Classical Studies 2700B

[On Tuesday, 9^th March we shall spend the first few minutes in further consideration of Roman Blacksmithing. (Please bring the page of illustrations from Tuesday’s website file.) Thereafter we shall proceed to the material below on Wood. CLM]

WOOD

In his Natural History Pliny the Elder (1st cent. AD; perished in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79) names the inventors of various arts, crafts and processes—mostly mythical, though a few may be historical. At 7.198 he says that carpentry was invented by Daedalus (which figures, since in Greek myth he is earliest person heard of doing woodwork), along with the saw, the axe, the plumb-line, the gimlet and glue. Slide from Pompeii shows Daedalus at work and gives much information about Roman woodworking; note bench with mortice (=hole) and tenon (=projection) joints; hammer (ball pene) and chisel; pegs and clamps fitting into bench to hold work steady (no evidence of vise in antiquity); also bow-drill, the only type known then, though there were augers with hard-wood handles.

Slide of various tools found in Essex (England) from Roman period: combination of hammer and adze, small hammer-head, gouges, chisel blades and saw blades—all made of iron. Description (and pictures) of adze.

Question of saws and setting of teeth; frame-saw—common form with tension device on one side; bow saw not uncommon (as also today). Discussion of large-scale sawing—to produce planks and beams (warning about regarding ancient pictures as being necessarily accurate; they are not photographs!) Also, there were no “hacksaws” in ancient times; no saw then could cut through metal.

Planes: 13 Roman versions survive (there is Greek word for this, but no surviving exx.) What is main difference between adze and plane? All planes, ancient and modern, are of basically same design, with blade wedged at about a 45° angle. They can have wooden or (better) metal soleplate; ex. (slide) of v. large plane from Cologne in Germany, approx. 30 x 5 cm—a “jack plane”; finer detail work done by a “smoothing plane”; also sandstone and dried sharkskin etc. used for smoothing.

One other v. important ancient device—the lathe. Problem of date of its invention: probably comes after discovery of how to “shave” pottery on fast wheel; Pliny says lathe invented by Theodorus of Samos (fl. c. 550 BC); this seems plausible, though earliest depiction of a lathe is from Egypt c. 300 BC. Two men were required to operate it.

Finally, illustration of a strange kind of workbench, used by a shoemaker, who held his work in place with a long leather strap pinned to bench at one end and held by his foot in a loop at the other. This will lead us into another topic—leather.