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7— Echoes of the Boscoreale Cup Panels in Later Historical Relief
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7—
Echoes of the Boscoreale Cup Panels in Later Historical Relief

Certain examples of Roman historical relief that postdate the Boscoreale Cups can be shown to echo their scenes. The points of correspondence vary: compositional structure, figure types and figure groups, iconography and iconographic context. The pieces I will discuss span the imperial period—Trajanic, mid-third and early fourth century A.D.—and are treated in the following sections: the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (figs. 91–92), bearing on the "son-giving" scene BR I:2 and the nuncupatio sacrifice scene BR II:1; the Ludovisi sarcophagus (fig. 88), bearing on the "son-giving" scene BR I:2.

I do not trace later parallels just for their own sake. Rather, these investigations are crucial to the thesis that the cup panels reproduce a set of monumental reliefs erected for or by the Augustan house in the city of Rome. If this thesis is valid, then one would naturally hope to find traces of the influence of this prototype in later imperial sculpture. It is more than simply gratifying to find such traces: these echoes provide the final necessary element of verification for the primary thesis just described. For one cannot attribute such echoes to inspiration from the cups themselves, even in the Julio-Claudian period;[1] and these two little skyphoi were buried under the mud of Vesuvius by the time that the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum and the Ludovisi sarcophagus were made. Influence must derive from my postulated prototype, to the cups on the one hand and to the later monuments on the other hand. It is logically satisfying, if fortuitous, that the parallels that have come to my attention bear on all three cup panels for which recognizable, derivative quotation can legitimately be sought (BR I:1 and 2, BR II:1); the triumph BR II:2 has too many stock elements observable from the Republic on for such direct inspiration to be traceable. This group of "later echoes" firmly situates the


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Boscoreale Cup panels in the realm of imperial monumental relief sculpture, demonstrating that the original reliefs copied on the cups remained on public view at least into the middle of the third century.

The Arch of Trajan at Beneventum

This section treats the passage reliefs of the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum, which depict respectively an alimenta distribution by the emperor and some kind of inaugural imperial sacrifice (figs. 91–92). The panel that truly parallels the cups is the alimenta panel.[2]

The arch can be dated from the terms of the dedicatory inscription;[3] it was dedicated in A.D. 114, between 19 August and 9 December. W. Gauer observed that the earliest date for the arch's inception is immediately after Trajan's Dacian triumph of 107,[4] which is portrayed in the "small frieze" just under the attic story; he suggested, sensibly, that the arch's decorative program might well depend from the theology of imperial worth and legitimacy worked out for Trajan's anniversary celebration of decennalia in A.D. 108. Thus the arch was begun between ca. A.D. 108 and ca. A.D. 110/111 and finally dedicated in A.D. 114.

The arch marks one end of the Via Traiana, the new stretch of road laid by Trajan to extend the old Via Appia to Brindisi to connect that great port directly with Rome and west-central Italy. Brindisi was the traditional port of embarkation for Western legions moving to Greece and Asia; the road itself was made ready by A.D. 109 to transport Trajan's troops to war with Armenia and Parthia. The choice of Beneventum as a site for this arch, voted to Trajan by the Senate, clearly points to a connection between its erection and the dedication of the great new highway. Thus the sacrifice in the arch passage (fig. 92) is often identified with the dedicatory sacrifice of the Via Traiana. Certainly it shows neither a profectio from Rome (in the same narrow sense as the nuncupatio depictions discussed in chapter 5) nor the conventional sacrifice ending a triumph.[5] Most likely it is a sacrifice at Beneventum itself to open the Via Traiana, in connection with Trajans profectio to Parthia; or it may be connected with Trajan's decennalia celebrations.[6]

An obvious point of correspondence between these passage reliefs and the BR cups occurs in this very sacrifice or profectio panel: the use of the BR victim group (pl. 9), the "Pausias motif," for the victim slaying.[7] However, this is not the point on which I will build my case; the way in


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which this victim group is incorporated into the composition depends on Domitianic workshop stylization. The evidence is worth presenting, as this particular point will be of use later on (see chapter 5 for individual monuments cited).

