Two recently-installed tombstones in the Ashmolean Rome Gallery: ANMichaelis.214 and AN1947.285

Here you can listen to Prof. Alison Cooley speaking with Dr Jane Masséglia about the two stones, the people they commemorate, and about the little surprise hidden in one of the inscriptions:

Visitors were offered a series of free activities, including tours with Alison Cooley, workshops on how to read a Roman tombstone with Janie Masséglia, lectures from Keeper of Antiquities Paul Roberts, and Roman object-handling with Hannah Cornwell. The AshLI team members were all helped by postgraduates from Warwick and Oxford Universities, who all showed their dedication to their subject by wearing Roman costume.

Colleagues from the Ashmolean Education department ran a craft session involving inscription-writing attended by more than 200 children, Helen Ackers guided groups around the Roman portraits in the Cast Gallery, and professional Living History expert Tanya Bentham offered Roman story-telling and costume demonstrations. Young actors from Gruffdog Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar also dropped in to give a lunchtime performance in the grand setting of the Randolph Gallery. At the end of a very busy day, with each activity being repeated several times, the museum estimated that around 1500 people had taken part directly in the day’s events.

[See image gallery at blogs.ashmolean.org]

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.

It was a sprawling town house that anyone would have been proud to own. But every night, the sound of clanking chains and a terrifying vision of an old man, his shaggy hair crusted with filth, woke the inhabitants. With each visitation, their terror grew until, sick with sleeplessness, they abandoned the house. It was put up for sale, but no-one would go near it. Then, one day, a man arrived in town, a man famous for his rational mind. A man who didn’t believe in ghosts. Dr Llewelyn Morgan picks up the story with a recording he made especially for AshLI:

The story of Athenodoros and the haunted house comes from the turn of the second century AD, in a letter from Pliny the Younger to his friend Sura (Pliny, Letters VII.27).

Spookily familiar

The basic story – a place is haunted by a ghost who can find no peace until its bones are found and laid to rest – is a very familiar one (The Woman in Black, Coraline, and Sleepy Hollow all rely on it). It’s also very ancient. In Homer’s Odyssey XI, Odysseus meets the ghost of his comrade Elpenor in Hades, and discovers that he’s been left behind on Circe’s island. Elpenor had rolled off the roof where he was sleeping and broken his neck, and needs a proper burial.

The many faces of the Roman ghost

In modern, Western culture, ghosts are often associated with this kind of unfinished business. Set against the Christian tradition of heaven and an appealing afterlife, ghosts often need to have a good reason to be hanging around on earth when they could be somewhere better. But the Romans didn’t have just one idea about ghosts. Some, like the old man in Pliny’s story, were lemures, angry or overlooked spirits, who could cause trouble for the living. They were honoured annually with a series of feast days in May. Not surprisingly, lemures mostly appear in Latin literature (e.g. Ovid’s Fasti 5), since they tend to make good stories. Others ghosts were members of the natural, and ever-increasing band of dead ancestors and close relatives, who functioned as guiding and protective forces in Roman daily life. These spirits, the manes, were imagined as being in or under the earth, and were celebrated with a nine-day festival, the Parentalia, in February, and were often described as gods (di). The distinction between gods and protective spirits wasn’t one which the Romans would have worried too much about.

‘Dis Manibus’

It’s the assembled ranks of this second type of ghost, the ancestor-spirit, which are extremely common in Latin inscriptions. Roman tombstones often open with two letters: DM, short for dis manibus – ‘To the spirits of the departed’. It’s an address to those who have gone before which alerts them that another spirit is on its way, and is commended to their care. Even if the rest of the inscription is broken off, worn away, or downright horrible, the opening letters DM mean that we can be sure we’re dealing with a tombstone, and not some other type of inscription.

Tombstone of Restitutus, 2nd-3rd century AD, Ashmolean Museum ANChandler.3.79

If we’re really lucky, the stonecutter might have included a slightly longer abbreviation, like the DIIS (this time with double ‘i’) MANIB we see on this ash-urn currently on display in the Ashmolean’s Rome gallery:

Ash-urn of Cornelia Thalia, c. AD 50-100, Ashmolean Museum AN2007.63, Rome Gallery

A toast for a ghost

One of the ways that the Romans kept the di manes happy was by making offerings. A recently deceased relative and the rest of the di manes could be honoured by pouring libations or leaving food on or near the grave. One of the pieces that the Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project hopes to put on display in 2015 is a remarkable tombstone for a woman named Livia Casta. In the middle of the stone is a relief carving of a Roman cup, pierced with four holes. The stone was originally set horizontally so that Livia Casta’s relatives could pour wine, honey and water offerings into the cup, which would drain through onto her ashes where she could enjoy it. Honouring the ghosts of dead relatives and the wider band of di manes was really a question of keeping them involved, and making sure they had their share of pleasures like food and drink.

Mensa sepulchralis of Livia Casta, AD 50-100, Ashmolean Museum ANChandler3.45

Did the Romans believe in ghosts?

