Tomb of Vestorius Priscus
About
Gaius Vestorius Priscus died in office as a Pompeian aedile at just 22 years old, and his mother paid for a tufa-stone tomb near the Vesuvius Gate to mark it. Painted walls inside show him entering through a doorway, a table stacked with writing tools and coin, and a pair of gladiators he had sponsored in the amphitheater. The city had voted two thousand sesterces toward his funeral. The 79 CE eruption buried the tomb, decades ahead of this map's 117 CE date.
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.
In ancient writing
- AE 1911, 72 (unknown/anonymous, funerary inscription; the tomb was excavated in 1908, after CIL X's 1883 publication, so it first appeared in L'Annee epigraphique rather than CIL), L'Annee epigraphique 1911 72
The inscription records that Gaius Vestorius Priscus, aedile, died at 22; the town decurions granted the burial place and 2,000 sesterces toward the funeral, and his mother Mulvia Prisca built the tomb at her own expense.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →