Roman Plates

I really enjoyed going to the Special Collections yesterday. Seeing all the items there was really cool, especially the hand-made illustrated book (I don't remember whether it was actually a Bible or not) from France. Out of all the things we looked at, there was one that stood out to me as very different: the Roman military/citizenship document. As Rome is my focus civilization, I figured I'd write a short post on the plates.

The actual plates (not the copy)

These plates were issued during the reign of Emperor Trajan in 109 AD on October 14 by imperial decree. (Ok, so that sounded really official but only because I pretty much stole it from the library website, which ironically was the first thing to come up when I googled "Roman plates citizenship.") They decreed that a former slave was now recognized as a citizen after serving in the military for many years and participating in the conquest of the Dacians in modern Romania. The plates also granted citizenship his family. The soldier would have received a copy, and another would have been placed in the temple of Minerva in Rome. Dr. Petersen compared these records' governmental significance to a driver's license.

But these plates are very different from a driver's license. They aren't too large, but they are made of bronze and subsequently something heavy enough you wouldn't want to carry around. If we exclude the massive bible that was to be chained to prevent theft, these were definitely the heaviest of the objects we saw despite being much smaller than some of the others. I wondered why the Romans would have picked such a heavy medium for this document when there were forms of paper being used in the Mediterranean. A couple reasons came to mind:

• Durability - metals are much more durable than animal skin or papyrus. It is also much more difficult to alter, which would be important for a legal document.
• Officiality - ok, that may not be a word. But the point is that something in metal just seems to have a more official feeling to is as if it was really something that Trajan's government would issue.
• Honor - something about the peoples of antiquity just seems to equate metals with honor, so the desire to honor this soldier for what he had done could certainly be another factor.
• Tradition - it could be that they simply stuck to the traditions that had been passed down to them.

So perhaps while other civilizations, such as Egypt, tried to use paper products (in their case papyrus) as much as possible, others chose to stick to previous methods for various purposes.

Trajan's Column, depicting the Roman conquest of the Dacians in modern Romania, in which this soldier participated.