It’s always dangerous to make generalisations about what an entire culture believed. It’s tempting to use the evidence in literature and inscriptions to draw conclusions about what the Romans thought, but plenty of people read (and write) ghost stories without necessarily being convinced about the existence of ghosts, and plenty of people ask for things to be caved on tombstones because they’re traditional. Some Romans probably believed in ghosts, and some probably didn’t. But what’s very clear is that the Romans liked the idea of ghosts, and used them in various different ways: for managing luck, for keeping family memories alive and even, just like us, for telling scary stories.

A more detailed discussion of the Latin inscriptions shown here, 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

Duty Free Delos

The tiny island of Delos sits midway between the Greek mainland and Asia Minor.

In the second century BC, the little Greek island of Delos in the Cyclades experienced an unexpected boom, as it became the place to do business in the eastern Mediterranean. Rome was not yet an empire, but Latin-speaking tradesmen were already very familiar the region. Everyone knew something about these enterprising people from Italy.

In 166 BC, the Romans made Delos a tax free port, making it an attractive place to trade goods and slaves. Many traders set up homes on the little island, making it a cosmopolitan commercial centre where Greek speakers and Latin speakers lived and worked side by side.

A Bilingual Inscription

(L) The Randolph Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum; (R) A colossal head of Apollo mounted on Avilius’ altar.

Today, the long Randolph Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum is lined with statues and reliefs from the Arundel Collection, and with a series of Greek altars which now serve as statue bases. These altars all follow a similar formula: a marble drum, shaped like a cotton reel, encircled with swags of foliage and bulls’ heads (bucrania, which refer to animal sacrifice). But one of these altars, now supporting a colossal head of Apollo, is an important record of relations between the Greek- and Latin-speaking inhabitants of Delos.

The altar dates to the late second century or early first century BC, when it was set up as a funeral marker for a man named Quintus Avilius. It is inscribed, in uneven letters, in both languages on the smooth surface of the drum: the Latin inscription at the top, the Greek at the bottom. But while what they say is largely similar, there are some revealing differences.

 When a Roman is not a Roman

Q(uinte) Avili C(aii) f(ilie) Lanu(v)ine salve
‘Quintus Avilius, son of Gaius, of Lanuvium, farewell.’

 The Latin inscription tells us that Quintus Avilius originally came from Lanuvium, a town in Latium, just over 30 km to the south-east of Rome. Someone from Lanuvium at this date (before the Social War) would not actually have been a Roman citizen. The Greek inscription, on the other hand, gives slightly different information:

  ΚοΐντεἈυίλλιεΓαΐουυἱὲΡωμαῖε
χρηστὲχαῖρε

‘Quintus Avillius, son of Gaius, Roman, honest man, farewell.’

This inscription calls Avilius a Roman, even though he wasn’t. And our inscription is not the only Greek text from Delos to do this. It seems that traders from Italy who spoke Latin were routinely called Romaioi by the Greek speakers on the island, even though they weren’t from the city of Rome, or have Roman citizenship. As far as the Greek speakers were concerned, the distinction apparently didn’t matter. And, judging by Avilius’ altar, everyone, including the Latin-speakers, went along with it.

An honest Roman?

Another difference is the inclusion of the adjective χρηστὲ – ‘honest’ in the Greek inscription, which doesn’t appear in the Latin. We might wonder why it’s been added. Its meaning is complicated by the fact that inscriptions don’t include punctuation. If we take it with the preceding word, the phrase Ρωμαῖε χρηστὲ means ‘an honest Roman’, which isn’t very flattering to Romans! It might give us a clue as to how the Greek speakers of Delos felt about their Latin-speaking colleagues. But in fact, χρηστὲ belongs with the word which follows it. The final phrase χρηστὲ χαῖρε – ‘honest (man), farewell’, is really a common, stand-alone ending in funerary inscriptions from Delos, and the stonecutter put those two words on the line below to show they belonged to a new clause. In our English translation, at least, we can use commas.

If we want to find out about relations between the Greek and Latin speakers in Delos, perhaps most revealing of all is the fact that someone, perhaps even Avilius himself, made the decision to have his funerary monument inscribed in both languages. His friends, customers and clients could read about him in whichever language they preferred and see terms that they readily understood, even if those terms were not entirely accurate. It’s a thoughtful gesture, and perhaps no surprise from an island population that knew a thing or two about international marketing.

Ashmolean ANChandler3.10 (RIB 17), currently on display in the Museum of London. Dowel-holes in surface related to later reuse as building material. (H. 209cm, W. 78cm, D. 27cm). 3rd century AD.

Rescued by Wren

In 1669, a limestone funerary relief was found by Sir Christopher Wren, when the church of St Martin’s in Ludgate Hill, London was being rebuilt following the Great Fire of London in 1666. With help from then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, the tombstone was brought to Oxford for display outside the new Sheldonian Theatre, and eventually became part of the Ashmolean collection. Today is can be seen on loan at the Museum of London.

