and others, was that when Romulus first organised his men by hundreds, he gave each company a standard consisting of a handful of twigs or grass on the point of a spear. In any case the maniple took its name from the hand, and the hand is often represented as the standard of the maniple; fig. 92 is taken from the Trajan Column. The cross-bar, which originally carried the banner, and its hanging tassels are shown in this standard, as in No. =237=, but the more important part of the cord, which fastened the bar to the shaft, has been omitted from the design. This fortuitous pattern of a cross was eagerly recognised by the early Church as a military emblem of Christianity, and the famous _labarum_, the miraculous standard which Christ gave to the Emperor Constantine on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge, was a cavalry _vexillum_ of the Roman army with the monogram of Christ emblazoned on its banner (fig. 93). The pieces of armour are described in the _Catalogue of Bronzes_ to which reference should be made for fuller details. The Catalogue numbers are painted on the objects. (185) _Bronzen aus Dodona in den Kgl. Museen zu Berlin_, p. 13, pl. 2; (201) Friederichs, _Kleinere Kunst_, 2197; (208) _Cat. of Bronzes_, 877; Benndorf, _Ant. Gesichtshelme_, p. 15, pl. 3; for the class see Curle, _A Roman Frontier Post and its People_, p. 179; (221) _B.M. Excavations in Cyprus_, p. 16, fig. 26; (236) _Cat. of Sculpture_, 2620; (237, 238, 239) reproduced by Daremberg and Saglio, _Dict. Ant._ s.v. _Signa Militaria_. =Weapons.=--The weapons of offence, which are exhibited in Table-Case E, differ from the majority of the antiquities shown in this room, in that many of them were made at a remote period in the history of Greece and Italy, some even dating from the beginning of the Bronze Age, when the use of metal had not long supplanted that of stone. In a few examples from the island of Cyprus, the metal is almost pure copper. It is therefore not strictly accurate to call these weapons Greek and Roman, for they were made a thousand years before those nations began; but they come from the lands which were afterwards inhabited by the Greeks and Romans, and are valuable as representing the development of arms in those parts of the world, and as being the work of the primitive races in whom the Greeks and Romans had their origin.