A Reconstruction of a Roman Saddle

Abstract

I was not able to identify the caracalla, at that time, with any of the garments seen in the repertoire of western provincial Roman art; for two other styles of hooded cape, the Celtic byrrus and the Italian paenula, were also in circulation and not enough explicit information was available to distinguish one from the others. Recently, however, a complete surviving late Roman cape from Egypt has been published which reproduces the characteristic features of the byrrus as I once defined them.116 In particular, the byrrus has an extra V-shaped section of cloth protecting the open neck, and this was woven, we now see, as an integral part of the garment. The second cape, the paenula, was principally worn by military personnel and government officers (it may be argued) rather than by the generality of the civilian population of the northern provinces, and we would not expect, therefore, to meet it often in provincial funerary art.117 The gravestones of Gaul and Britain regularly show the male deceased dressed in a loose-fitting hooded cape which I have called the 'Gallic cape'.118 The clearest representations of it are found in Gallia Belgica; the British examples are a mere handful, lacking detail.119 By process of elimination one would be inclined to equate the Gallic cape with the caracalla; but the Bath defixiones offer more positive evidence. One caracalla could be explained away; two may be more than a coincidence. The caracalla, I submit, is the name of the everyday cape worn by men in the northern provinces. The Bath inscriptions raise two further points. The 'rustic capitals' of Docilianus' defixio suggested to Tomlin a date prior to A.D. 200.120 Of course, the curse may not have been inscribed in the second century.121 Nevertheless, it could contain the earliest known reference to the caracalla in Latin and be itself pre-Caracallan. Finally, we learn from the Bath curses that the correct original spelling of the term was caracalla and not caracallus, which I once favoured on the strength of the Greek texts.122 I was wrong.