I refer to the coin (fig. 90) issued for Domitian's ludi saeculares ; it is likely itself to depend on a monumental painting or relief. The points of resemblance between the arch passage panel and the Domitianic coin type are: the group now consists only of the axe-swinging popa and the victimarius who kneels at left to twist the bull's head down, while only the forepart of the bull projects from the massed figures immediately right of the victim group; these in turn consist of two tall figures oriented toward the right and overlapping very slightly (the left behind the right), and from between them, as if flattened to paper-thinness, projects the bull; finally, the group is set at left of the main imperial sacrifice scene, so that its lines of force diverge instead of converging on the sacrificial altar; the group as a whole is reduced in size relative to the other figures, and the bull itself is now very small in relation to its slayers, and so even smaller compared to the altar group celebrants.

The onset of this process of "insertion" is observable on the Temple of Mars Ultor relief (fig. 9a). Here, however, the victim group is still to the right, and part of a unified and centralized composition; the bull slayers are still three in number and of the same size as the other figures in the relief, and the victim is still, realistically, of massive size. The Beneventum relief, on the other hand, goes even farther than the Domitianic coin in treating the victim group as a kind of pictograph whose physical "realism" is a matter of indifference—the left of the two figures who cut off the bull actually stands with his forearm loosely resting on the animal's back (at his waist level) as if the bull were an inert lump of balustrade and not a heaving animal maddened by fear under violent restraint!

The victim group on the arch, then, follows a line of adaptation of the BR victim group that passes through a Domitianic reworking documented by the coinage. This dependence on Domitianic workshop tradition is not surprising; mere common sense predicates a good deal of continuity between the workshop staffs employed first by Domitian and then, after the single of year of Nerva's reign, by Nerva's successor, Trajan. Such continuity has already been established for the purely architectural decoration of the arch, linked now to the Domitianic Arch of Titus.[8] The autonomy of this line of transmission for the victim group is confirmed by the contrast with the so-called Uffizi relief (fig. 94). This


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Trajanic or Hadrianic relief returned to a fuller and more "classical" rendering, which is much closer to the line of adaptation seen on the Julio-Claudian Temple of Mars Ultor relief (fig. 9a).

This brings us to the real focus of this section. Given the pictographic condensation of the BR victim group on the arch's sacrifice passage relief, it is especially noteworthy that the facing panel in the arch passage does borrow from the BR sacrifice panel composition, directly and in a far more sophisticated fashion. This other passage panel, the alimenta relief (fig. 91),[9] borrows as well from the "son-giving" composition of BR I:2. In both cases, the borrowing seems to be the product of a search for formal inspiration, that is, for guidance in the composition of massed figure groups, rather than an effort to evoke the kind of historical events celebrated on the cup panels and their original prototype.

The alimenta passage relief divides formally into two halves, left and right; I discuss the left section first. This portion of the relief is dominated by a triad of paludate figures (heads now missing), whose placement can be compared to that of the figures of a carousel as it revolves before a spectator. Each figure steps forward with one leg trailing on a circular path, first coming toward and then receding from the spectator: at left fully frontal; in the center in a higher, "nearer" plane of relief in three-quarter profile; at right in lower relief, again seen from behind and moving back into the relief ground. Each figure extends one or both arms forward to a greater or lesser degree, thus enhancing the sense of forward motion along the circular path established by the grouping of the triad. They circle toward and past a low tripod table on which stand two vaguely triangular lumps, which represent food or money to be handed out as alimenta to the children to the right of the table. The right-hand triad figure, moving past the table, still has an arm out over it and presumably has just handed out largess to the child now moving away with loaded cloak at right center; the central figure, who can only be Trajan, is moving toward the table in his turn, awaited by the child who right of the table holds out his cloak to pocket the expected dole.

The rite of distribution, then, seems to have been introduced by the right-hand triad personage, plausibly identified as the curator viarum; not only would he have been responsible for the construction of the Via Traiana, but by virtue of his office he was also in charge of the distribution of alimenta[10] (sensible, as he controlled the road network on which this distribution depended). The emperor is about to take over the presiding office, awaited by the expectant child and the equally expectant figures of city personifications behind and to the right of the table.


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Note, finally, the distinctive shape of the tripod table (the front support of which and its braces are now missing): its legs are solid and straight, flat extensions, rectangular in section; they support a very wide, round flat-bottomed tray with high, straight sides. This tray table is very different in form and proportions from the tripod altar on the facing passage panel, which is the table's compositional pendant as one passes through the arch.

