Johann Huttich, a cleric and antiquarian, wrote several volumes on Roman history, including an illustrated book on the antiquities of his native Mainz. Mainz (ancient Moguntiacum) was the site of a Roman legionary camp in the late first century B.C. and a base for military campaigns against Germanic tribes along the Rhine frontier. In Huttich's engraving, a pillar of crumbling Roman brickwork looms over the houses and churches of current-day Mainz. The Roman funerary inscription on the left, referring to a local member of the legionary force, offers more explicit epigraphic testimony of the city's historical past.