File:Glass dropper-flask in the form of a secutor helmet with "snake thread" trails, made in Rhineland, 3rd century AD, British Museum (8872619130).jpg

The small flask, made by a glass-blowing workshop in Cologne, is designed as a perfume dropper.

This flask, in the form of a gladiator's helmet, is a product of the Rhineland glass industry. It has a narrow hole in the neck that would allow only drops of unguent or perfume to pass.

When the flask is inverted (and the helmet is the right way up) a blue trail, tooled flat and milled across the forehead, provides a nose and side whiskers. Birds on either side of the face are formed by unmilled thin trails of the same colourless (clear) glass as the vessel. The birds are particularly attractive and stand on a berried twig of opaque white with red berries, and a green twig and petals. The birds' eyes are colourless coils with opaque white and blue pupils. Generally, flattened and milled snake-thread trails are found on larger glasses, like this flask, while finer trails forming patterns such as floral elements, spirals, swastikas and volutes, appear on smaller vessels.

Another helmet similar to this one was found at Cologne. Dropper flasks in the form of helmets, but of green glass with green trails, were also known in the eastern Roman empire.

H. Tait (ed.), Five thousand years of glass-1, 2nd paperback edition (London, The British Museum Press, 1999) D.B. Harden and others, The British Museum: masterpiec (London, 1968) E. Köhne and C. Ewigleben (eds.), Gladiators and Caesars: the po (London, The British Museum Press, 2000) D. Harden (ed.), Glass of the Caesars, exh. cat. (London, The British Museum Press, 1988)