipped to Sydney, where they are to find a place in the Technilogical Museum. With it will go a fragment of a plate which Primus, a contemporary of Felix, made in Southern Gaul, a brick from, the city wall of Roman London, the upper stone ,of a handmill for grinding corn which was originally quarried at Andernach in Bavaria (not far from the birthplace of Herr Hitler) and a large mixing bowl bearing the stamp of Sollus, who seems to have worked near Lyons about 100 A.D. A number of specimens of the fine red pottery made in Gaul in Roman days and miscalled Samian will accompany it. ROMANS’ SMALL FEET. There is a preservative quality in London clay and Roman sandals, boot and shoe soles and uppers have been found still in excellent condition. Two of the soles are studded with hobnails. The Roman Londoners, by the way, had very small feet. Few of their successors of today could use this footwear without knowing where the shoe pinched. Earpricks seem to have been a necessary part of a Londoner’s equipment in Roman days. Though only two (both of bronze) are included in the collection for Sydney .they have been turned up in swarms under London. A narrow bronze spoon used for extracting cosmetics from small pottery bottles show that even if the Britons of pre-Roman days painted themselves blue with woad, as the history books tell us, the Romano-Briton ladies of London knew about face makeup. Bronze hairpins, needles of bone, bronze, and iron all represent women’s interests. WRITING ON WAX. Writing in Roman days involved the preliminary co-operation of the busy bee. The exhibits for Sydney include three fragments of wooden writing tablets, and four of the pointed metal “pens” used in writing. The tablets were coated with wax and the letters were scratched in the wax with the sharp end of the stylus. The butt was flattened and used for erasing the writing and smoothing the wax again. In one case the writer has leant too heavily on the pen and scratched the wood. A little pottery lamp seems too small to give any worthwhile light. Mr Waddington, an expert of .the Guildhadd Museum, thinks it was used to keep a pilot flame going at night to save having to start a fire anew in the morning. The Romans knew of the flint and “steel,” but their “steel,” or rather iron, was rather soft, and it must have been a task to get fire with it.