ROMAN TOMBS AND SCULPTURE.*
AMONG the antiquities of a great nation, its tombs always hold a foremost place. They are invariably an index to its character and its ideas. Hence they are invaluable to the historian and archaeologist. In the volume before us we have a minute and detailed description of some of the most striking among the old Roman tombs. Their number, it appears, is almost innumerable, and their forms exhibit every con- ceivable variety, although certain types seem to have been special favourites. A pyramid or a massive tower often covers the remains of the illustrious dead. One point is specially to be noted. The horrible practice of intramural interment, which modern barbarism long and patiently endured, never found favour among the Romans. In this respect, as in many others, those especially • Archaeology of Rome: Tombs in and near Rome, and Funereal ;Sculpture. By J. E. Parker, 0.B. Oxford: Parker. London : Murray.
connected with all matters of religion and religions, ritual, they followed the Etruscan fashion. The Etruscans always buried their dead outside the trench or foss which formed part of the fortifications of their towns. So in Rome no tombs have been found within the line of the Servian walls, which for a thousand years, up to the time of the Em- peror Aurelian, marked the limits of the city. Many of the tombs, in fact, indicate the positions of the old gates. The tomb, for instance, of Caius Bibulus, the man who in his mdile- ship made an effort to check the growing luxury of the first cen- tury B.C. by a revival of the sumptuary laws, stood on the outer bank of the Capitolian fortress, and was near the north-east gate of the second wall. Portions of this gate were excavated in 1872, and about the same time was discovered a tomb of very similar construction, about which nothing can be ascertained, near the Porta Salaria. The famous tomb, too, known as that of the baker and his wife, is just outside the Porta Maggiore, Rome's principal eastern gate. The baker, one Eurysaces by name, appears to have been an army contractor for supplying bread to the soldiers of Julius Caesar or Augustus, and he designed for himself a tomb which should represent the craft in which he had been so successful. It is exhibited in plate iii. of this volume, and it was formed of old stone kneading-troughs, or of imitations of such troughs. It was also adorned with a very re- spectable piece of sculpture, the figure of the baker himself and of his wife, Aristia. This tomb had been buried in one of the round gateway towers of the Emperor Honorius from A.D. 403 to 1833, when this singular memorial of antiquity was brought to light. A. very interesting tomb, discovered as recently as 1871, near the Porta Salaria, is that of Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, a remarkably precocious youth, who died at the age of eleven, after winning a prize for Greek verse against fifty-two competitors. It would seem that the idea of the Porson prize, to which so much value is attached by Cambridge men, was familiar to Roman lads. The boy in question must, indeed, have been a prodigy, as he threw off his Greek verses extempore ; and they are still preserved, being in. scribed, with a Latin translation, beneath his statue. It appears that this amazing feat was performed by the lad in A.D. 94, the twelfth• year of Domitian's year. That Emperor, it may be remembered, liked to encourage scholarship and culture, and in the young Sulpicius he certainly got his reward.
A Roman tomb was often made up of three chambers ; and of these, the uppermost was used for family and anniversary feasts, gatherings much in favour among the Romans, which perhaps developed into the Christian Agapai. At any rate, -it is not always easy to distinguish between paintings representing Christian and Pagan meetings. Beneath the upper chamber were the so- called columbaria, or pigeon-holes, in which were stowed away the cinerary urns of the burnt bodies ; and under this, again, was a a chamber for sarcophagi,—for bodies buried, and not burnt. Burial was the old Roman practice, as it had been that of the Etruscans, and subsequently, and indeed during the- whole of the first century, bodies were now buried, now burnt. This was even the case with some of the early Christians, and we may infer that they did not regard cremation as neces- sarily repugnant to their ideas, as has been erroneously suggested. Burning or burial was really a matter of custom as much as of religion, though on the whole, it is probable that Christian senti- ment rather favoured the latter. As a fact, many of the tombs of the first two centuries have chambers both for urns and for sarcophagi. Mr. Parker observes that the Romans liked to make a tomb an exact copy of the house in which the deceased had lived, so much so, that sometimes the one can hardly be distinguished from the other. Occasionally the Etruscans would convert a house into a tomb, and in this the early Romans imitated them. The upper chamber was usually adorned with frescoes, as would befit a place in which the annual commemorative feasts, Silicernia, as the Romans called them, were held. We are rather too apt, Mr. Parker thinks, to surmise a Christian origin where there is really no ground for the supposition. It is usual, for instance, to assume that the cruciform arrangement of some of these funeral chambers must have been due to Christian influence, but it appears that this plan is to be traced in Sulla's mausoleum, and in other tombs anterior to the Christian era.
