A Roman Garland Sarcophagus in New York

This sarcophagus was found in 1889 in a tomb near Capranica, a modern municipality about 40 miles to the northwest of Rome, not far from the ancient town of Sutrium (modern Sutri) on the Via Cassia. It contained the skeleton of a middle-aged man. Today it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (90.12).

The case of the sarcophagus is made of Luni marble, while the lid is of Pentelic marble and is narrower that the case. This mismatch may be the result of the use of marble blocks originally intended for other purposes. It is less likely that a finished lid was chosen for this case from a stock of ready-made lids, since the reliefs on case and lid seem to have been carved by the same hand.

The Sarcophagus belongs to the Western type (as opposed to the Attic and Asiatic types: see the previous post “Types of Roman Sarcophagi,” April 2015). Only the front and sides are carved, while the back is plain, since it was meant to be set against the tomb wall, where it would not be seen. Moreover, this is a “garland sarcophagus,” especially popular in the early years of sarcophagus production, from the early second century AD. Before then, when cremation was still the norm, garlands decorated ash chests and funerary altars. The garlands represented the real swags of flowers and fruit with which the survivors of the deceased adorned those chests and altars when they visited their loved ones at certain times of the year. With the transition to inhumation, garlands continued to be used for the decoration of sarcophagi.

Olivia Roberts

Hadrian's Villa: The Pecile

The largest of all Roman villas was that built (and probably designed) by the emperor Hadrian near Tibur (modern Tivoli). Its largest part -- hard to miss when one looks at the model (above) or the plan (below) -- is known as the Pecile.

The Italian name evokes a connection with the building erected in the Agora of Athens in the fifth century BC: the Stoa Poikile, famous both for the paintings it housed (hence its name, Painted Porch) as well as for its association with philosophy (Stoicism). A passage in the Historia Augusta (Hadrianus 26.5) records that Hadrian himself named this and other parts of his villa for famous places:

His villa at Tibur was marvellously constructed, and he actually gave to parts of it the names of provinces and places of the greatest renown, calling them, for instance, Lyceum, Academia, Prytaneum, Canopus, Poecile and Tempe. And in order not to omit anything, he even made a Hades.

The Pecile was a huge quadriporticus, i.e., a courtyard enclosed by porticoes on all four sides, measuring 232 x 97 meters -- many times larger than the celebrated Athenian building that supposedly inspired it.

The Pecile featured on its northern side a double portico, of which the 9-meter-tall central spine wall is preserved, as are the bases for the columns at regular intervals (intercolumniation = 3.6 meters) to either side.

The north side of the spine wall of the double colonnade, facing east: column bases are to the left.

The south side of the spine wall, facing west. The column bases are to the left. The pool is to the left of the trees.

The double colonnade had a gable roof. This photo shows the holes for the roof beams at the top of the spine wall.

Circular spaces at both ends of the spine wall allowed one to do laps on this “track,” which was covered and thus offered protection in inclement weather. This double colonnade may have been modeled on the running track (dromos) that was part of a typical Greek gymnasion, which typically offered two options: an open-air dromos called a paradromis and a roofed one called a xystos.

The other three sides were covered, too, but they were single porticoes; the east and west ones were slighty convex.

The quadiporticus surrounded a garden in the center of which was a pool (piscina) measuring 100 x 25 meters.

The Pecile was the ideal place for exercise -- the daily walk prescribed by doctors -- and for quiet contemplation, isolated as it was from the rest of the villa by its walls except at the places where it communicated with contiguous structures, such as the Sala dei Sette Filosofi and Ninfeo-Stadio on the eastern side, or the Edificio con tre Esedre on the southern side. Did it also have painted panels, like its namesake? Perhaps, though there is no evidence that it did, apart from the name.

In fact, “Pecile” may be a misnomer, at least for the entirety of what the term now designates, as Frank Sear has suggested. “The layout of the whole area with the pool in the center and the large open space in the middle suggests that the complex might well be an imitation of the Lyceum or Academy in Athens rather then the Stoa Poikile.” It is true that the Athenian Stoa Poikile was a much shorter structure, hardly a running track (cf. drawing by W. B. Dinsmoor above, top center).

The Pecile is built upon an artificial terrace that rises as much as 15 meters on the western side, which was a separate part of the villa known as the Cento Camerelle (Hundred Chambers, although there were in fact more than a hundred -- the red lines in the photo show their disposition). These were small cells in as many as four stories, apparently apartments for the service staff, with wooden floors and accessed from wooden balconies except at the ground level, which included storerooms and latrines. The cells were nearly identical and had a single opening that served as both door and window. It is estimated that they lodged some 1500 people.

• Bruciati, Andrea and Benedetta Adembri. Villa Adriana: Guida (2017) 62-65.
• Christesen, Paul and Donald G. Kyle. A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity (2014) 298-299.
• Sear, Frank. Roman Architecture (1983) 175-176.

