Skip to content

Ancient Roman soldier carved a phallus with a personal insult into this stone

    Archaeologists found a crude graffiti drawing of a penis at the ancient Roman fortress of Vindolanda, accompanied by a personal insult.
    enlarge † Archaeologists found a crude graffiti drawing of a penis at the ancient Roman fortress of Vindolanda, accompanied by a personal insult.

    Vindolana Charitable Trust

    Archaeologists excavating the remains of a Roman auxiliary fortress in the UK recently made a surprising and rather hilarious find: a small stone with the unmistakable image of the penis – basically an ancient Roman d**k photo, accompanied by a grossly insulting message aimed at someone the sculptor clearly didn’t like.

    The Vindolanda site is south of the defensive fortress known as Hadrian’s Wall. An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the ruins’ existence in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site and discovered a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715. The Rev. Anthony Hedley began work. excavating the site in 1814, but he died before he had a chance to record what he found for posterity. Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fortress was called Vindolanda.

    Serious archaeological excavations at the site began in the 1930s under the direction of Eric Birley, whose sons and grandson continued the work after his death, up to the present day. The low-oxygen conditions of the deposits (some of which extend six meters or 19 feet into the earth) mean that the recovered artifacts are remarkably well preserved. These include wooden writing tablets and over a hundred boxwood combs, which would have disintegrated long ago in more oxygen-rich conditions.

    Vindolanda Tablet 291, circa 100 CE: An invitation from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina, who invites her to a birthday party.
    enlarge † Vindolanda Tablet 291, circa 100 CE: An invitation from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina, who invites her to a birthday party.

    The site is most famous for the so-called Vinlandia tablets, one of the oldest surviving handwritten documents in the UK. Discovered in 1973, these are thin wooden leaves, about the size of a postcard, with text written in carbon-based ink. Most of the documents are official military communications and personal messages from soldiers in garrison to their families, revealing many details about life in the fort.

    For example, a tablet is a letter from a Roman cavalry officer named Masculus to a prefect asking for more beer to be sent to the garrison. (An army marches on its belly.) By far the best known is Tablet 291, written about 100 CE by the wife of a commander of a nearby fortress named Claudia Severa. It was addressed to Sulpicia Lepidina and invited her to a birthday party, and it is one of the earliest known examples of a woman writing in Latin.

    Among the many other interesting finds: a bronze and silver fibula (a brooch or pin for fastening clothes) in 2006; the remains of a female child between the ages of 8 and 10, found in a shallow pit in a barrack room in 2010; a wooden toilet seat unearthed in 2014; and two (unparalleled) Roman boxing gloves unearthed in 2017, similar to modern full-hand boxing gloves, except these date back to 120 CE.

    Also in 2017, archaeologists found cavalry barracks littered with swords, ink tablets, textiles and arrowheads, among other artifacts. Archaeologists also found a 5th-century chalice in 2020, and last year unearthed a carved sandstone depicting a naked warrior astride a horse — possibly the Roman deity Mars.

    Retired biochemist Dylan Herbert was volunteering at the dig site when he came across the carved stone.
    enlarge † Retired biochemist Dylan Herbert was volunteering at the dig site when he came across the carved stone.

    Vindolanda Charitable Trust

    As for this latest find, one of the volunteers working on the dig was a retired South Wales biochemist named Dylan Herbert, who initially thought of the stone as just a piece of rubble. But when he turned it over, he saw clear letters and realized it was far from ordinary. “It wasn’t until after we cleared the mud that I realized the full extent of what I had discovered, and I was absolutely delighted,” Herbert said.

    The stone is quite small, 40 cm wide by 15 cm high (15 inches by 6 inches). Experts in Roman epigraphy recognized the lettering as a mangled version of secundinus cacatorwhich translates into (ahem) “Secundinus, the shitter.” The penis image only added annoyance – a clever subversion of the traditional interpretation of a phallus as a positive symbol of fertility. The Vindolanda site now has 13 phallic carvings, more than have been discovered at any other excavation site along Hadrian’s Wall.

    “Retrieving an inscription, a direct message from the past, is always a great experience at a Roman excavation, but this one really raised our eyebrows when we deciphered the message on the stone,” said Andrew Birley, director of excavations and CEO of the Vindolanda Trust. “The author clearly had a big problem with Secundinus and was confident enough to publicly declare their thoughts on a stone. I have no doubt Secundinus would have been less than amused to see this when he wandered about on a rock over 1700 years ago.” the website.”