ABSTRACT

Roman law defines instrumentum domesticum as “the equipment necessary to the management and use of a household, furniture, tools, utensils, etc.” (Berger 1953: 505); for the modern student of antiquity, however, instrumentum primarily means the categories of materials of daily life that Heinrich Dressel gathered in volume XV of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum: bricks and other objects in heavy terracotta, amphorae, kitchen- and tableware, lamps, glass vessels, metal objects of various sorts, seals, gems, and rings. 1 Nevertheless this list is scarcely exhaustive, and we can follow Harris (1993: 7) in applying the definition to “most kinds of inscribed portable objects,” with the exceptions of coins and materials that function purely as carriers of writing (wooden tablets, ostraka, and the like).