Photos courtesy Hannah, Susanne, and Thomas Marier

The Judgment of Paris on a Pyxis

This small vase -- it is less than seven inches tall with its lid and less than five without it -- is a pyxis (pl. pyxides), a round lidded container for cosmetics and jewelry. The pyxis was an everyday container for Greek women. It was also associated with weddings. Pyxides were among the presents brought to the bride were amphoriskoi (tiny amphorae for perfumed oil), epinetra (knee protectors for carding wool), and lekythoi (oil bottles), as well as loutrophoroi (large pots for the bridal bath). Many of these vases also bore images relating to marriage in some way.

Our vase depicts the Judgment of Paris, certainly a subject relating to marriage and indeed one of the most popular in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art. For example, we have hundreds of black-figure and red-figure vases that depict it, and twenty-one Roman wall paintings, most from Pompeii.

The story was widely known. At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, an apple bearing the inscription TO THE FAIREST is tossed into the midst of the guests. When the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aprhodite each claim the title, Zeus tells Hermes to take them to Mt Ida near Troy, where the shepherd Paris, a son of Priam, will decide which was the most beautiful. Each of the goddesses offers Paris a bribe -- Hera promises him worldy power, Athena victory in battle, and Aphrodite the loveliest woman in the world - Helen of Sparta. Paris, ever the voluptuary, chooses Helen, and thus begins the Trojan War.

The vase shows Paris as a beardless youth sitting on a rock, not in Asiatic dress but in ordinary traveler’s gear: broad-brimmed hat (petasos) hanging down his back from a cord, short cloak (chlamys), tall laced sandals over stockings, and knotted club. Behind him is a bearded man wrapped in a long mantle (himation) and holding a tall staff. He may be Priam, as the great expert Sir John Beazley suggested, but there is no way of telling. Paris is looking up at Hermes, easily recognized by his wand (kerykeion), dressed in chlamys, petasos, and winged boots.

What is going on between Paris and Hermes? What moment in the story is depicted? One idea is that Hermes has just arrived to give Paris Zeus’s orders (as Richter thought). Another is that Paris has already received his orders and is trying to make up his mind (Schefold).

Behind Hermes are the three goddesses. Hera, wearing chiton, veil, and diadem, stands holding her scepter. Facing her is Athena in peplos and aegis, holding a spear; she has taken off her helmet and put on a diadem. 

Behind Athena stands Aphrodite wearing a chiton, himation, and diadem; with her left hand she adjusts her himation and with her right she holds a metal phiale or else an exaleiptron filled with perfume.

The technique is white-ground, with figures are drawn in black outline and a variety of ceramic colors, especially for the garments. 

The piece is attributed to the Penthesilea Painter and its date is ca. 470 BC.

• Richter, Gisela M. A., “White Athenian Pyxis,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 3 (1908) 154-155.
• Richter, Gisela M. A. and Lindsley F. Hall, Red-Figured Athenian Vases in the Metropolitan Museum, Vol, 1 (1936) 101-103.
• Schefold, Karl and Franz Jung, Die Sagen von den Argonauten, von Theben und Troia in der klassischen und hellenistischen Kunst (1989) 104.

Funerary Relief of the Decii

This relief of Luna marble was found near a columbarium on the Via Ostiensis, the much-traveled road that connected Rome with Ostia, the city’s major port at the mouth of the Tiber. Its findspot was behind the Basilica di San Paolo fuori le Mura about two kilometers down the road and the year was 1898. But that is all we know. It may have come from a tomb. There is no upper frame, and the back slants down to the right -- an oddity. It may have stood upon an altar, as suggested by a recess on the bottom.

The relief shows a man and a woman united by a gesture known as the “joining of the right hands” (dextrarum iunctio), often, though not always, signifying marriage.  Between them is their child, perhaps very young, though we cannot be sure, since his head is lost. The names of all three are framed in the epitaph on the base: A(uli) Deci Spintheris, A(uli) Deci Felicionis, Deciae Spendusae.

Decius and Decia are tilting their shoulders outward, as though to make room for their child in the middle, and they are facing forward. Decius’s head is prominent, out of proportion to his torso. He wears a toga and in his left hand holds a rotulus (parchment roll), the top of which has been broken off; the rotulus may be the marriage contract (tabulae nuptiales). The child wears a tunic and holds a small bird (a dove). Decia wears a garment knotted at intervals on the sleeve; over her left shoulder and draped about her waist is a cloak that she has gathered in front of her breast in her left hand, on which she wears a ring.

It seems that less effort was given to Decius’s head than to that of his wife. His forehead creases are merely incised, and his locks lie flat in cookie-cutter patterns. Decia, by contrast, sports a distinctive hairdo: parted in the middle, the hair is arranged in waves and knotted at the back of the head, with large curly locks falling down in front of the ears. Her ears have holes for earrings, now lost.