Turn to the left-hand portion of the sacrifice panel BR II:1. Here is the same "carousel" of three paludate figures, in this case a lictor and two officers. Corresponding to the right-hand Beneventum triad figure is a lictor three-quarters front, right arm similarly flexed at the elbow and brought slightly forward, left arm hidden under his cloak balancing the fasces on the left shoulder; corresponding to the Beneventum Trajan is a figure in high relief in the nearest foreground plane, in three-quarter profile, left arm bent and brought forward and grasping something small, the right arm brought forward from the shoulder and bent sharply up; corresponding to the Beneventum curator is a third figure, in lower relief, seen from behind with his head turned, so that we see it in profile, his cloak similarly draped from a point on each shoulder so that catenary arcs fall down his back in succession between a cluster of vertical folds on either side. These three figures circle just behind Tiberius, immediately before whom stands a tripod altar of exactly the same shape and proportions as the Beneventum tripod table.

This "carousel" group serves to frame the action and lead the viewer into the narrative, at the same time enhancing the viewer's perception of deep "real" space. It is a clearly demarcated and highly sophisticated compositional group that functions as a dynamic visual device—what can be called a compositional unit. I have not seen this particular device used elsewhere in Roman relief (one is hampered by the fact that figure groupings and precise spatial devices are seldom discussed); note the identity of structure and placement, with the basic iconographic elements that the triad is paludate near the shared element of the distinctive tray table. In his rendition, the arch designer has used "carousel" and altar conflated, omitting the sacrificant Tiberius, who on the cup intervenes between these two compositional elements; retaining the placement and gestures of the BR figures, he has made the central triad figure in the foreground in high relief serve as protagonist of the panel and has put an enveloping fringed cloak on the back right triad member, who seems here, as on the cup, to be a bearer of something, probably a standard or vexillum. Also, the "carousel" has been rotated back a notch, so that the right-hand figure is


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buried less deeply in the relief ground and is on the same plane as the bearer at left, while the central figure is more fully displayed in three-quarter view. This kind of quotation and adaptation of compositional units occurs in Greek battle friezes, Roman sacro-idyllic landscape paintings, and Late Antique/Early Byzantine manuscript illustrations, among other examples; the reuse of such units, which serve both an iconographic and a formal function, is the hallmark in antiquity of a continuous artistic tradition in a given medium.

Now for the right-hand portion of the arch panel. At farthest right a man moves away with a (female) child on his shoulders whose arm curves down to lead away an older (male) child on foot;[11] beyond the older child a slightly shorter child comes up to the central tripod table; this child holds his arms up and looks upward at the emperor/attendant, who is making a gesture of reception and bestowal. The descending curve formed by the linked arms of the father and his son, highlighted by the curving gesture of the girl child on his back, is continued in the next plane of relief back by the curved body of a child in the arms of the leftmost female personification, and by the outstretched arms of this female and the personification immediately next to her. The father and two children on foot form, as it were, the front plane of highest relief, as shown below.

Behind them is a second plane constituted by the massed curtain of female figures, three personifications with turreted crowns who stand frontally with their heads turned toward the center; beyond this basic group are, behind the altar table from right to left, another father with his child on his shoulders (the father of the child at the table, presumably) and a larger female personification (probably Beneventum herself). This second plane is illustrated below.

The group as a whole consists of fathers with children who move in procession in stages to the center, taking their turns, to supplicate a benefit


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that state personages benevolently aquiesce in extending, meeting the supplicants with an answering gesture.

Significantly, this group, at least up to the altar table and the third female personification from the right, is a mirror image of the left-hand portion of the hostage scene BR I:2. There, a group of fathers usher their children forward in turn, two children on foot, framed at far left by a father with his child on his shoulders and in their movement highlighted by the stretching out of arms forming a descending arc. This descending arc is met by the answering curve of the gesture with which Augustus acquiesces in the children's supplication for protection and sponsorship. This curving sequence of foreground figures, highlighted by curving accents in the relief plane behind, is set against a backwall of massed figures of Romans and barbarians.

The Roman (Drusus) physically succors the children, as do the Beneventum personifications (the cities from which the children come). Above. (p. 107) I showed how the BR "flap" composition turned up on the Ara Pacis, used in either case to frame the young general Drusus set in its midst (fig. 78). At Beneventum (fig. 91) it occurs in its own right, facing, not enclosing, a standing imperator and benefactor. It is plain, too, that the Beneventum panel derives not from the Ara Pacis version but from the BR version of this compositional structure, in figure types, narrative context, and formal location (framing one end of a centralized panel narrative composition). This is what occurred with the left-hand section of the Beneventum panel and BR II:1 (carousel group + table unit); a triad of paludate figures was involved in an imperial offering from a special table (to the gods on the cup, to men on the arch). In the unit described here, young children are brought by their fathers as loyal subjects/citizens to ask for and receive imperial sponsorship in the form of the extension of a father's nurturing role by the emperor (guardianship on the cup, material nourishment on the arch).

