Metropolitan Museum on Ancient Rome

A Freed Slave in Augustan Rome Paid to Have His Wrinkles Carved in Marble

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The piece is small, about nine and a half inches high, and it is obviously a fragment. A man’s head and shoulders, carved in marble in the late first century BCE, broken out of something considerably larger. The Met’s curators identify what that something was: a funerary relief, the kind set into the outside wall of a family tomb, and they think the man was almost certainly a freedman.

His face is not flattered. The flesh sits heavy around the mouth, the brow is creased, the whole head has the blunt hard-worn quality that art historians call verism. He paid for that. Somebody in Rome, a generation or two out of slavery, commissioned a portrait and specifically did not ask to be made handsome.

The Badminton Sarcophagus Was Carved While the Roman Empire Was Coming Apart

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Forty human and animal figures, cut in high relief across seven feet of marble, with Dionysos riding a panther at the centre and the four Seasons standing around him as broad-shouldered young men rather than the women Roman art usually used for the job. One rounded end holds Mother Earth reclining with her attendants. The other has a river god and a pair of winged figures. Small Bacchic hangers-on fill every gap between the large figures, carved at reduced scale so the composition never breathes.

The Boscoreale Bedroom at the Met May Be Named for the Wrong Roman

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vesuvius buried the villa at Boscoreale in 79 CE, about a kilometre north of Pompeii on the mountain’s lower slopes. By then the room was already old. Its walls had been painted around 50 to 40 BCE, while Caesar was still alive and the Republic still formally existed, so what the eruption sealed was a century-old bedroom whose occupants had chosen not to redecorate.

You can walk into that bedroom today, in Gallery 165 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Met's Augustus Was Carved After He Died, and It Shows Him Half His Age

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The head is over life-size, twelve inches on its own, and it broke away long ago from what was probably a seated statue of the emperor. The Met dates it to somewhere between 14 and 37 CE, which is the reign of Tiberius. Augustus was already dead when the sculptor started work. He had died in 14 CE at seventy-seven, after fifty-odd years at the centre of Roman public life, and the face on this marble belongs to a man around thirty.

The Met's Caracalla Denarius Promised Imperial Heirs and Then Rome Erased the Bride

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The coin is silver, struck at Rome, and weighs under four grams. On the front there is no emperor at all. The bust is a woman’s, draped, with the legend PLAVTILLAE AVGVSTAE running around her. Turn it over and two figures stand clasping right hands, Caracalla and his wife Plautilla, under the words PROPAGO IMPERI. The empire’s continuation. Heirs, in other words, promised on the currency.

The Met dates it between 202 and 205 CE. Those three years are the entire window in which this coin made sense, and it is worth understanding why the window shut.