Most scholars have dated the relief to the Flavian period or even later. But Valentin Kockel has argued that the hairstyle conforms to the locks-on-the-temples type (Schläfenlöckchen-Typus) of Antonia Minor; he finds analogues in earlier portraits. The carving, too, looks to him Tiberian, the treatment of the garments, Claudian.

Who were the Decii? What were they saying with dress, gesture, attributes (parchment roll, dove, ring), hairstyle, physiognomy? Kockel has surveyed 270 such funerary reliefs and points to an answer: “The clients who commissioned the portraits belonged overwhelmingly to the freedman class... …the reliefs reflected the aspirations and ideals of that class. The format, with frontal figures standing shoulder to shoulder, was inspired by honorific statues of magistrates set in public places; the wearing of the toga expressed the newly won citizen status of the menfolk; the emphasis on marital ties declared the legitimacy of their families” (Ling 190).

• Gasparri, Carlo and Rita Paris, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme: le Collezioni (2013) 186.
• Kockel, Valentin. Porträtreliefs stadtrömischer Grabbauten: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und zum Verständnis des spätrepublikanisch-frühkaiserzeitlichen Privatporträts (1993) 190-191.
• Ling, Roger. Review of Kockel (1993). The Classical Review 46 (1996) 191-192.

Early Greek Painting: the Metopes from Thermon

While vases are our chief source for early painting in Greece, there are some survivals in other media. Among these are painted terracotta slabs that once decorated old wooden temples, in particular those from Temple C at Thermon in Aetolia, near the western end of the Gulf of Corinth. The style of the painting, which shows Corinthian influence, points to a date of ca. 630-620 BC.

The drawing shows how these slabs were set as metopes between cross-beams capped by triglyphs. They are slightly more than two and a half feet square.

The background is a cream-colored clay slip. The skin of male figures is generally brown outlined in black; that of female ones is white outlined in red.

Some of these painted terracotta panels have subjects drawn from myth, including Perseus fleeing with Medusa’s head tucked into a sack, a hunter (perhaps Orion) carrying his quarry on a pole, two half-naked women who may be the daughters of Proetus, and, illustrated above, the sisters Aedon and Chelidon (better known as Procne and Philomela) with the dead child Itylus (or Itys). The identification of the last subject would be difficult were it not for the retrograde inscription labeling the figure to the right: CHELID(W)ON. (The W, written like our letter F, is a digamma, which later dropped out of the alphabet).

The story is rather a gruesome one, best known in its Attic version, where the sisters are Procne (Aedon) and Philomela (Chelidon). Procne marries Tereus and goes to live with him in distant Thrace. Lonely Procne/Aedon longs for her sister. Tereus fetches Philomela/Chelidon but rapes her on the way, cutting out her tongue to prevent her from telling. But Philomela/Chelidon weaves the rape into a cloth, and after Procne/Aedon sees it, the sisters unite to avenge themselves on Tereus. This they do by murdering Itys/Itylus, the son of Tereus by Procne, and serving him to his father for dinner. When Tereus discovers the truth about his meal, he chases the women, whereupon they all are turned into birds: Procne/Aedon becomes a nightingale, Philomela/Chelidon a swallow, and Tereus a hoopoe.

The composition of the metope is simple. Aedon and Chelidon face each other over a table on which the dead Itylus lies. The boy’s head is faintly discernible in the crook of Chelidon’s arms (cf. the drawing above). Are they mourning the boy? It is more likely that they are butchering him. After all, at this point in the story, they were out for vengeance.

Payne, H. G. G. “On the Thermon Metopes.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 27 (1925/1926) 124-132.

Schefold, Karl. Götter- und Heldensagen der Griechen in der Früh- und Hocharchaischen Kunst (1993).

Topper, Kathryn, R., “Coming of Age at Thermon.” Center for Hellenic Studies Open House 3/1/2018 (YouTube).

Early Hellenistic Coins from Rhodes

In the course of his conquests (336-323) Alexander the Great set up many mints (26 are known) to turn the booty captured from the Persian Empire into coins for his soldiers. His silver issues used the same basic design: on the obverse the head of Heracles wearing the lion’s skin and on the reverse the hero’s father Zeus, sitting on his throne and holding his scepter and eagle. Even after 323 BC, these “Alexanders” continued to be struck on a large scale (the last ones were issued as late as 65 BC). Instantly recognized and widely accepted, the posthumous coinage of Alexander served as the de facto standard in the Hellenistic economy.

While most cities in Asia Minor were following this trend, moving away from their own distinctive coinages toward that of their Macedonian conqueror, a few continued to produce their own civic issues. One of them was Rhodes, the largest and most important of the islands off the southern coast of Asia Minor (the Dodecanese) and indeed one of the great commercial powers of the eastern Mediterranean.

