A Greek couple in Rome: Agathemerus and Myrtale

The Ashmolean museum in Oxford houses an extraordinary marble funerary portrait relief, depicting a Greek couple from around 100 CE. The relief was found in Rome and scholars assume that is where it is from. The famous English collector Thomas Arundel purchased it from an Italian shop in the early seventeenth century and it has been in the Arundel collection until it was gifted, through the efforts of John Evelyn, to the University of Oxford in 1667. An inscription in Greek provides us with the names of the deceased, positioned underneath a very Roman-looking portrait of a middle-aged man with a Trajanic hair style and an elderly woman wearing a large Flavian wig. For a Greek couple, they chose a very Roman styled funerary portrait.

The inscription states

Here lie I, Claudius Agathemerus, a doctor
commonly known as a swift healer of disease;
this monument brings me and my consort, Myrtale, together;
we are with the blessed deceased in Elysium.

The Roman writer Suetonius mentioned a Claudius Agathemerus, a physician from Lacedaemonia (Sparta) who was known to visit the stoic philosopher Cornutus of Lepcis at the same time as when the poet Persius was studying there (Suetonius, vita Persii). Suetonius wrote that Agathemerus was around the same age as Cornutus, who was probably born in the twenties CE, which means Agathemerus was in his late seventies when his funerary monument was made. Scholars generally assume this man is one and the same as the person in the portrait relief.

His portrait and hair style are in the Trajanic style, a similar style as seen in a portrait of Trajan now in Copenhagen (98-117 CE). If the dating is correct, Agathemerus is depicted much younger than his probable age at the time of the production of the relief. His wife Myrtale, on the other hand, is portrayed as an older woman with deep nasolabial folds and more pronounced bags under the eyes. The style of the elaborate wig is Flavian in origin but remained popular well into the Trajanic period. So was she depicted at the age she was, or was she perhaps still alive and commissioned the monument? Did she then decide to portray her (deceased?) husband at a much younger age? We do not know when Agathemerus died so all of this remains speculation.

Agathemerus is wearing a tunic and a Roman toga, his wife wears a tunic and a cloak (palla) which is pulled over the back of her head, partly covering the decorated vitta (a ribbon or fillet, possibly symbolising the matron of the family) in the wig. There are probable pigment remains on both portraits, suggesting they were at least partly painted. The torsos have no arms but are stylishly finished with drapery around and below the shoulders. Both portraits are cropped just below the ribs, at the level of the balteus of the cloaks, which are draped across the body and over their left shoulders. There is a definite sense of repetition (but not symmetry) in the dress of both portraits. The reliefs are carved nearly in the round, with the heads only just touching the back plate (which was replaced at a later date, as were the noses).

Agathemerus used the same portrait relief format as many freedmen did before him in the late republic and early imperial era. Freedmen initially used a plain framed ‘window-like’ format to display half-figure portraits of the deceased. These portraits appeared in the walls of tombs, on altars and cippi. They often follow the same format: two or more half-figures in a frontal pose, often couples, but also with other family members portrayed side by side. During the course of the first century CE these types of reliefs became less popular, the sculpting style varied and more lively poses were adopted as well as a deeper carving style. Some of these reliefs still have surviving inscriptions and many of these tell us that the depicted were freedmen and women.

The relief of Agathemerus and Myrtale fits in with these other reliefs, but we don’t know whether Agathemerus was a freedman. The choice of this type of monument suggests he might have been, although there are cases known where freeborn Romans also used this funerary format. If he was not a freedman, then perhaps foreigners (peregrini) used this funerary relief format as well. Very few epigraphs state the origins of the deceased, but epigraphs do usually provide a name. Here, the half-figure portrait relief is combined with an inscription in Greek, using the traditional Greek format of a funerary epigram. The dual identity is clear for all to see.

The combining of identities also appears in Roman literature, for example when the poet Ennius claimed he had three hearts because he spoke three languages (Aulus Gellius 17.17.1), or when Favorinus of Arlete found a paradox in being able to speak Greek as a Gaul (Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 8). In both cases language stands for an ethnic identity, but ethnic identity can also be related to geographic origins. In Cicero’s de Legibus Cicero’s friend Atticus expressed a dual ethnic identity when he stated that “all people from small towns have two countries, one by nature and the other by citizenship”. He argued, for example, that Cato had Roman citizenship because he was born in Tusculum. He was a Tusculan by birth and a Roman by citizenship. “One of his countries was local, the other legal” (Cicero, de Legibus, 2.5).

As Wallace-Hadrill explains, Greek and Roman identities are not working on the same plane; “the ‘Greek’ is defined precisely by its hellenic culture, the ‘Roman’ is defined by political structures” and these two identities can therefore exist side by side without interference. Because Roman or Greek identity was not just geographic, it could exist simultaneously with other local identities and, in some cases, even with each other. Agathemerus (or his descendants) chose a Greek epigram and used a Roman styled portrait relief. The relief format could still have had freedmen connotations in late Republican and early Augustan times, and perhaps still in the early Trajanic period. However, it has been suggested that the freedmen of the funerary monuments might not have been such a separate group as scholars think, and should be considered as part of the larger middle class of Rome with plenty of variety in wealth, status and education amongst them. Perhaps for his funerary monument Agathemerus simply followed a true and tested format widely used by non-elite Romans, or did he consciously hook up to a freedman identity? Was he a citizen of Greece, Rome, the world, or a ‘citizen of nowhere’?

Further reading:

Borg, B.E., (2014), ‘The Face of the Social Climber: Roman Freedmen and Elite Ideology’, in T. Ramsby (ed.), Free at Last! The Impact of Freed Slaves on the Roman Empire, London, 25-49.
Kockel, V. (1993), Porträtreliefs stadtrömischer Grabbauten: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und zum Verständnis des spätrepublikanisch-frühkaiserzeitlichen Privatporträts, Mainz am Rhein, 208.
Noy, D. (2000), Foreigners at Rome: Citizens and Strangers, Swansea.
Petersen, L.H. (2006), The Freedman in Roman art and art history, New York.
Snyder, H.G. (2000). Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World. Philosophers, Jews and Christians, London.
Vickers, M. (2006), The Arundel and Pomfret Marbles in Oxford, Oxford.
Wallace-Hadrill, A. (2008), Rome’s cultural revolution. Cambridge.

Sources for the Agathemerus relief

Ashmolean Museum

Chandler R. (1763), Marmora Oxoniensia, Oxford.
Kaibel G. (1878), Epigrammata graeca ex lapidibus conlecta.
Michaels, A., (1882), Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, tr. C.A.M. Fennel, Cambridge.
Prideaux H. (1676), Prideaux H. (1676) Marmora Oxoniensia, Oxford.
Reinesius, T. (1682), Syntagma inscriptionum antiquarum, Frankfurt.
Smith W. (1849), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 1, Boston.
Wissowa, G. (1893), Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Stuttgart*.*