Funerary Altar of Flavia Dafne

Roman art

This four-sided altar is richly decorated with ram heads in the four corners, holding up festoons of fruit and leaves on the front and laurel leaves on the sides. Below the ovine heads, there are two eagles with spread wings and standing on two small protruding brackets. Beneath the tabula inscritta on the front, there is a gorgon’s head with eagles on either side. Below the festoon, there are two fighting roosters. The short sides are decorated with reliefs of ritual symbols: a libation tray called a patera, and a small pitcher called an urceus. There is a small dolphin below the garland.

This funerary monument was dedicated by the imperial freedman Titus Flavius Crescente to his sister Flavia Dafne. The cognomen Flavius suggests that the two freedmen were linked to the Flavian dynasty, a period to which the altar seems to be datable.

The sculpture came from the Villa di Mondragone at Frascati, where it was documented in 1742. It was recorded in the Villa Borghese, Rome in 1832, in its current location in the Salone.

Object details

Commentary

In 1726, this altar was listed among the numerous finds unearthed in the Frascati area (Mémoires pour l'histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts 1726, p. 1538). Later, in 1742, Volpi confirmed its provenance in the Villa Borghese at Mondragone in Tuscolo, where it was used as a base for a statue of Antinoüs (Volpi 1742, p. 144). Lastly, in 1832, it was documented in the Villa Borghese in Rome by Nibby, who described it in its current location in the Salone, serving as a base for a statue of a ‘Togate Caligula, veiled in the act of making a sacrifice’, which was probably the portrait of Augustus as Pontifex Maximus that is currently set on the altar, inv. XLI (Nibby, 1832, pp. 43–45, no. 8).

The moulding on the base of four-sided altar is composed of a listel, a cyma reversa and an astragal. Its four sides are decorated with ram’s heads in the upper corners. The curved horns of the rams are holding up garlands of fruit and flowers suspended from fluttering taeniae. Below the ovine protomes, in the lower corners, there are frontal eagles with spread wings and their heads turned towards the altar. The eagles are standing on small corbels. Below the garland on the front, there are two roosters fighting over an ear of grain. Above the garland, there is a Gorgon head, flanked by two small eagles under a tabula with the funerary inscription, framed by a listel. On the left side, above a garland of laurel leaves, which Nibby wrote was meant to evoke the name of Daphne (the nymph loved by Apollo who transformed into that plant), there is a small libation pitcher called an urceus above two small birds. There is a dolphin below the garland. The right side repeats the imagery on the left, replacing the pitcher with a ritual tray called a patera.

The six-line epigraph dedicated to Flavia Dafne on the front reads:

DIS MANIBUS

FLAVIAE AUG(USTI) L(IBERTAE)

DAPHNE

CRESCENS AUG(USTI) L(IBERTUS)

A RATIONIBUS

SORORI.

 The altar is a commemorative monument that was commissioned by the imperial book-keeper and freedman Titus Flavius Crescente for his sister Flavia Dafne. Nibby dated the altar to the Flavian period, specifically Vespasian, and thought it might have come from Gabii. According to the scholar, Titus Flavius Crescente was a freedman of Vespasian and Titus also named in another altar, also in the Borghese Collection, that was unearthed during excavations in Gabii (inv. LXXXV). Nibby misinterpreted the inscription, reading Aug and L, as Aucte (1832, pp. 43–45, no. 8). In fact, the final letter of the third line, an E, could be an error (or a modern insertion), the abbreviated words thus correctly becoming Aug(usti) l(ibertae). Kłodziński proposed that Flavia Dafne had been freed by a Flavian emperor, as was likely the case for her brother, based in their shared nomen, Flavius (Kłodziński 2017, p. 298, no. 8, fig. 11). Other scholars instead argued that Claudius or Nero freed Crescente, who they identified as the procurator of Carthage cited by Tacitus in his Historiae as ‘Crescens Neronis libertus’ (Tac. Hist. 1:76: Weaver 2004, pp. 145–146, nos 806, 810).

The sculpture belongs to a category of funerary altars from the imperial age decorated with 

symbolic imagery from the Roman funerary repertoire. Specifically, in an exhaustive study published in 1905, Altmann identified a type decorated with ram’s heads holding up festoons, ‘Verziening mit Widderkopfen’, that was introduced during the Augustan age and became especially popular during the Claudian period, to which the scholar dated the Borghese altar (1905, p. 79, no. 40, fig. 66).

Although reworked, especially in the back, the sculpture’s iconography and style is comparable to an altar in the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps (inv. 8578 ter: De Lachenal 1983, pp. 6–10).

The sculpture is datable to the Flavian period, in the second half of the first century CE.

Giulia Ciccarello