The coin shown above is a silver didrachm (worth two drachmae) dating from the second half of the third century or perhaps somewhat later. The obverse shows the head of Helios, the god of the sun and the patron deity of Rhodes. The god’s pose is nearly frontal. His head is surrounded by rays of light.

The poet Pindar, in an ode (Olympian 7) that was monumentalized in gold letters inside the Temple of Athena at Lindos, one of the island’s cities, tells how Helios came to be the island’s patron. The myth begins long ago, just after the defeat of the Titans. When the three sons of Cronus and Rhea cast lots for their portions of the world, with Zeus receiving the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld, Helios happened to be absent (for he was busy giving light and warmth to the world) and so received no realm. When he complained, Zeus offered to recast the lots, but Helios said that he would be content to have a certain island that he, the all-seeing god, knew was soon to emerge from the sea and destined to be “rich in nurture for men and kindly to their flocks,” i.e., fertile. Zeus nodded and Helios “mingled in love with Rhodes and sired seven sons whose minds were subtler than any of that day,” three of whom in turned sired the eponyms of the island’s greatest cities, Kamiros, Ialysos, and Lindos.

On the reverse, within a circle of dots, is the emblem of Rhodes, the rose (rhodon in Greek, which of course lies at the root of the name of Helios’s bride and the island itself). Above is the name of the Rhodian magistrate in charge of minting the coin, one Aristokritos. Below the rose is the abbreviated ethnic: the first two letters, rho and omicron, of the Greek place name ΡΟΔΟΣ (Rhodes). In the field to the right is a single rosebud on a stem with long tendrils; its stem crosses that of the central rose, terminating just below the first letter of the abbreviated ethnic. In the field to the left is an aphlaston (also called an aplustre), an ornament capping the stem or stern of ship.

A stylized representation of a many-beaked bird’s head with a long history (for which see Wachsmann 163-197), the aphlaston was a symbol of naval strength (hence the practice, widely attested in the ancient world, of cutting off and displaying the aphlaston of an enemy ship as a sort of trophy). The image to the right is of a rock carving at Lindos, with an inscription recording a naval victory.

Hoffmann (119ff.) sketches the iconography of Helios down to the third century and beyond. From ca. 500 BC the god appears on Attic vases as a youthful charioteer with a nimbus; by ca. 450 BC he has lost his beard. An red-figure calyx-krater dating from ca. 430 BC depicts a beardless youth wearing a solar disc and emerging from the Ocean in his four-horse chariot (cf. the image; the boys represent stars).

Rhodian coinage from the end of the fifth century shows a youth with radiating curls suggesting flames. The great sculptor Lysippus of Sicyon was especially noted for his statue of Helios driving his four-horse chariot at Rhodes (Pliny, Natural History 34.63), which, though lost, is known from copies and imitations, the best of which may be this metope (right) from the Temple of Athena at Troy (ca. 300-280).

Then there was Lysippus’s pupil, Chares of Lindos, who produced the huge statue we know as the Colossus of Rhodes (on which more below). One may, it is true, detect shifts in the iconography of Helios over time--in particular the influence of the portraiture of Alexander in the “long wavy strands centrally parted and falling like a shaggy mane along the sides of the face” as well as fuller cheeks and heavier brows and chin (Hoffmann 121). Yet the basic scheme did not change: a beardless youth adorned with his chief attribute, rays of light around the head.

Now let us look at another, earlier Rhodian issue:

The head of Helios on this silver didrachm, unlike the one we have considered hitherto, is shown in profile and wears a radiate taenia (a rayed band). Why the profile pose? Was it to draw attention to the radiate taenia? Richard Ashton thinks so. He argues that the series to which it belonged was struck between 304 and 265 BC for a special purpose: to pay for the construction of that huge bronze statue by Chares of Lindos mentioned above, the Colossus of Rhodes. The Rhodians were grateful to their patron god for protecting them when their city was besieged by Demetrios Poliorketes (Demetrios the Besieger--the name is ironic, since the siege was a failure). When Demetrios left in 304 BC, the proceeds from the sale of the siege towers he left behind--300 talents--were used to pay for the Colossus. If Ashton is right, Helios on the coins in this series is a reflection of the Colossus--in effect an advertisement for the project and a commemoration of it. And it deserved the attention. After all, it counted as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Ashton may be right. But the truth is that the coinage tells us little about the Colossus that we did not already know: the god was shown as a beardless youth wearing a radiate crown. A relief (right) found on Rhodes, if it really “gives us an almost contemporary picture of the Colossus,” as Herbert Maryon believes, has the god shading his eyes with his right hand, gazing into the distance, with a piece of drapery hanging from his pendant left arm. Maryon argues that the drapery serves to mask a structural support.

