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.