Two Silver Plates from the late Antiquity in the National Museum in Warsaw

This is a new publication of two late Roman silver plates, found in 1852 in Toulouse and kept now in the National Museum in Warsaw. They were mentioned in recent studies on Gallic silver vessels, but most scholars consider them to have been lost since World War II. In 1889 the plates became part of the Princes Czartoryski collection of antiquities, acquired in Paris and then moved to the castle at Goluchów, Poland. During World War II they were taken to the National Museum. Renovations of the plates revealed new elements of ornamentation, which shed light on their interpretation. An inscription on the plate with a golden multiplum of Theodosius II, with names of people known from the correspondence of Sidonius Apollinarius, allows us to connect both plates with largitiones among Gallic aristocracy of the 5th c. AD.