Tomb of the Frontispiece
About
Shaped like a miniature temple, this shrine-form tomb carried a marble pediment centered on a carved rosette above a long relief of four family busts. It stood roughly a hundred metres south of the Rabirii tomb along the same stretch of the Appian Way. No inscription survived to name its owners, only the family portrait clasping hands in the traditional dextrarum iunctio. Built in the second century BCE, it ranks among the oldest funerary monuments on this stretch of road.
What happened here
Roman burial is a family matter conducted in public. The dead are carried out of town, cremated or laid in the ground, and mourned with formal noise; the funeral of anyone important is a procession with masks of the ancestors carried by hired men. The tomb that follows is designed to be read by strangers on the road: name, age, offices, sometimes a trade shown in relief, often a line addressed directly to the passer-by. Ordinary people appear here as they nowhere else — a baker with his ovens carved on the front, a freedman naming the woman he could finally marry, a child's age given in days. Anniversaries bring the family back with food and wine.
Sources
Nearby
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