Missorium of Hercules fighting with the Lion of Nemea. Century VI.
Missorium is the Latin term commonly used by historians and historians of twentieth-century art to designate large plates of silver or gold tableware from late Antiquity. However, as A. M. Canto has shown, the term is a loan from the later Greek vocabulary, minorórion, which describes certain silver ware, but whose use is not attested in Roman times, but in the 6th-7th centuries AD. C. (see for example messorium ... a mensa in the glossary of Isidoro of Seville, and the voice missorium, -ii in the Oxford Latin Dictionary), and more often in Byzantine times. The general sense that is given to the term in modern terms (with very abundant bibliography, especially in German and English) is that of "silver plate sent or given in the name of the emperor" although, as is clear, it is not documented in antiquity, or in imperial times, neither for that form nor for that use.
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