Dolabra

The dolabra was a versatile axe used by the people of Italy since ancient times. Depending on who carried it, it served as a pickaxe for miners and excavators, as a priest's implement for the ritual slaughter of animals, and as an entrenching tool of the mattock kind in Roman infantry tactics. One recorded use in battle comes from the first century CE at the siege of Augustodunum Haeduorum, where armoured Gallic gladiators were defeated by legionaries wielding dolabrae. Frontinus reports that Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo liked to say that you defeat the enemy with a pickaxe. This atlas records the dolabra as a piece of legionary equipment that sits between a digging tool and a weapon.