A cast of twenty, in full costume, including lictors, musicians, mourners, an Archimimus, a funeral director and members of the Roman household, laid to rest the body of Tiberius Claudius Abascantianus, a Roman commemorated in a fine ash-urn in the Ashmolean’s collection. The event was the result of months of preparation, which included making costumes, building a funerary couch complete with corpse, creating an ash urn (with the help of Amy Chaplin, on work experience with us from Cherwell School), learning to play Roman musical instruments, and casting wax imagines from the team’s own faces.

The funeral was repeated twice during the evening, with each performance including an introduction to the cast, excerpts from the Twelve Tables on Roman funeral practices, a eulogy for the deceased, an off-stage cremation and, finally, the installation of Abascantianus’ remains in the family tomb, all accompanied by the sounds of a cornu, an aulos, and team of enthusiastic professional mourners. The museum, packed with over 4,000 visitors, perfectly evoked the bustle and noise of a Roman funeral, with the procession winding its way through the crowds, and with more following along behind.

The funeral was masterminded by AshLI to celebrate the recent installation of new Roman displays in several galleries, and in particular a hand-painted columbarium in the Reading and Writing Gallery housing the original ash urn of the real Abascantianus. The decoration of the niched tomb, with its display of funerary plaques, inscribed ash chests and pierced libation ‘table’, was inspired by the columbarium at the Villa Doria Pamfilii in Rome, and handpainted by Oxford-based designer Claire Venables. Head of the AshLI project, Prof. Alison Cooley, was on hand with a series of short talks to introduce visitors to the new columbarium display and tell the story of the real Abascantianus who had first inspired the event.

New columbarium (‘dovecote’) tomb in the Ashmolean Museum, installed by AshLI and hand painted by Claire Venables of Giraffe Corner.

After some clever sleuthing from classics-lovers and amateur epigraphers, we published the solution and the story behind the plaque on our blog.

Now you can listen to members of the AshLI team talk about this little inscription, from inside the Ashmolean’s Rome Gallery, in the second podcast in the project’s new series.

Click here to launch the podcast in a new window.

(c) Ashmolean Museum

Bronze votive plaque from1^st-2^nd centuries AD. H. 4.9cm, W. 7.1cm, D. 1cm. Ashmolean Museum AN2001.1, on display in the Rome Gallery.

Latin:

Deo / Herculi/ Marus tribunus / legionis XX fecit

 English translation:

‘For the god Hercules, Marus, tribune of the 20th legion, made this.’

Click here to launch the podcast.

A more detailed discussion of the plaque, with full bibliographic references, will appear in the new catalogue of the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions, which will be freely available online before 2016.

Click to enlarge

Latin:

d(is) m(anibus) / L(ucio) Annaio Firm(—) / vixit annis ° V / m(ensibus) II ^. d(iebus) °VI ^. h(oris) ° VI ° /⁵ qui ° natus est / nonis °Iuliis / defunctus / est °IIII idus / Septembres /¹⁰ Annaia Feru-/sa vernae su-/o karissimo

 Translation :

‘To the spirits of the dead. For Lucius Annaius Firm(ius?), who lived 5 years, 2 months, 6 days, 6 hours, who was born on the 7^th July and died on the 10^th September. Annaia Ferusa set this up for her dearest household slave.’

Born a slave

The inscription was not set up by a mother for a son, but a mistress for a slave. The Latin word she uses to describe him is a verna, usually used to describe slaves who were born and brought up within a household. If an enslaved woman had a child, that child was also a slave and part of the master or mistress’ household property. Child-slaves were a familiar part of Roman life but not a group which often appear in Latin literature.

Some masters may have seen vernae as a convenient way of increasing their stock of slaves. Once child-slaves reached the age of five, they took on a monetary value, meaning that they could be counted among the master’s assets, and even be sold. But it’s also clear from many texts that some masters formed a particular attachment to the slave-children they saw growing up in their household. The last line of our inscription describes just this. It tells us that the little boy had been born a slave in the household of Annaia Ferusa, and it was she who set up his tombstone.

