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78 FIRST PERIOD—ANTIOUITT

(to the corpse); but it shall not be unlawful to bury or to burn it with the
gold with which the teeth may perchance be bound together."
From this it results that at the time when the Law of the Twelve
Tables was written, that is, four centuries and a half before the Christian
era, there were already individuals m Rome who practised dental opera-
tions. And these individuals cannot have been medical men, as at that
epoch (corresponding pretty nearly with the date of Hippocrates' birth)
Rome had as yet no doctors.
The inquiry naturally suggests itself whether the gold mentioned in
the legal dispositions above cited was used for fixing artificial teeth or
simply for strengthening unsteady natural teeth. Some authors, Serre
among them,' have pronounced in favor of the first hypothesis, others,
as, for example, Geist-Jacobi,- are rather disposed to accept the second.
In truth, however, we do not possess sufficient historical data to defi-
nitely resolve this problem. I myself am rather of opinion that artificial
teeth were already in use in Rome, as they were, even before this time,
among the Etruscans. Indeed, if we take into consideration the priority
of the Etruscan civilization to the Roman and the relations of vicinity
existing between Etruria and the Roman State, of which it afterward
became a part, it is even possible that dental prosthesis was first practised
in Rome by Etruscans.
In a Greek-Roman necropolis near Teano (Province of Caserta, Italy)
there was found in Februar\-, 1907, a prosthetic piece of a very peculiar
construction, and which may be considered as quite unique in its kind.
It is an appliance destined to support three inserted human teeth (the
two lower central incisors and the lateral incisor on the right). These
teeth—lost perhaps by the patient himself, in consequence of alveolar
pyorrhea—were fixed by means of a system of rings, made of laminated
gold wire, turned around the teeth and then soldered.
By the examination of the piece it is easy to argue that the author of
this prosthesis made at first three separate rings by tightly turning the
laminated gold wire around each of the three teeth to be applied, and by
soldering together the ends of the wire forming each ring, after having
taken away the tooth, in order not to spoil it in making the soldering.
Then, with another laminated gold wire of sufficient length, he soldered
the three rmgs together in due position, put the appliance in the mouth
and turned the two ends of the wire around the sound teeth, serving
as a support for the lateral incisor on the left and the two canines.
After this, he took the apparatus delicately out of the mouth, made the
soldering necessary for finishing the skeleton of the apparatus, forcibh'

' Josef Scrrc, Zalinarziui kiinst, Ikrlin, 1804, 6.
p.
^ Geist-Jacobi, (leschiclitt- dtr Zahnluilkunck', 26.
p.