Ancient Worlds, New Space, continued

The Roman World

The Museum’s Lead Coffin
Purchased in 1895 from a Newark, New Jersey, dealer with roundabout connections with the Museum, our third-century Roman lead coffin reveals its story in a symbolic language that is not easily deciphered. While both abundant and relatively cheap, lead carried for the ancients the stigma of being gold’s opposite. While gold was “noble,” lead was “base.” The gloomy planet Saturn, itself thought to be made of lead, was associated with decaying old age and death, while the life-giving sun was thought to be of gold. And if bright gold symbolized the perpetuation of life, its cold and dark opposite was used to engender destruction and death as the preferred medium on which to write curses and magic spells. The coffin’s long sides are covered in low relief with Medusa heads and dolphins surrounded by laurel and ivy leaves; one of the short ends pictures the facade of a Corinthian temple, the other an eight-spoked “rope star” design interspersed with more ivy. All of these devices are symbolically connected with either the cult of Dionysus, which promised its initiates an existence beyond the grave, or the repulsion of evil spirits and demons. But the coffin’s most arcane message lies in the triple lines of twisted rope that bind its box lengthwise and doubtlessly would have looped over the missing lid to seal its vaulted cover firmly in place. The Roman world was popularly believed to swarm with malignant spirits, succubi, and ghosts, and nowhere were they more apt to be found than in a cemetery. The ropes consequently serve a dual purpose, the one preventative, the other prophylactic. The first was designed to keep external spirits from harming the dead, the other to keep the ghost of the deceased from escaping its coffin to wander abroad and molest the living.

—Donald White

Diana’s Gifts
“No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban Hills, can ever forget it,” wrote Sir James Frazer in the opening sentences of his 1890 opus The Golden Bough, which immortalized Nemi and the myths associated with Diana’s cult along the lake. Since antiquity, Lake Nemi and the virgin huntress Diana’s important sanctuary on its shores have been the stuff of legend, lore, and artistic inspiration. Lake Nemi is located just south of Rome in the cool and wooded Alban Hills, where Aeneas roamed and where the rich and well-connected have kept vacation villas since Republican Roman times.

The Museum’s collection of 45 pieces of marble sculpture from the Sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, acquired in 1896, were among the first for the newly founded Museum. The collection is made up of mostly late-second-century B.C. votive statuettes and a set of inscribed marble vessels of early Imperial date, all gifts to Diana from devotees, as well as fragments of cult statues of Diana that would have been set in one of her temples. A display on the Sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis in the Roman World gallery, which includes many of these sculptures with a mural backdrop of the lake, is my favorite part of the exhibition.

—Dr. Irene Bald Romano Gr’80, research associate in the Mediterranean Section, co-curator and coordinator.

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