Compositional analysis thus establishes that the alimenta passage relief composition was constructed by combining two compositional units that each make up roughly one-half of two separate panels from the Boscoreale Cups. These formal compositional correspondences are indisputable; how is one to comment on them? It is true that very little panel relief survives from the years between the reigns of Augustus and Trajan; it is possible that these compositional units came down to the Trajanic artist mediated by separate lines of transmission, to converge in the arch by accident. However, it seems to me too much of a coincidence that the two


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units quoted should stem from a single assemblage and be reused in a single assemblage and that in each case not only formal but contextual reference has been maintained to a significant degree. The arch panel is based on the observation of a single assemblage containing the originals of the two cup panels BR I:2 and II:1.

This still leaves the possibility that the arch designer was looking at an earlier imperial relief that did his work of quotation and combination for him, what I have termed a mediating work. We do have for comparison on the facing sacrifice panel a reuse of a BR cup compositional unit, which can be proved to have been transmitted by intermediate stages of reuse. That unit is the victim group discussed above. There it can be seen how the handling of what was once a formally rich and sophisticated figure group had turned flat and stale, after the group had passed through several stages of mediation. Evidently, the Beneventum master was quite willing to turn to the later and simpler reworking of a given compositional unit, if such a version was available, rather than attempt a more difficult presentation (contrast especially the work of the designer of the Uffizi relief, fig. 94, discussed on p. 158). The alimenta panel, too, when compared with the BR renderings echoed, manifests this tendency toward stylization and dimensional simplification on the part of the Beneventum master. Given this observable tendency, the remaining close correspondence between the alimenta panel groupings and the BR groupings (Gallic fatherson group, and altar group) seems to show that the Beneventum master worked here at only one remove from the BR panels' originals.

To conclude, the designer of the reliefs of the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (the Beneventum master) belonged to a workshop from the capital known to have carried out other commissions in Rome.[12] In drafting the composition for the alimenta passage relief, he made notes for himself to carry to Beneventum, based on direct observation of the BR prototype reliefs. In doing so he marked down useful ideas on how to make a stimulating panel rendering of particular kinds of crowd scenes dictated by his commission at Beneventum: "paludate imperial party approaches offering table"; "children supplicate the emperor for his fatherly patronage." For these considerations of structure and content, he reworked for his own commission what seemed to him a useful guiding prototype, the pair of reliefs copied for BR I:2 and II:1. One is tempted to think that the Beneventum master thought that one useful element of his prototypes was that they were Augustan reliefs, that is, that some of his audience were meant to pick up on the Augustan reference as such; this kind of imitatio would fit nicely with Trajan's well-known tendency to portray himself as


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a "new Augustus" by evoking Augustan political themes and imitating Augustan monuments (consider the Forum of Trajan vis-à-vis the Forum of Augustus). While it is possible that a reference to specific Augustan monuments was supposed to be legible in the alimenta panel, it cannot be proved, and it is rather unlikely given that the arch at Beneventum had to be viewed at such physical distance from its visual sources, which were located in Rome.

A few closing words on style are in order. The discussion of compositional units here should enlarge the reader's notion of what the lost Augustan monumental corpus was worth in artistic terms. As those who have waded through the literature on Roman relief know, the so-called achievements of Flavian illusionism have dominated discussions of the evolution of Roman relief style, especially as a dating criterion for unattached fragments, ever since F. Wickhoff waxed enthusiastic over the Arch of Titus panel reliefs and associated monuments, to the point of comparing the master of the Arch of Titus (figs. 107–8) to Velázquez. He was particularly struck by Flavian mastery in the manipulation of relief planes "die Wirklichkeit vorzutauschen,"[13] as other scholars have been ever since. We, like Wickhoff, cannot but respond to this Flavian mastery of the expressive possibilities of relief, which we can see beginning to crystallize into a more stylized deployment in much of the Trajanic corpus. What the BR cups show is that some at least of the most sophisticated visual devices available to the master carvers of the late first and early second centuries of the Empire had already been initiated and formulated at the beginning of the Empire. By sheer accident most of what Julio-Claudian relief is left to us is in the form of procession friezes, which exercise in decorous conformance to their genre a much more subdued style than the narrative historical panels that first surface on the Arch of Titus. The BR narrative panels show us that Augustan response to the demands of this genre can stand comparison with the weightiest of imperial compositions from the so-called Golden Age of Flavian and Trajanic narrative relief.