Dying free

But, reading between the lines, the text also tells us that he didn’t die a slave.

The tombstone gives him three names: the praenomen Lucius, the nomen Annaius, and a cognomen beginning with the letters FIR, perhaps short for ‘Firmius’, meaning ‘Steadfast’. But the three-name format was the mark of a Roman citizen, a free man. Slaves usually only had one name.

When they were freed, slaves added part of their master’s name to their own slave name. In this case, the feminine name of his mistress, Annaia, became Annaius for the little boy, and was added before his slave-name, ‘Fir…’. He had become a libertus, a freedman.

So there seems to be a bit of a mix-up in the text. We can tell from his name that he was free when he died, but his mistress still calls him her ‘dearest household slave’. One solution may be that Annaia Ferusa was using the world verna to show how close she was to the little boy, to explain why she, of all people, was qualified to set up his tombstone. Another solution might be that the Romans sometimes used the word verna to describe a person’s origins, no matter what happened to him later in life. Or it might be that his freedom was such a recent event that Annaia Ferusa simply hadn’t got used to the idea of calling him anything else.

‘He lived 5 years, 2 months, 6 days, 6 hours’

A libertus, a freedman, of only five years old is unusual. The majority of slaves had to reach the age of thirty before they could be granted their freedom. But, importantly for this little boy, different rules applied to slaves born into a household as vernae: they were allowed to be freed much younger. But for how many of his five years of life had L. Annaius Fir. been free? If we think that Annaia Ferusa was still calling him her verna because she wasn’t yet used to him being a freedman, the answer is probably ‘not long at all’. One of the more likely (and most poignant) scenarios is that she freed him on his death bed, giving the little boy his citizen name so that that he could die free.

This last-minute grace would be entirely in-keeping with a mistress who was clearly paying close attention to what happened to the little boy. Although it was commonplace to include the age of the deceased on a Roman tombstone, inscriptions usually only include years and months. Annaia Ferusa, on the other hand, knew to the hour how long he had lived. With heart-breaking precision, she recorded exactly how long he had been in her household and so in her life. She described him as karissimus (a Greek-influenced spelling of carissimus), her ‘dearest’ or ‘most beloved’, and inscribed it on a marble tombstone. It is a monument which testifies to the emotional realities which blurred the strict legal lines between slave and free. It is also an important reminder that sometimes it’s the least attractive artefacts that tell the most beautiful stories.

c. 2^nd centuries AD (?), from Rome. Ashmolean Museum ANChandler.3.90. H. 0.38, W. 0.21, D. 0.4. Currently in storage at the Ashmolean Museum.

A more detailed discussion of the plaque, with full bibliographic references, will appear in the new catalogue of the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions, which will be freely available online before 2016.

Related Objects

This beautiful funerary portrait of a child-freedman from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, this time from Egypt, can be seen on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Further Reading

• Chandler, R. (1763) Marmora Oxoniensia (Oxford, Clarendon Press)
• Herrmann-Otto, E. (1994) Ex Ancilla Natus (Franz Steiner: Stuttgart) (in German)
• Prideaux, H. (1676) Marmora Oxoniensia ex Arundellianis, Seldenianis aliisque conflata (Oxford)
• Weaver, P. (2001) ‘Reconstructing lower-class Roman families’, in S. Dixon, ed. Childhood, Class and Kin in the Roman World (Routledge: London and New York) 101-14

Looking Blank

On display in the Ashmolean’s Ark to Ashmolean gallery stands a red sandstone altar. On three of its sides there are relief designs: a six-petalled flower, a jug and a libation-dish, each within a square frame. At first sight, the fourth side appears to be blank.

But closer inspection reveals faint traces of letters. This square frame once held the Latin inscription that gave details of the man who set up the altar, the god he dedicated it to, when and why. Unfortunately, since its discovery in the seventeenth century, the text has become illegible. But with a combination of modern technology and old-fashioned archival research, AshLI have produced a new reading.

