By Simon Vanlint
This is the first of a three part article on Roman names of soldiers of the 2nd Augustan Legion (LEGIIAVG), ‘part one’ is about our need for names, part two is a list of names so far from their various respective sources and part three will be a further list to include work in progress on more names currently being compiled.
One of my pet interests with re-enactment has always been attention to small details, and this includes small personal articles that people from a previous time period such as the Roman Empire may have carried, and for reconstructing the Roman military this includes an item called a signaculum which to us modern people is often referred to as a "dog tag".
Very little is known about this signaculum, to the best of my knowledge none have been found and any reference to them is brief. I decided that our soldiers should have them as a talking point and also for roll-call. Identity tags of lead have been found for property and slaves (or possibly pets) and this was my reason for going with a lead tag, there is also a suggestion from a paper by Roy Davies that soldiers wore a lead tag with an official seal. Adrian Goldsworthy in his recent book "The complete Roman Army" (p.80) also states that the signaculum was made of lead and was carried in a small leather pouch. Add to this military lead ‘property markers’ found that identify specific centuries by name of their Centurions, particularly some found at Caerleon, home of the original LEGIIAVG, and others on display in the Grosvenor museum in Chester have left me with a strong conviction that such items were made from lead.
Without any hard evidence to go by I went with a rectangular design for our signaculum’s with a hole punched through for a leather thong, this was purely for simplification and ease of manufacture. The tags can be easily replaced at a later date if a genuine signaculum is identified. The details I thought pertinent to the tag should include the name of the soldier, the Century he served in, his unit plus the official seal. Not knowing what this seal was I have used a Claudian coin for an imprint as we are Claudian era troops, again this can be rectified when better evidence is available. This then left me with a need for Roman names to go on these tags, luckily a list of genuine names had been made available to LEGIIAVG in 1992 by Talbot Green who had done some research on the matter and this was my starting point, since then I have tried to add further names to that list along with any relevant details on those soldiers careers. So far a few publications have come my way which have added names to the original list and I still have other books to study which may add to that. While aware that our tags are speculative in their design, we are at least able to use genuine LEGIIAVG names and make people aware that signaculum’s existed in the first place.