The Ludovisi Sarcophagus Lid

The previous section analyzed an instance of Trajanic dependence on the BR "son-giving" scene, or rather on its original prototype. This formal dependence occurred together with a rough similarity of context: "children supplicate the emperor." This section treats an instance of full depen-


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dence on BR I:2—that is, the copying of the BR composition to depict an identical subject.

The afterlife of the Boscoreale composition is difficult to discern. Gabelmann put it at the very beginning of the long series of scenes of barbarian submission in imperial art.[14] He was partly right, because the cup does give us the earliest example of the basic composition "barbarians submissively approach an emperor." He saw the cup's monumental prototype, a post-Augustan Julio-Claudian monument, as the startling initial formulation from which all later iconographic variants derive. A first necessary qualification to this thesis is that the monumental original transmitted to us on the cup is the first extant variation on this compositional genre of barbarian submission scenes. Given the scanty surviving record of early imperial documentary art, one cannot assert that this particular example stands at the head of the series. Indeed, the indication is that is does not, that it is itself a variant of a convenient, already evolved genre composition.

This leads to a second qualification. As carefully explained in chapter 4, BR I:2 is not a canonical submission scene. It shows aliens friendly to Rome (the primores of Gaul) offering their children to be raised by Augustus; it does not show the leaders of a just-defeated people offering their children unwillingly as hostages. The emperor himself is togate, not armed: tribute to his abilities is paid here to his peaceful administration of the empire as a chief magistrate, not to his exercise of military virtus as a conquering general. As chapter 2 stresses, this representation is unique; excepting the piece treated in this section, Republican instances of submission scenes and all later imperial depictions that show foreigners with or without their children approaching a Roman official in a military setting portray groveling, beaten savages abasing themselves before a general to beg his clemency. The surviving Republican depictions of this theme are extremely abbreviated numismatic representations; this does not allow us to conclude with Gabelmann that more complex compositions on the same structural armature did not exist until the BR prototype was formulated, for abbreviation is in the nature of numismatic depiction. Compare, for example, the numismatic abbreviation of the BR depiction on the Lugdunum coinage of 8/7 B.C. (fig. 87) to the cup panel!

Instead, I think that the very resemblance of the BR composition to canonical submission scenes, among which modern scholarship has summarily placed the cup panel, testifies to the fact that it is a variant on an established (lost) genre of crowded triumphal representations; for if the artist had never seen such a submission scene, I do not think that it is likely


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that he would have composed such an initially misleading rendering. In depicting an event peculiarly tied to Augustan practice and propaganda he used a compositional structure that he evidently took for granted, which he could, and had to, modify in details—toga, smiling babies, et cetera—to suit his unique commission. Prior to the BR representation must stand monumentally scaled panel depictions, in sculpture or painting, which we know only from the numismatic abbreviations that begin over half a century before the cup prototype with, for example, Faustus Sulla's coinage (fig. 50). It is this main line of evolution that is followed by the canonical submission scenes that come after the cup. No doubt, among the mass of Augustan monuments, there was at least one Augustan rendering of the typical theme of beaten barbarians. In the cup panel BR I:2, however, we do not have such a rendering, but a variant on the generic submission composition that has been altered to serve a different thematic purpose.

The Augustan composition reproduced by this BR cup panel did have a limited afterlife, limited not because the prototype was insignificant or badly made, but because there was no call to use it for an identical purpose. That is, the policy that stressed the rearing of the children of subject and nonsubject foreign elites was an Augustan one that was dropped by later emperors. Some kings continued to send their children, but policy as such consists not least in the placing of emphasis on actual practice, by means of the organs of state propaganda. This proclamation of policy ceased, as far as one can tell from the extant historical record, and the call for images celebrating the particular manifestations of such a policy ceased with the policy itself. To cite a parallel from a later era: when England and northern Europe broke from the Catholic church in the Reformation, Protestant Christians still erected crucifixes, but they ceased to erect representations of the Madonna, having abandoned the "Mariolatry" of Catholic Christianity.

