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-

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.