Maryon's reconstruction is shown to the left. It should be noted, however, that the relief on which it is based has been dismissed as a generic self-crowning athlete by Reynold Higgins (134). The Colossus collapsed during the earthquake of 226 BC and remained on the ground for the next nine centuries.

The story of the island’s beginnings told of Helios’s devotion to it (as his chosen realm and even as his bride); Demetrius’s failed assault at the end of the fourth century seemed a confirmation of his favor. In turn the Rhodians showed their devotion to their patron deity by retaining their traditional Helios coinage despite the general trend toward "Alexanders" and even by commissioning an unprecedented monument to him, which may have been reflected in a special coin series emphasizing the god’s radiate crown.

• Ashton Richard H. J. “Rhodian coinage and the Colossus.” Revue Numismatique, 30 (1988) 75-90.
• Higgins, Reynold. “The Colossus of Rhodes,” in Peter Clayton and Martin Price, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (1990) 124-137.
• Hoffmann, Herbert. “Helios.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 2 (1963) 117-124.
• Howgego, Christopher. Ancient History From Coins. 1995.
• Maryon, Herbert. “The Colossus of Rhodes.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 76 (1956) 68-86.
• Nisetich, Frank. Pindar’s Victory Songs. 1980.
• Thoneman, Peter. The Hellenistic World: Using Coins as Sources. 2015.
• Wachsmann, Shelley. Seagoing Ships & Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant. 1998.

The Forum Transitorium

It is late in the reign of Domitian (ruled AD 81-96). The emperor Domitian is about to make a major change in the area of the Imperial Fora. Between the Forum Augusti and Forum Iulium on the one side and his father Vespasian’s Templum Pacis on the other was a very old street, the Argiletum, which ran from the Subura to the center of the city, entering the old Forum between the Basilica Aemilia and the Curia. Like the Subura, the Argiletum was crowded, noisy, smelly, and disreputable, as least in the eyes of authors such as Juvenal and Martial.  A new temple precinct would put an end to all such commercial activity there.

One of Martial's poems (1.117) offers evidence that in AD 85 or 86 the new forum had not yet been built there. This passage is taken as a terminus post quem for Domitian’s intervention.

What Domitian decided to do was to monumentalize the Argiletum where it passed between the Forum Augusti, Forum Iulium, and Templum of Pacis.  He would build a new forum there, with a temple dedicated to Minerva, his patron goddess.  The forum was still under construction at the time of his assassination in AD 96 and was completed by his successor Nerva in AD 97: hence it is also known as the Forum Nervae.  But others call it the Forum Transitorium or Forum Pervium, to emphasize its continued use as the main thoroughfare between the Subura and the old Forum.  Just what name Domitian would have given his new forum will never be known, for the name was erased along with all other public mentions of his existence when the Senate officially condemned his memory in a damnatio memoriae.

The new forum was about 120 meters long but only 45 meters wide.  On its long sides it shared walls with the adjacent Forum Iulium, Forum Augusti, and Templum Pacis, and on each of its crescent-shaped short sides there was a gate, for this forum was to remain a thoroughfare.  Wheel ruts in the paving in front of the gate next to the temple may go back to antiquity.  If it was the smallest of the imperial fora, it was perhaps also the most frequently trodden.  A semicircular portico, the Porticus Absidata, was added behind the temple to serve as a grand entrance into the new forum from the side of the Subura.

At its northeast end stood a small temple to Minerva.  It was still in good shape in the seventeenth century, when it was removed to be reused elsewhere.  But the Marble Plan shows that it was hexastyle prostyle.  There was an apse at the rear of the cella for the cult statue of the goddess.

The narrowness of the space meant that there was no room for covered colonnades.  The Forum Iulium and the Forum Augusti and the Templum Pacis (with the exception of its northwest wall--a point to which we shall return) all had covered colonnades.  No room here for those, so the architect had a problem.  The solution was to set the columns close to the wall, with the entablature and attic projecting out from the wall over each of them.  The colonnade thus created cannot said to be “engaged” in the proper sense, since the column itself is not so attached to the wall that a part of its circumference is cut off by the line of the wall; instead, the column stands free but is attached to the wall by the entablature and the attic acting as a sort of bracket.

This is the first example of this bracketing in the extant remains of Roman architecture.  There is evidence for this development that’s a bit earlier in a painting, in Cubiculum 16 of the Pompeian Villa of the Mysteries, which of course must have been produced before AD 79, shown in the picture above.

Along each long side slender Corinthian columns of Phrygian purple marble created bays.  About eleven meters of the wall and two columns have been preserved.  The photo shows how much lower the ground was two millennia ago.  This ruin is known today rather unflatteringly as Le Colonnacce, “those ugly columns.”

