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10.3 The Tomb of Caecilia Metella on the Via Appia
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Roman Architecture
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Accessing Afterlife: Tombs of Roman Aristocrats, Freedmen, and Slaves
Sepulchral architecture in Rome under Augustus. Roman tombs were built in a variety of personalized forms among them the pyramidal Tomb of the aristocrat Gaius Cestius, and the trapezoidal Tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, probably a former slave who made his fortune overseeing the baking and public distribution of bread for the Roman army.
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
Now it may not surprise you to hear that, that once the emperor chose the form of
his tomb that he set in motion a
fashion that just about every aristocrat wanted to follow.
So all of a sudden, after the
construction of the Mausoleum of Augustus, again between
28 and 23, there is this efflorescence of
round tombs in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.
And I
want to show you just one example of that.
This is the so-called tomb of Caecilia Metella.
It dates to 20 BC, so it began to be
put up not too long after Augustus' mausoleum was built.
It is located on the famous Via Appia in Rome, the Appian Way.
The Appian Way which you see this is a
Google Earth image once again where you can see a
stretch of the Appian Way or the Via Appia.
That is modern asphalt, although there are remains, and I'll show
you later an example of this, there are remains of the
polygonal masonry floor, pavement that
would've been there initially, looking very
much like the pavement that we saw in Pompeii, for example.
And you can see the tomb of Caecilia Metella right over here.
Like the mausoleum of Augustus it was reused in ancient times and
there was a fortress and a palace that was added to it.
And you can see also there in a red, reddish earth color the remains of
that fortress and palace that was, that abutted
the mausoleum of the tomb of Caecilia Metella.
And while this is on the screen you can
also see that while the tomb was essentially
a cylindrical drum, resembling a cylindrical drum of the
mausoleum of Augustus, it was placed, it was
given some height by being placed on a podium.
The kind of podium that we saw at the sanctuaries, or the podium
that we saw at the Villa of the Mysteries to raise it up.
It's not as big as those, but it's, it's sizable.
And it raises this around tomb up a little
bit so that it can be readily seen as, as people make their way along the Via Appia.
The Mausoleum of Augustus does not have a similar podium.
So that's a unique, a different feature
that is added to this particular structure.
You can also see there's an inscription on the front, and we'll
talk about in a moment, and then there are crenelations at the top.
There's some dispute about when those
crenelations were added, whether they belong to
the original tomb or not.
I think it's highly unlikely that they belong
to the original tomb and they may have
been added at the time that this was made into a fortress as I've already mentioned.
This is a view of the tomb of Caecilia
Metella as it looks today, the tomb of this Woman.
And of 20 BC.
And you can see that it's actually quite well preserved.
And we can get
a very good sense of its original appearance.
You can see the concrete podium down here, without its original facing.
It was surely faced.
You can see the great cylindrical drum of the tomb of Caecilia Metella.
And you can see the facing.
And once again, the facing for this tomb, just as
in the Mausoleum of Augustus, is not Luna or Carrara marble.
It is travertine. But very,
very nicely cut travertine blocks, as you can see here.
Very well done.
She was undoubtedly a well-to-do patron who was able to hire the best architects
the best artisans, and they have done
an outstanding job of cutting that travertine.
You can see also the, that there is a freeze
that, that encircles the monument at the upper most part.
Right
here.
And that frieze depicts garlands and skulls of bulls, bucrania.
The same sort of thing that we saw in the inner precinct wall of the Ara Pacis.
Although this predates the Ara Pacis so we can't
say it was the influence of the Ara Pacis.
This is, again, 20, whereas the Ara Pacis wasn't begun until 13.
And it shows us that this motif was
very much in the air during the Augustan period.
This motif of garlands handing from bucrania.
Which of course makes reference to sacrifice.
And it could be a sacrifice in honor of a funerary
event as well as anything else. And we again see that very well here.
One very interesting fact is that the frieze is not made out of travertine,
but out of pentelic marble, pentelic.
Pentelic marble is marble from Mount Pentelikon in Greece.
So it tells us that marble was imported from Greece or
marble that was imported from Greece was purchased
and used for the frieze of this particular structure.
And we'll see that it was used also for the inscription plaque.
So it tells us something.
It tells us that there was, that some patrons made the decision to spend a
little more for the material for what they
considered the most important part of the monument.
So in this case, the most important
part of the monument was the freeze.
And also the inscription plaque that preserved this woman's name for posterity.
So they paid a little bit more in order to get that
more expensive material for the critical, those critical details of the monument.
Here is the inscription.
We are very fortunate that it's still preserved today.
We see it still inserted into the monument again.
It's done in pentelic marble.
And I think you can see, even in this view the difference between pentelic
marble, and and traverti-, travertine. Travertine is more
texture to it than the, the plainer marble as you can see.
And her name was given here, Caecilia
Metella, Cecilia Metella, and Cecilia Metella down here.
And it
tells us that she was the daughter F, Filia, the daughter of Quinitas Q.
Creticus. Creticus, who may have come from Crete.
It's possible.
And it, it also makes reference to the fact that
she was married to someone by the name of Crassus.
This may be Crassus the Elder; we're not
absolutely sure.
But it, what it does indicate to us is this is an aristocratic woman.
This is an aristocratic woman whose family has a great deal of money,
who are honoring her with this tomb, in the mode of the day.
Which of course was the the, the tomb type that was chosen by Augustus himself.
You may have noticed up here in this same
detail, not only the frieze that we've already described with
the garlands and bucrania, but that there is
a relief here that represents a Roman trophy.
What is a Roman trophy?
A Roman trophy what, what the Romans did at the end of battle,
if they were victorious, is they went over to the nearest tree trunk on
the battlefield, and they took arms and armor from their defeated enemy,
and they tacked that arms and armor up on that tree trunk to create a military
trophy commemorating their victory right on the battlefield.
And that's exactly what you see here.
A tree trunk with a breastplate and a helmet and
shields and so on, all tacked up to that trophy.
So, we have to ask ourselves, what is that trophy doing on this particular monument?
It's highly unlikely that it refers to, there are, there are some instances.
well, we do, do hear about
women trying to raise troops, raise money for the troops and so on and
so forth, but we don't and, and even of, thinking that they might go into
battle, but for the most part, Roman women did not participate in battle, so
it is highly unlikely that this refers to a military en-, encounter that she had.
More likely it either refers to a military encounter of her
father or her husband, or it may be a more generic
reference to victory.
We've talked about the fact in the minds of the Romans the victory in battle,
victory in hunt, in the hunt often were conflated with victory over death.
So it could be a more generic reference, but I would guess it may have something to
do, more specifically with the conquest of her husband or her father.
The structure
today is it is right, it does right there on the Via Appia.
Easy to see.
There is a small museum that isn't all that often open, but sometimes it
is that is in the remains of the fortress and the palace next door.
You can see that the outside of the
monument, they've inserted a lot of finds just
from the, doesn't mean they came from the
tomb of Caecilia Metella, but from this area
on the Via Appia.
There were tons of Roman tombs out here
and all of this paraphernalia that you see.
Statuary and fragments of freezes and cornices and so on all come, in
part possibly from this monument, but more likely from the other tombs in the area.
Those have been inserted into the wall in a kind of interesting way.
And then here's the museum itself.
The museum doesn't have, the, the stuff that's
in there is pretty much the same sort
of thing that you see here. But going into the museum is interesting
because you can see into [SOUND] the central chamber of the
tomb of Caecilia Metella and see the concrete construction and so on.
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