Tricky Text

The inscription tells us that it belonged to Vivius Marcianus, and was set up by his wife Ianuaria Martina.

  d(is) m(anibus) / Vivio ° Marci/ ano ° {ivy-leaf} leg(ionis)° II / Aug(ustae)° Ianuaria /⁵ Martina ° coniunx °/ pientissima °posu/it ° memoriam

‘To the spirits of the departed. Ianuaria Martina, most dutiful wife, set up the monument for Vivius Marcianus, of the 2^nd Legion Augusta.’

In the words Marciano and coniunx, we see two examples of letters wrapped inside the C. In the words Martina and memoriam, we also find examples of ligatures, where two letters are stuck together: in the case of Martina, the ligature of the TI has led to many people to misread her name as Marina. The ivy-leaf in line 3 has also caused confusion and led some readers to insert extra letters or leave it out altogether.

The Many Faces of Vivius Marcianus

An image of Vivius Marcianus is shown at three-quarters life-size, standing inside an arched niche below the inscription. The surface of the relief is much worn, but we can see that he was shown wearing a short tunic, belt and cloak. In his left hand he holds what looks like a scroll, and his right hand holds a stick at this side. This confirms what the large size of the tombstone might have already suggested: that Vibius Marcianus was no ordinary soldier. The stick was the badge of office of a Roman centurion.

This interpretation of the damaged relief is based on what we, in 2014, know about the Roman Army and about Roman funerary art. But past studies of the relief haven’t always presented Vivius Marcianus in the same way. Here are just a few examples:

Prideaux, 1676

In 1676, Humphrey Prideaux imagined Vivius Marcianus with long hair and a fringe, and (rather dangerously) holding a long pointed sword by its blade. His reconstruction was clearly influenced by seventeenth-century fashions, giving him a contemporary hairstyle and replacing the stick with a long, thin blade unlike any Roman gladius.

Gale, 1709

In 1709, Thomas Gale produced a very different reconstruction. This time Vivius Marcianus’ hair was short, and he was shown looking more poised and alert. But several details are missing and incorrect: the fall of the cloak behind, the belt, the scroll-like object in his left hand and the vertical stick in his right do not appear, suggesting he had not inspected the relief closely. In 1813, Thomas Pennant remarked how Vivius Marcianus had been ‘differently and faultily represented by Mr Gale.’

Allen, 1827

In 1827, Thomas Allen produced an illustration which restored the long cloak and belt, but showed the left hand empty. Rather than invent the hair and face, he chose to leave them blank. He offered a very impressionistic transcription of the Latin, with the words in line 5, Martina coniunx, almost unrecognisable.

In 1841, Charles Knight attempted his own version, drawing heavily on Prideaux’s early reconstruction, but now giving him a historical flavour with an old fashioned mop of curls. And the long sword has reappeared. The nineteenth-century readings of the relief are interesting because of the evident influence of contemporary ideas about Ancient Britain and Britons.

Many antiquarians had already tried to argue that Vivius Marcianus was a native Briton. Thomas Pennant, in 1790, even used the long hair that Prideaux had included in his reconstruction as proof that he was a soldier of the cohors Britanorum and that he was ‘dressed and armed in the manner of the country’. But in the nineteenth century, this interest in Marcianus’ Britishness had a slightly different flavour.

Knight, 1841

Charles Knight quoted the 1813 description by George Alexander Cooke which had Vivius Marcianus having ‘a plaid flung over his breast’ and holding ‘a sword of vast length, like the claymore of the later Highlanders’. The Victorian enthusiasm for Scotland and romantic historical themes appears to have influenced both men’s vision of our Roman soldier. Despite his flamboyant illustration, Knight admitted ‘in truth nearly all the points of his attire and accoutrements are so uncertainly delineated on the mutilated stone that anything like a complete or consistent picture of the whole can only be made out by an exercise of fancy’.

Archer, 1852

Before photography, these kinds of drawings, accompanied by verbal descriptions, were the only way to share information about ancient objects. But it was not always easy to tell how much of any drawing was based on fact and how much conjecture.

Considering how strong a temptation there was to make a damaged stone look more attractive in illustrations, the watercolour painted by James Wykeham Archer in 1852 is especially interesting. Archer’s is the only drawing to include the holes, breaks and areas of wear, suggesting a largely reliable record of the condition of the stone in the mid-nineteenth century. Importantly, it looks very much like it does now. Without Archer’s drawing, we might have believed that Allen, Knight and the others were able to see details that we no longer can, and perhaps trusted their illustrations more than we should.

Sources

• Allen, T. (1827) History and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark and parts
  adjacent, Vol. 1 (London)
• Cooke, G.T. (1813) Topographical and Statistical Description of the Country of Middlesex (London)
• Gale, T. (1709) Antonini Iter Britanniarum (London)
• Knight, C. (1841) London vol.2 (Charles Knight & Co.: London)
• Pennant, T. (1790) Some Account Of London (London)
• Prideaux, H. (1676) Marmora Oxoniensia ex Arundellianis (Oxford)