It is a hollow silver statuette of the top half of a woman's body, with a mechanism to allow ground pepper or spices to be loaded into its base and then shaken out.

[3] Other sites have revealed food flavourings including coriander, poppyseed, celery, dill, summer savoury, mustard and fennel.

[4] Two 'pepper casters' were found at the House of Menander in Pompeii but these are ill-suited to setting upon a table, leading to suggestions that they were in fact used to sample wine rather than spread pepper.

[citation needed] There is a strong resemblance of the pepper pot to a design used for some steelyard balance weights at a later period in the Eastern Roman Empire.

However, subsequent thinking on the bronze weights has moved to the view that the design is not intended to depict an empress, or indeed any of the Roman goddesses.