The monument on which the cup is based, evidently a representation of some complexity and sophistication, did remain standing in Rome and did exert some influence on later relief: this we have seen above in the formal borrowing of some of its compositional devices in the passage panel of the arch at Beneventum. This postulated Augustan monument continued to stand well into the third century, when it inspired the representation of a "submission" on the lid of the Ludovisi sarcophagus.

I have explained why I think it wrong to see in the BR prototype the early imperial ancestor of later submission scenes in general, as represented by Antonine relief and by "generals'" sarcophagi of the second and third centuries A.D. (figs. 83, 89, 93). The BR panel may or may not be


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behind the figure types used when these submission scenes include the defeated barbarians' children; we do not know if the small children on the cup were a new element in themselves when introduced, or whether the pathetic representation of a barbarian family suing for mercy after the males had been defeated in battle was already part of the Republican repertoire. The stock figure of a barbarian with his little child is used in a purely triumphal context as emblem of a beaten enemy; compare the child standing with two adult captives in a triumph, on the Julio-Claudian frieze from Rome in Naples (fig. 84). It is also a rare theme of Julio-Claudian cuirass statues, disappearing after from the extant corpus of cuirass portraits. One is an Augustan cuirass portrait (now headless) from southern Gaul in Copenhagen,[15] honoring a member of the imperial house; on one of the pteryges (embossed "bronze" lappets) fringing the bottom of the cuirass is a half-naked, disheveled, bearded Gaul with his child on his shoulders (identifiable because the adjacent lappet has a boar standard) (fig. 82). On a Julio-Claudian cuirass statue from Etruria (Rucellae) a barbarian advances along the "ground" (cuirass edge) toward a central trophy, carrying his child.[16] A Neronian statue in Rome shows a naked infant at its father's feet, where he is bound by a trophy.[17]

The only other commemorative representations, aside from Antonine panels showing a barbarian with an adolescent son (figs. 83, 89), are on late imperial sarcophagi (fig. 93). On these, a general on a tribunal sits back as anguished barbarians, of Celtic type, stumble forward from or before a crowd of soldiers. (Compare the childless submission on the lost base reliefs of the Column of Marcus Aurelius; see fig. 121.) Usually the barbarian nearest the general goes down on one knee, back bowed and hands held out in pleading submission; a crying child (sometimes with its mother) will, when included in such a group, grovel immediately in front of this leading figure, its father. This is the kind of genre scene with which Gabelmann identified the BR rendering.

The inclusion of children on the Julio-Claudian cuirass statues and on the late imperial sarcophagi may or may not derive from the BR prototype. The cuirass statues' abbreviated emblematic figure groups can very well be taken as testimony to some major early imperial prototype of the sarcophagus genre scene; compare the reflection of such lost major monuments in the exergue of the Tiberian Grande Camée de France, where barbarian men and women huddle with infants among captured arms.[18] The Antonine sarcophagus panels certainly copy set pieces of lost triumphal monuments. The depiction of an adolescent son with his father in a supplication was not restricted to the Aurelian panel relief (fig. 83) but


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appeared elsewhere on less abbreviated second-century monumental reliefs, such as the Torlonia relief (pendant to an adventus in the Conservatori):[19] a barbarian embassy supplicates the standing togate emperor, a boy of approximately twelve years standing behind his kneeling father at the edge of the group, reaching out his hands like his elders (fig. 89).[20]

These compositions seem to be simple, brutal depictions of the utter dependence of a defeated foe for clemency on the conquering Roman emperor/general. Perhaps the children in these groups are to be handed over to the custody of the conqueror as hostages; more likely, they are brought by their fathers to try to stir Roman pity for the vanquished, as symbols of the total subjection of their race. Also missing from any of these scenes is a sponsoring figure like the young general Drusus on the BR cup; the only general is the conqueror himself, judging from the position of triumph in which his virtus has placed him. The curious third-century variant in this sarcophagus series was illustrated by Gabelmann, but as he did not go into the details of the BR panel (young general as sponsor, physically cherishing the children; smiling babies; etc.), he was not alert to its similarly variant status.

