Does Virgil’s imaginary battle between mythical heroes reflect anything of the reality of axe combat in Iron Age Italy or in the Roman Empire? The general Latin term for an axe was securis, but Camilla’s weapon was no ordinary axe. It was double-bladed or bipennis (Aeneid 11.662, 694-698).
Readers of Ancient Warfare will be familiar with the funerary stele of Auvele Feluskes, a warlord who led a gens (clan) in Vetulonia in Etruria at the close of the seventh century BC. Feluskes is depicted in the newly fashionable Greek war gear of hoplite shield and Corinthian helmet but, like Camilla, he is armed with a bipennis.
Silius Italicus tells us that the Romans adopted the from Vetulonia ( 8.483–485). These symbolized a magistrate’s power to administer corporal and capital punishment. A model of the , iron rods bound around the haft of a , was, perhaps also from a set of . The axe brandished by Auvele Feluskes certainly represented his military prowess, but it also conveyed his total authority as judge and executioner.
