Draco standard
The draco was a dragon standard: a dragon’s head on a pole, with a body of cloth that filled with wind and hissed as the riders moved. Arrian called it Scythian; by the later Roman empire each cohort and the emperor himself rode behind dragons.
Meaning
Arrian described these standards in his manual of cavalry drill (Tactica 35). In the version the Suda preserves, they were textiles dyed to look like snakes, hung on poles of equal length; when the bearers ran or rode, they swelled out until they looked very like the creatures, and made a sound from the breeze forced through them. Ammianus Marcellinus describes them at the emperor Constantius’s entry into Rome: dragons woven of purple thread, bound to the golden and jewelled tops of spears, their wide mouths open to the breeze so that they hissed as if angry, and their tails winding in the wind. Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1875) says that under the later emperors each cohort had a dragon for its ensign, carried by the draconarius.
Origin and history
The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica thinks the dragon came to Rome from outside. It calls it the military sign of many peoples, the Dacians and the Parthians among them, and thinks it was probably first used by the Romans as the ensign of barbarian auxiliaries; it notes that the Dacians carried a standard of a contorted serpent, and that standards much like dragons appear on the Arch of Titus and Trajan’s Column as the standards of barbarians.
In Ammianus’s history the dragon also marked the commander. In his account of the battle Julian, then Caesar, fought against the Alamanni, a tribune of fleeing cavalry recognised Julian by the purple ensign of a dragon fitted to the top of a very long lance, and turned back to fight.
How the form changed
The sources describe two kinds of dragon. Arrian and Ammianus describe a windsock: a cloth body that hangs limp until the wind or the gallop fills it. Smith describes the dragon of the later cohorts as woven on a square piece of cloth, raised on a gilt staff with a crossbar, like a Vexillum, and cites the poet Sidonius’s phrase “textilis anguis”, a woven serpent. Neither source says which was commoner.
The dragon standard in England
Dragons stayed on the battlefield long after Rome. The 1911 Britannica notes the dragon standard placed near Harold on the Bayeux Tapestry, and quotes an order of Henry III in 1244 for a dragon “in fashion of a standard of red silk sparkling all over with fine gold”, its tongue to look like burning fire and seem always moving, its eyes of sapphires or other suitable stones. The dragon that became the emblem of Wales is on the red dragon page.
Read next
- Next in Historical flagsLabarumThe labarum was the military standard of Constantine the Great, made after the vision he reported before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312: a gilded spear with a crossbar, a square jewelled banner hanging from it, and the Chi-Rho inside a gold wreath at the top.
- English kings fought under dragon standards, and the red dragon became the emblem of Wales.Red dragon of WalesThe red dragon of Wales, Y Ddraig Goch: a red, winged, four-legged dragon on the Welsh flag of white and green. It was a badge and supporter of the Tudor kings and became the official flag of Wales in 1959.
See also
Vexillum, Jolly Roger, Blackbeard’s flag, Calico Jack’s flag, Bartholomew Roberts’s flag, Emanuel Wynne’s flag.
Sources
- Scythian standards (Suda On Line, sigma 322), translated by William Hutton; an approximation of Arrian, Tactica 35.3–4, Suda On Line (Stoa Consortium), sigma 322
- Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History, Book XVI (Loeb translation), Ammianus Marcellinus, The Roman History, vol. I, translated by John C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library, 1935), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), XVI.10.7; XVI.12.39
- Signa Militaria (Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1875), James Yates, in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875, pp. 1044–1046, LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer), p. 1044
- Flag (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 10, Encyclopædia Britannica, via Wikisource, Greek and barbarian standards; Bayeux Tapestry; Henry III
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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