This variant scene is a panel on the front of the lid of the Ludovisi sarcophagus (fig. 88), much less well known than the battle panel on the sarcophagus face. At some modern date it became separated from the body of the sarcophagus and ended up in the state museum in Mainz, where it was severely damaged and broken in World War II. Recently, it was painstakingly put back together; older drawings supplement the many small gaps where pulverized stone could not be replaced.[21] The lid has a flat front edge, high enough to take figural decoration. At center is a (blank) tabula for a painted inscription; at right a female bust is set before a curtain (parapetasma ) held up by Victories; below the tabula a little group of four mourning barbarians flanks a trophy;[22] on the left is our panel, its tall, rectangular format comparable to that of the Antonine panel reliefs. The general/emperor in the battle scene on the main face must be the (headless) protagonist of this panel. He sits at right on a sella castrensis on a tribunal of moderate height, wearing tunic and paludamentum, in his left hand a spear or scepter; he lifts his right hand with palm open. At left a massed group attends him; the back row are soldiers with two legionary standards and a vexillum. In the front rank at far left stand two Celtic barbarians, in front of whom stand two children side by side, decorously upright, aged about ten (slightly over waist height to the parents). These children are being "introduced" to the emperor by a young, bearded officer, who stands full front between the children and the tribunal, his head


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turned sharply in profile toward the emperor; his right hand rests on the head of the foremost child; his left hand is knotted around the hilt of his sword (compare the BR Drusus), though the carver omitted the baldric from which the sword should be suspended. This officer wears dress uniform, though not the cuirass of the BR Drusus; a paludamentum is pinned on his right shoulder and pushed back over his shoulders.

Two elements of this scene are immediately surprising to an observer of the other sarcophagi and interesting to a student of the BR panel: the presence of a sponsor for the barbarian party and the dignified way in which the barbarians are represented. The two barbarians at far left correspond to the standing barbarians at far left of the cup panel; except that their cloaks are not fringed, their costume is identical. Note that they stand at ease, looking toward the emperor, and do not assume any posture of humiliation, in contrast to the genre scenes discussed above; in this they also conform to the cup and coin representations of the BR event. Their two children also stand at ease; the left holds hands with his father and looks up at him; the right looks at the emperor on the dais as the young officer places his hand on the child's head.[23] The children's costume is not Celtic but Greco-Roman, a himation- or togalike garment; the different way it is draped on the two children may distinguish them as boy and girl.[24] Though older than the BR infants, they are shown in a similar posture of emotional ease and privileged dependence on Roman authority, in the person of the sponsoring officer. This officer himself is singled out as being of very high status: in this hierarchic composition the foreigners and soldiers are much smaller than the presiding figure on the dais, but the tall young officer is as large as his superior.

We have here the bones of the BR scene, in composition and in theme; dignified barbarians at an audience before the emperor, presenting their children to him as he responds with a welcoming gesture, sponsored by a young Roman officer of very high rank who is also in a privileged position—that is, probably a young relative—vis-à-vis that emperor. Whatever this is, it is not an image of beaten barbarian enemies groveling to sue for mercy. In no other sarcophagus group of barbarians-children-general does the presiding figure make this gesture of welcome. It echoes the gesture of the general in the battle scene below, where it expresses military superiority; here it is a gesture of just and peaceful rule over loyal foreigners, who themselves stand in contrast to the anguished superbi dying below and to the grieving captives at the lid's center.

This panel, so much at variance with the late imperial submission genre, must borrow from the BR composition. The vaguely Romanized


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dress of the children is reminiscent of a similar alteration in the dress of the BR child on the Ara Pacis frieze (figs. 76–77); whether this detail on the lid is an invention of its sculptor or whether it has been picked up from some other monument, its purpose seems to be to mark the children out as favored and civilized recipients of Roman attention, in a period when small children upheld by stooping fathers would look too much like a (by-now) conventional submission scene.

As for other discrepancies between the sarcophagus lid and the cup depiction, when examined they turn out to be due to a garbling of real details in the BR composition. The curious armor of the "Drusus" figure, not like any other dress cuirass in this period or earlier, is in fact the armor of the soldier who stands at the far right of the BR panel, who is also a frontal figure; this explains why the sword has no baldric from which to hang so that its bearer can rest the weight of his arm on it—the BR soldier whose torso is copied here has no baldric either. The lid emperor's drapery is confusing and inexplicable as a representation of a simple tunic and cloak. Consider the large tongue of drapery massed on his left thigh: when we look at the BR cup we see that this tongue of drapery on the thigh is a notable element of Augustus' portrait, but on the cup it follows naturally from the disposition of a toga on the legs of a seated figure. Note also that the tunic of the seated emperor on the lid falls into the same prominent nest of catenary V folds as does the tunic of the enthroned BR Augustus.