The wall is tufa (peperino), with some of the marble lining still in place.  On the projecting entablatures above the columns and continuing along the wall between the columns is a frieze, poorly preserved, and a cornice.  Above the entablature is an Attic, some 4.4 meters tall, itself topped with a cornice.  In the single surviving bay there is a recess with a large relief panel showing a female figure.  We have to imagine a line of such bracketed columns all along the lateral walls of the forum, perhaps some twenty per side, producing some 38 bays, with recessed relief panels in each.  Holes in the front surfaces of the attic projections and on top of the attic cornices suggest that something was affixed to the front of, and on top of, each projection.  If we add all this up--meters and meters of frieze, relief panels in each bay, objects attached to the front and top of the projections--we end up with, well, a lot.

It was once thought that the attic figure was Minerva, repeated in each bay. That would mean as many as 38 Minervas!

Then in 1996 H. Wiegartz showed that the relief has a parallel in an inscribed stele found at Aphrodisias in Turkey representing the personification of the ethnos of the Piroustae, a people of Pannonia.  Both figures carry a helmet with a plume, a small round shield, a long cinched garment, a cloak secured at the right shoulder, and a broad belt.  The belts are nearly identical, right down to the little spur that is turned downward on the Roman relief, upward on the one from Turkey.  Wiegartz and others since have concluded that the attic figure preserved from the Forum Transitorium is non other than the personification of the ethnic group called the Piroustae.

It may be, then, that the Forum Transitorium featured in each bay a different personified people (ethnos) over whom the Romans claimed to hold sway.  A monument that gathered many ethne was in effect a display of Roman of the breadth of Rome's conquests.  The whole point was to show a great number of peoples.  Servius (ad Aen. 8.721) reports that “Augustus made a portico in which he assembled images of all peoples [simulacra omnium gentium], on which account it is called the Porticus ad Nationes."  This monument is lost, but the Temple of Aphrodite Prometor (i.e., Venus Genetrix) at Aphrodisias, excavated 1979-81, offers an analogue: it  featured the sculpted representations of some 50 conquered peoples in its portico, some of which have been preserved.

If the female attic figures represented were simulacra gentium, then it is possible that the reference was to Domitian’s Dacian campaigns in AD 86-88, for which he celebrated a double triumph in AD 89.  The metal objects affixed to the attic may have included the spoils from that war.  This may be guesswork, but its reasonable guesswork.

So we have a plausible explanation for a part of the sculptural program--the attic reliefs.  But what about the frieze?  And the decoration of the temple?  We hope to return to these questions in a future post.

[For those who cannot not accept the hypothesis that Domitian built the Forum Transitorium to commemorate his Dacian triumph in AD 89, there is always the explanation offered by James Anderson in 1982, which which we began: that Domitian’s aim was to close the Argiletum to commercial traffic.  Anderson argues that to that end Domitian moved the northwest wall of his father’s Templum Pacis, eliminating its covered colonnade to make room for his own project.  This has the advantage of explaining the asymmetrical layout of the Templum Pacis, whose rear wall does not have a covered portico to match that of the other three walls.]

• Anderson, James.  “Domitian, the Argiletum an the Temple of Peace.”  American Journal of Archaeology 86 (1982) 101-110.
• Claridge, Amanda.  Rome.  An Oxford Archaeological Guide.  2010.
• Kleiner, Diana.  Open Yale Courses.  Lecture 13, chapter 6.
• Kleiner, Diana.  Roman Sculpture.  1992.
• Sear, Frank.  Roman Architecture.  1982.
• Ward-Perkins, J. B.  Roman Imperial Architecture.  1981.
• Wiegartz, H.  “Simulacra gentium auf dem Forum Romanum.”  Boreas 19 (1996) 171-179.

The Villa Iovis

The ruins of Tiberius' clifftop retreat on Capri, the "Villa Iovis."  The church and statue (upper left) are of course modern.

In AD 27, at the age of 67, the emperor Tiberius left Rome for a tiny island three miles off the coast of Campania.  There he would spend most of days, ruling Rome away from the capital, until his death in AD 37.  Tacitus in his Annals (4.67) reports that Tiberius “so loathed … every place on the mainland that he buried himself on the island of Capri…. The solitude of the place was, I believe, its chief attraction, for a harborless sea surrounds it and even for a small vessel it has but few safe retreats, nor can anyone land unknown to the sentries. Its air in winter is soft, as it is screened by a mountain which is a protection against cutting winds. In summer it catches the western breezes, and the open sea around it renders it most delightful. It commanded too a view of a most lovely bay.… Tiberius had by this time filled the island with twelve country houses, each with a grand name and a vast structure of its own.”  Augustus had acquired the whole island from the city of Naples some fifty years earlier (Suetonius, Augustus 98), and had built villas there.  To judge from the so-called Palazzo a Mare, thought to belong to Augustus, on the island’s north coast, these were not particularly extravagant.  Augustus, after all, claimed to live modestly.