Eagle-eyed Antiquarians

The altar was found intact in Foregate Street, Chester in 1653. By chance, the Chief Master of the Chester Free School, John Grenehalgh, happened to witness its discovery. Recognising its Roman origins, he returned the next day to transcribe its text, but was never confident about the accuracy of his transcription. The altar caused something of a sensation in antiquarian circles at the time, and several other transcriptions were made, each slightly different.

The inscription, already in poor condition when it was discovered, became increasingly worn after the altar was set up in a garden in Chester for some years. It was finally given to Oxford University in 1675 by Brasenose alumnus Sir Francis Cholmondeley, who came from a local landowning family from Vale Royal near Chester, and it became part of the Ashmolean collection. When Ernst Hübner examined the stone for CIL in 1873, he remarked ‘Vidi, sed vestigia tantum litterarum perpauca evanida dignoscere potui’ – ‘I have seen it, but I was only able to make out a very few, disappearing traces of the letters.’ He wasn’t able to read the text himself and had to rely on an earlier transcription by Randal Holme from 1688.

New Technology: RTI

Luckily, the AshLI team were able to use technology unavailable to earlier epigraphers. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) uses a combination of photography and multiple light sources to map the surface of even very worn objects, bringing out marks that are invisible to the naked eye. Ben Altshuler from Oxford’s Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents was able to produce new surface images of the stone, which have confirmed the accuracy of much of Grenehagh’s initial report, but which also support a suggestion first made by Wilhelm Kubitschek  in 1889, that the dedicator of the stone may have been a Spaniard from Clunia, a town in Hispania Tarraconensis.

Click to enlarge

New Reading

Unfortunately, even with the help of RTI, some areas of the text are still illegible: the surface of the stone has become too damaged. But by combining the old records, the RTI images, and knowledge of similar formulae, we now think the inscription reads:

 I O M TANARO
T ELUPIUS GALER
PRAESENS CLUNIA
PRI LEG XX VV
COMMODO ET
LATERANO COS
V S L M

I(ovi) ° O(ptimo) M(aximo) Tanaro / T(itus) Elupius Galer(ia tribu) / Praesens [Cl]unia / pri(nceps) ° leg(ionis) ° XX V(aleriae) V(ictricis) /  Commodo et / Laterano co(n)s(ulibus) / v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito)

‘To Jupiter Best and Greatest Tanarus, Titus Elupius Praesens, of the Galerian voting-tribe, from Clunia, princeps of the 20^th Legion Valeria Victrix, in the consulship of Commodus and Lateranus, willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow.’

A Cosmopolitan Cast

So this altar seems to have been dedicated by an officer of Spanish origin, in the Roman legion XX Valeria Victrix which was stationed during the Flavian period at Chester, near the border with Wales in the north-west of England. He was princeps of a legion, the second centurion in seniority, next in command after the primus pilus. The consuls he mentions give us a date of AD 154. The ‘Commodus’ here is Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus, now better known as the emperor Lucius Verus. His name ‘Elupius’ isn’t entirely certain, but now looks the most plausible among the many previous suggestions, which have included  ‘Elypius’, ‘Elufruis’, ‘Flavius’, and even ‘Bruttius’.

But several mysteries remain: Tanarus is a Celtic thunder god, who appears in other inscriptions in the Rhineland and Dalmatia, but is otherwise unknown in Britain. Why are there no other British inscriptions to Tanarus, and why is a Spaniard dedicating an altar to a god more commonly associated with Germania?

A more detailed discussion of the stone, with full bibliographic references, will appear in the new catalogue of the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions, which will be freely available online before 2016.

Sources Cited

Holme, R. (1688) The Academy of Armory (Chester)
Hübner, E.W.E. (1873) Inscriptiones Britanniae latinae (Berlin)
Kubitschek, J.W. (1889) Imperium Romanum Tributim Discriptum (Vindobonae)

Dr Jane Masséglia will be saying a few words about the project’s aims, and encouraging any schools who would like to take part in our pilot study of new teaching resources in 2014-5.

http://classicsincommunities.org/conference.php

Details of the academic arm of the project can be found here:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/research/dept_projects/latininscriptions/