There remains the fact that the emperor on the sarcophagus lid wears tunic and paludamentum instead of tunic and toga. I pointed out in chapter 5 that in the late Empire a subject can still be accounted paludatus even if he is not wearing a cuirass, as in the nuncupatio votorum sarcophagus scenes (fig. 93), which omit or include the cuirass indifferently. It is worth pointing out, however, that this protagonist differs from all the other sarcophagus submissio protagonists in not wearing a cuirass, a detail that seems a true deliberate variant from the sarcophagus submission genre, and that with the resemblances to the BR Augustus' drapery type is grounds for identifying deliberate (if confused) dependence on the BR imperial figure. Since the third-century artist was carving a scene in a military setting, he thought that he ought to make his emperor paludatus; he looked, however, to the BR Augustus' "nonthreatening" costume and not to the seated cuirass figure of the by-now familiar submission iconography. Also altered is the height of the emperor's dais; but this, and the tall, narrow rectangular format of the panel itself, seems to reflect again the second-century evolution in monumental art.


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This format is very unusual for a figure panel on a sarcophagus lid; it copies the kind of format for narrative documentary panels that is exemplified by the panel reliefs of Marcus Aurelius (fig. 83). On these too, the emperor's dais is very tall, in scenes with a military setting, and also in "friendly" scenes like the congiarium panel from the series where the emperor is passing out gifts to Roman citizens and their children (the sarcophagus's children's costume may be influenced by just such a late second-century congiarium representation).[25] The observable differences between the sarcophagus panel and the cup panel are nonessential, products of unthinking assumptions made by a third-century artist in the mainstream of contemporary imperial relief production. The Ludovisi sarcophagus can in fact be placed in a small, but discrete, class of third-century sarcophagi from Rome whose lids exhibit "documentary" scenes from the public career of the deceased;[26] the rarity of this narrative format highlights its derivation from large-scale relief-ornamented facades, rather than from any sarcophagus workshop tradition, even if certain types of scene (e.g., magistrates' processions) later developed observable formulae within that tradition.[27] The Ludovisi sarcophagus itself is almost certainly an imperial commission,[28] or at least made for a very high-ranking general in the imperial service; we know that in the third century such sarcophagi made in Rome could be executed by artisans from the same workshops that got monumental imperial commissions (e.g., the Constantinian panels on the Arch of Constantine and some contemporary sarcophagi). Its decoration is so far unique even within the limited class just described, as it is the only lid to illustrate a scene from an imperatorial career; the type seems originally to have been worked out for magistrates at Rome who were restricted to civilian careers, not for those who commissioned the "generals'" sarcophagi. Its clearly delimited oblong panel format also points to its immediate dependence on official monuments,[29] for other lids in the class tend more to a longer, loosely processional or crowd format, even when (as here) the consular protagonist gives audience from a tribunal.[30]

To conclude, the Ludovisi sarcophagus lid has a panel that is a second echo of the BR I:2 "son-giving" scene, to set next to the alimenta panel from the Trajanic arch at Beneventum. That was a borrowing in formal terms, tied to the representation of children before an emperor in a context of alimenta; this is a borrowing of some of the compositional structure of the BR panel, with confused echoes of its figure types, in a similar context involving non-Romans before the emperor. Such borrowing is not at all out of place on this sarcophagus, whose main battle scene, justly


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famous, depends on the monumental relief tradition exemplified by the battle frieze from the Forum of Trajan. Even if the sarcophagus is not an emperor's commission, nonimperial generals were celebrated on such sarcophagi with imperial artistic formulae in any case.

One cannot say exactly why the BR theme is being echoed here. Certainly in the context of the sarcophagus's entire decorative program such a depiction fits in as emblematic of peaceful rule, balancing the conquering virtues of the main face. Whether it is, thus, simply emblematic, not at all impossible in this late period, or whether it reflects particular historical circumstance, is also hard to say. This problem applies in particular to the figure of the young officer: perhaps, if this is an imperial sarcophagus, this "Drusus" is indeed an imperial heir; even if this is not an imperial sarcophagus, the female portrait on the other end of the lid shows that the patron wished to include his immediate family, and this might indeed be his son, prince or no prince. For all its clumsiness, the Ludovisi sarcophagus lid panel shows that the original of BR I:2 survived into the third century A.D. and could still be understood at that time for what it basically was, a depiction of benevolent imperial rule of loyal non-Roman dependents.


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