The tombs generally spoken of as in Rome were, as we have seen, properly speaking, at the city gates. Some of the most con- spicuous were in the neighbourhood of Rome, and on the famous Appian and Latin roads. One of these is the tomb of the Scipios, which is shown us in plate i., and is a good illustration of early
Roman architecture, the walls resembling in their construction those of the Sings. In Livy's time there were three statues in front of this tomb, those of Publing and Lucius Scipio, and of their friend, the poet Ennius. The great family of the Scipios, to which Rome owed so much, were old-fashioned in their notions, and prided themselves on their Etruscan origin. Their bodies were not burnt, but buried in sarcophagi of the rough peperino, instead of travertine or marble, which was then becoming fashion- able. Even in the inscriptions they liked to keep tip an antique tone, and that on the sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus, now in the Vatican Museum, is in part Etruscan. One of the most striking tombs was found in 1875, near the Porta Maggiore, in the Esquilke, where the gardens of Maecenas were situated. It is the tomb of Statilius Taurus, who was one of the Generals of Augustus, and built the first stone amphitheatre at Rome. Its date is 30 B.C. Mr. Parker gives us a full account of it, and shows us in plates xix. and xx. the frescoes, which denote consummate artistic skill. One of these represents the familiar figure of a shepherd, with three sheep, and has been pronounced equal to any drawing of Raphael. In the other we have the foundation of the city of Lavinium, and we see Lavinia, seated on a part of the unfinished wall, with a crown and veil on her head. The work is going on tinder her direction, and the great oblong blocks of tufa are being piled up to defend the new capital. It would seem that the paintings in this tomb are meant to illustrate Rome's early history, in con- nection with Virgil's great poem. Of all the tombs, we suppose the best known is the circular mausoleum of Cmcilia Metella, which is, in fact, the chief landmark on the south side of Rome. We cannot say why Mr. Parker has not thought fit to show it us in one of his plates, unless it is that it is too familiar. The wall, which is of concrete and enor- mously thick, is faced with travertine, still in good preserva- tion. It was a burial-place for the two great families of the Crassi and Metelli. Crecilia was the daughter of the Metellus who was one of Pompey's chief opponents, and who was surnamed Creticus, from his conquest of Crete, in B.C. 67. But she was not, as Mr. Parker says, the wife of the triumvir Crassus who fell in battle with the Parthians. She did, it appears, marry a Crassus, from the inscription on the tomb, and her husband may have been the triumvir's son, but of this we cannot be certain. At any rate, Mr. Parker is wrong. So, too, he is wrong in speak- ing of Priscilla, whose tomb Statius describes at length, in the fifth book of his Silva:, as the Emperor Domitian's wife. The lady, as appears from Statius's poem, was the wife of one Abas- cantus, as Mr. Parker himself notes, in the description attached to plate vii., in which the tomb is represented. The round tower which now stands on its remains is mediaeval. Another slip which Mr. Parker might have avoided is that of making the young Marcellus, Augustus's favourite and his intended successor, the son of Germanicus and Agrippina. He was, of course, the Emperor's nephew, and his sister Octavia's son.
The essay on Greek and Roman sculpture, by Cavaliere Visconti, adds to the value and interest of Mr. Parker's volume. It is intended as a sort of preface to the latter part of the work, on funereal sculpture. There is, too, another essay of which Mr. Parker has made use, by the Rev. C. W. Jones. This will repay reading to those who want to understand the nature and meaning of the symbolical representations found on the old tombs of Rome. Some of these are at first sight very perplexing. Bacchanalian scenes, for instance, strike us as singularly incongruous in sepulchral sculptures, except on the principle that they are to impress on us the lesson, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Mr. Jones admits that in part they do mean this. But there is a more recondite meaning behind. They speak of the power of wine, as derived from the earth, and so from an earth- god who is the giver of life, and who, it may be hoped, will impart a new life even to those who have sunk into the grave. Thus these strange representations of the wine-god, with his rollicking crew, testify of life and immortality. Hunting scenes, with Adonis and his death, and the pursuit of the Calydonian boar, figure frequently on tombs, as also do battle-scenes, and the contests of Theseus and the Amazons and of the Centaurs and Lapithm. For the explanation of this, Mr. Jones thinks the " solar myth " helpful, though he does not wholly rest on it. We have, too, the rape of Proserpine and the story of Prometheus. The first, of course, suits cases of premature death, though originally the myth may have bad a much more comprehensive meaning, and have mystically represented the seed sown in the ground. The latter speaks of suffering and deliverance, and so is well suited to a sarcophagus. In some way or other, it would seem that all these various symbols implied the hope of a life beyond the grave. Some such belief was thoroughly worked into the Pagan mind, though it had become very weak and vague in the first century B.C. Of these various funereal sculptures Mr. Parker has given us several illustrations, some of which are very striking and beautiful. One, of the hunting of the Calydonian boar, was found on a sarcophagus at Vico-Varo in 1872, on the banks of the Anio, and Meleager stands in the centre, in the act of giving the boar its death-wound. Another represents the story of tEdipus. In those of a rather later period we have vines and birds, and the story of Cupid and Psyche, under the influence of Neo-Platonic theories of the soul, may be often traced. The later sculptures are inferior as works of art, and we may infer that art was, on the whole, at its best in the Augustan age, though in Hadrian's age it was able to achieve some signal triumphs. We must now take leave of Mr. Parker, with an assurance that this is by no means the least interesting of his volumes on the archaeology of Rome.
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