Tiberius made no such claim.  And of the twelve villas on Capri, it is generally supposed that his favorite was the so-called Villa Iovis on the eastern tip of the island.

Twelve villas?  And why the name Villa Iovis?  Suetonius says that after the fall of Sejanus the emperor did not leave the Villa Ionis (sic) for nine months.  In the sixteenth century it was suggested that the twelve villas were all named after the twelve Olympian gods, and that Villa Ionis was accordingly to be corrected to Villa Iovis--not Io’s Villa but Jupiter’s Villa.  This was of course no more than a guess.  The name Villa Iovis is thus perhaps just modern fancy.

The remains of the central vaulted substructure.  The preserved part of the floor (above) of the peristyle courtyard.

The Villa Iovis is perched on a steep cliff that drops nearly 1100 feet to the sea below.  The architect was faced with two limitations.  One was the size of the site.  The other was the lack of a spring.  Yet water would be had from … the sky-god himself!  So the villa was to be built around a core of rain-collecting cisterns in the form of tiered concrete barrel vaults in the center of the structure, covered by a large (100’ by 100’) square platform that may have been adorned with mosaics and even a peristyle of columns.  This central courtyard/cistern system took up fully one half of the surface area of the site.  Surrounding it were four distinct wings connected by staircases and ramps.  The result was quite compact, unlike most luxury villas, which were characterized by sprawl.  Compact, but still interesting: the different levels (there were eight stories in all) made it so.

From the southwest.  Model by Clemens Krause.

The visitor approached from the west, up a steep paved road, with the villa towering above him.  He entered through a vestibule at the southwest corner (shown in the illustration above).  A ramp took him up into a corridor.  To his left was the west wing, where several stories of small rooms housed the servants, some of whom were employed in the kitchen, projecting at ground level.  Turning right, he entered the south wing, which featured a suite of baths.

The north and east wings were for the emperor (mainly on the seventh story).  On the east were larger rooms and the aula, the great reception hall, extending into a semicircular exedra with large windows, behind which were niches to accommodate couches: facing the southeast or northwest, they offered both sun and shade.  

From the southeast.  Model by Clemens Krause.

This east wing and the rooms above commanded spectacular views of Sorrento and Vesuvius.  On the north side were the triclinium, which featured polychrome marble paving, and rooms for the emperor’s personal attendants as well as the quarters of the emperor himself, to which access was of course restricted (via a single corridor).  His rooms opened onto a loggia (terrace) from which he could look down over most of the island and the Bay of Naples.  A long ramp took him down to the ambulatio, a long walkway for physical exercise than extended along the cliff’s edge, with additional rooms opening off it that included a vaulted dining room.

A specularium or signal tower (for communication with the mainland via fire or smoke) and a lighthouse were located to the west and south, respectively.

Was this lofty seaside retreat unique?  No, not even in the vicinity.  Similarly situated was the villa on the tiny Isola del Gallo Lungo, about two miles off the southeast coast of the Sorrento peninsula.  Yet another example was the clifftop villa on the Isola del Isca near Sorrento.  In each case the water supply problem solved by building atop cisterns.

Nonetheless, the Villa Iovis is widely regarded as a special imperial building, partly because of its location, partly because its state of preservation permits a fair appreciation of it, and partly because of its design.

“Few Roman buildings that have come down to us convey such a vivid impression of the personality of the unknown architect and of his skill in wedding the unusual terms of his commission to the potentialities of a magnificent but difficult site.  Here, on a waterless mountaintop, throughout the summer months the emperor could conduct affairs of state or retire into absolute seclusion, enjoying the beauties of nature and as safe as human ingenuity could contrive, and yet maintained by an ample staff and surrounded by every comfort. … The diversity of interest resulting from the loose, spreading layout of most of these luxury villas was here achieved within the limitations of a compact, tightly organized plan by means of a skillful play of levels.  On such a site a more relaxed plan might well have spelled architectural confusion” (J. B. Ward-Perkins, 201).

• Kleiner, Diana.  Roman Architecture.  Yale Open Lectures.  Lecture 11, chapter 1.  2/17/2009.
• Krause, Clemens.  Villa Jovis.  Die Residenz des Tiberius auf Capri.  2003.
• Mielsch, Harald.  Die römische Villa: Architektur und Lebensform.  1987.
• Sear, Frank.  Roman Architecture.  1982.
• Ward-Perkins, J. B.  Roman Imperial Architecture.  2^nd ed.  1981.

