Museo Nazionale Romano alle Terme di Diocleziano
Largo Villa Peretti, 1 00185 Rome (Termini Station)
Opening hours: 9 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Closed Mondays

Epigraphy Collection (Collezione Epigrafica)

For decades the greater part of the collection of Roman antiquities housed in the Museo Nazionale Romano (Rome's National Museum) remained inaccessible to the public. The museum, containing most of the finds from archaeological excavations in Rome after 1870, the year of Italy's unification, had reached a saturation point. It was impossible to display everything, yet there was no designated space for storing the finds from ancient Roman sites but that which housed the museum itself within the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. Since 1997, however, the long-anticipated project of de-centralizing the National Museum has been realized, with the inauguration of new homes for one or more of the museum's many collections or departments. Following upon the opening of Palazzo Altemps near Piazza Navona for the Ludovisi sculpture collection, Palazzo Massimo for a collection centered around work of the late Republic and Imperial Rome, and the Crypta Balbi near Piazza Venezia for the unique presentation of finds from Late Antique and Medieval sites in the city, comes the re-opening of the old center for the museum in the Baths of Diocletian. Deprived of many of its star attractions in sculpture and fresco now in the other museums, the Terme complex instead houses several special collections and visiting exhibitions related to ancient history and culture.

At present, three of these collections have been fully installed in a new, multi-level edifice hidden between the old atrium of the museum and the Michelangeloesque cloister of the Terme. These are the Museum of the Prehistory of the Latin People, the Epigraphic collection and a collection of sculpture largely made up of funerary monuments and cippi.

The Epigraphic collection contains a chronological presentation of inscriptions from Rome and Latium from the city's origins (VIIIth century B.C.) to the Vith century A.D. It displays artifacts which provide important linguistic, historical, geographic and material information about the ancient texts and the context in which they were created and used. For this reason, not all the objects on display are epigraphical; rather, the focus is directed on how the written language interacted with the daily lives of the Romans. Pottery, weaponry, tools and votive objects of terra-cotta and marble are displayed alongside the dedicatory or funerary inscriptions often discovered in a single site.

The collection is arranged on three floors. The ground floor introduces the collection with a section on early Latium and a life-sized cast of the Lapis Niger from the Curia and proceeds with a series of displays on Republican cults in Rome and Republican funerary stele and reliefs. The first floor shifts focus on to the Imperial period, with a exhibit of dedicatory inscriptions from the period of the Julio-Claudian dynasty to the time of the Tetrarchy. The imperial inscriptions do not just name emperors; much of the material on this theme testifies to the complicated class system in ancient Rome and the relations between various classes and the almost complete disappearance of the gens from Roman society.

The top floor houses the final part of the collection, comprised for the greater part of inscriptions invoking the favor and protection of the gods. This section should be seen, however, along with the rest of the collection in order to recognize the Romanitas of an Mithraeum (meeting hall for members of an Iranian cult) or Christian epitaph in Rome, and the continuity of various formulae for funerary epitaphs and public works carried out on shrines. Thus, a mid-second century Jewish funerary epitaph in Latin from Castelporziano conserves on a neat rectangular marble slab the legalities of preparing a funerary plot for members of the "universitas Judaeorum". It ends with the standard formula "lib. Posterisque eorum" and the exact measurements of the plot.

The marble lid of a sarcophagus, decorated in the style of a temple roof with theatre masks as antefixes, bears a Greek inscription to a certain Faustina, accompanied by a series of Jewish symbols and the word "shalom" in Hebrew on the central tabellum of the lid. A Christian epitaph in Latin from the beginning of the third century opens with an invocation to the Dis Manibus (guardians of the grave). There is a break in the inscription, however, for the inclusion of two fish beside an anchor and the Greek phrase IXOUS ZWTWN (Fish of the living). This is one of the earliest examples of Christian symbolism on a funerary monument. The piece was discovered close to the site of the Vatican necropolis beneath St. Peter's Church and formerly belonged to the Kircherian collection.

There are some rare fragments of epitaphs from the now-destroyed Monteverde catacomb, including a dedication to Vindicanus the mellarchon (designated archon) of a synagogue, and a series of inscriptions naming members of several of the 13 known Jewish synagogues in Ancient Rome (specifically those of the Hebrews, Agrippenses, Tripolitan, Calcarenses, and Volumnenses) believed to have been located in Trastevere or by the Circus Flaminius by the Tiber. The symbols of the shofar, lulab, aron and menorah are common, whereas the rarer images of unleavened bread and a vase seem to refer to liturgical rites and feasts in the Jewish calendar. Among the Christian inscriptions, the Good Shepherd makes an early appearance, along with the figure of the orans and dove. Other images canonical to Roman catacomb art are that of Noah emerging from the arc and the five loaves and two fishes from the New Testament account of the Multiplication of the loaves and fishes.

The invocations to other gods testify to the religious pluralism and syncretism of Late Antique Roman society. The collection includes the cult objects found in the Mithraeum excavated below the Vth century church of Santo Stefano Rotondo. The head of Mithras from a cult statue and a large relief depicting the scene of the tauroctonos still retain traces of gold gilding and paint. In another display case, the bronze idol wrapped in the coils of a large serpent may represent an Attis or Osiris worshipped in the Sanctuary of the Syrian Gods on the Janiculum Hill.

One of the last and most modest (illegible) objects on display brings the viewer to the threshold of the Middle Ages in Rome; it is a silver amulet dating from the VI th or VII the centuries A.D. In an extremely miniscule text, incised within an aedicula on a plinth, the amulet cites biblical and mystical phrases for a certain Joseph, son of Baruch Judas. It may have had an apotropaic purpose, or have been venerated as a blessed object. Certainly its association of the Bible with mystical beliefs is but one indication of the growing importance of the sacred text to inspire post-Classical Roman religion and art.

Contributed by Jessica Dello Russo