File:Roman folding knife (FindID 224139).jpg

English: A Roman folding knife, the cast copper-alloy handle of which is an erotic scene. The handle is sub-rectangular and openwork. An iron blade has corroded in its folded position within a slot in the handle. The blade folded around a rivet towards the corner of the handle's pedestal. Corrosion product has spread from the blade across much of the pedestal base and the slot faces (both sides, including within the open area), as well as around the perforations for the rivet. The remnant of the blade, as well as the length of the slot, implies that the blade would have been a minimum of c. 44mm long. The handle has a mid-green patina with some wear and corrosion, although none active.

The handle is modelled in the round, and depicts a standing male figure engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman seated on the bent shoulders of a third person, who is kneeling on one knee. This latter is smaller, appears to wear a hat and has clasped hands. The group is set on a largely plain square pedestal. The women and the kneeling figure are naked, while the man wears boots and possibly a tunic; his hands support the woman's legs around his waist. The modelling is reasonably crude and the details of the figures are poorly indicated. That said, moulding extends to eye sockets, oval eyes and noses on all three figures. The hairstyles on both main figures are incised, with the female sporting a distinctively elongated hairstyle. There is a deep transverse incision below the feet of the main figures. On one large face of the pedestal there is a second incision below; this is absent on the other face on which the kneeling figure's foot goes below the line of the top of the pedestal. The slot for the knife blade runs up the back of the standing male figure.

The knife is virtually identical to an example found at Verulamium in a 4th-century context (Frere 1984, 56-59; ref. 217, Plate III). There are only slight differences in some of the incised decoration. On the Verulamium example the male's fingers are delineated on one face; wear on this artefact renders them indiscernible. A further example of this type can be found recorded on this database (ref. SF-A23522), with other similar examples known (see discussion in ibid., 58-59/Plate III; Mills 2000, 87; ref. RB259). On a more unusual variant recorded on this database (ref. LIN-536F87) a severed head has intruded into the scene!