Emily Claire Kibbe

The Kouros from Delphi

In an earlier post it was noted that most Daedalic figures are female.  Here we consider a male example: a bronze statuette of a youth, only about seven and a half inches tall.  It was found in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi.  This is a significant piece, marking as it does the transition from Daedalic to Archaic.  The head is Daedalic, with its inverted-triangle face, large eyes, flattened crown, low forehead, straight hairline, and stylized coiffure in horizontal layers (the so-called Etagenperücke or “layered wig”) hiding the ears.  The hair closely resembles the Protocorinthian aryballos shown in our earlier post (3/3/17) and thus may be dated to around 650 BC or perhaps a bit later.

Like other Daedalic males, the youth is naked but for his rather prominent belt.  But what sets him apart from the Daedalic type is that his body is no longer static.  He is moving.  He has put his left leg forward, although most of his weight seems still on his right foot.  His arms are at his sides and he is clenching his fists.  This is a kouros, a form typical of the Archaic period, indeed the earliest example that has been completely preserved.

The term kouros means “youth” and refers to a standing nude male youth.  Martin Robertson offers this general description: “The figure stands with the left leg forward, the weight evenly distributed, arms at the sides, looking straight before him.  He is absolutely frontally constructed, in that there is no turn, twist or bend except the deflections caused by the movement of the legs, and these have no repercussions above the waist.  Nose, navel, fork are in one vertical plane; eyes, shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, ankles in parallel horizontal planes at right angles to it” (1.40).

It is generally supposed that this formula was borrowed directly from Egypt.  Let us compare the kouros from Delphi with a contemporary Egyptian piece, a statue of Metuemhet, a prince of Egyptian Thebes (right).  What leaps to the eye?   The two poses are very similar.  Nonetheless, there are notable differences:

• The Egyptian wears a kilt while the Greek has only a belt.
• The Egyptian is extending his left leg much farther forward than the Greek.
• The Egyptian is leaning against a backboard of stone (seen between legs and between arms and torso), while the Greek is free-standing, independent. In fact the Egyptian statue is a block carved in very high relief, while the Greek one is in the round.

How exactly was the kouros type introduced from Egypt in the mid seventh century?  How did the Greek sculptors have contact with Egypt?  The historian Herodotus (2.152) reports that the pharaoh Psamettichus I (Psamtik I, 664-610 BC) hired Greeks as mercenaries and allowed them to settle in the Nile Delta.  Once there, the Greeks had but to go south to see life-size and over-life-size statuary in hard stone such as the statue of Metuemhet pictured above.

But Egyptian and Greek artists had different aims.  Thus the dynamism of a piece as early as the Delphi kouros already marks a departure from the Egyptian schema.  The Egyptian monumental sculptor was “not concerned to produce an impression of life (though marvelously vivid little statuettes show what he could have done in this line had he wished) but rather of static grandeur” (Robertson 1.41).  Indeed the Egyptian type had not changed much in two millennia, so that to “static grandeur” we might add “permanent.”  The Greek, by contrast, was on the path that would lead, in time, to statues that seemed to be alive.

It was to Daedalus, the craftsman of King Minos of Crete, that the Greeks credited this achievement.  The fifth-century playwright Euripides has a character say “Daedalus’s works all seem to move about and his statues to speak: clever man, that one!” (Eurystheus Satyricus fr. 372 ed. Nauck).  And Palaephatus reports: “It is said that about Daedalus that he made statues that walked on their own.  That seems impossible to me….  The truth is this: in those days the sculptors of gods and men made the feet joined together and the arms hanging down at the sides. Daedalus was the first to make one foot striding forward, which is why people said ‘Daedalus has made this statue walk!’” (De Incredilibus 21).

This seems odd to us, since Daedalus has given his name to the Daedalic Style, which was hardly dynamic.  But as we have already seen in our previous post (3/3/17), the name “Daedalic” is a misnomer.  And in the passages quoted above the underlying notion is that Greek artistry, embodied in the mythical figure of Daedalus, gave life to the lifeless.  The long line of kouroi, in the next two centuries, show the development quite clearly.  At the end of that long line stands the Kritian Boy, the piece generally taken to mark the transition from Archaic to Classical and often called the “poster boy” of the “Greek Revolution,” defined as close imitation of natural forms “corrected” or “perfected” so as to transcend the mundanely natural, with the result that a work could be at once astonishingly true to life and yet unlike anything ever seen.

Our little bronze statuette, the Kouros of Delphi, is a transition piece, too.  But it stands at the beginning of that long line, as a hint of things to come.

• Boardman, John.  Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period.  1978.
• Hurwit, Jeffrey M.  The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 BC.  1985.
• Robertson, Martin.  A History of Greek Art.  2 Vols.  1975.
• Spivey, Nigel.  Greek Sculpture.  2013.  Esp. 17-53.
• Stansbury-O’Donnell, Mark D.  A History of Greek Art.  2015.
• Stewart, Andrew.  Greek Sculpture.  2 Vols.  1990.