The baker, his tomb, his wife, and her breadbasket: the monument of Eurysaces in Rome

Since its rediscovery in 1838, the tomb of the baker has sparked the interest of visitors to Rome (Fig. 1). With its rows of dark, hollow circles that repeat on its three extant facades, this curious and unique ruin appears more modern than ancient; its strong, cold geometric forms suggest a Fascist-era monument rather than a two-thousand-year-old tomb constructed by a Roman baker. The patterns of circles are not the only unusual features of this tomb. The trapezoidal monument as a whole defies any typological categorization in ancient Roman tomb construction and thus piques the curiosity of scholars as well. (1)

Two of the monument's inscriptions tell us that this is the tomb of a baker named Eurysaces, who was also a contractor of bread. One of them survives in its entirety:

EST HOC MONIMENTUM MARGET [sic] VERGILEI EURYSACIS PISTORIS REDEMPTORIS APPARET

(This is the monument of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, baker, contractor, public servant.) (2)

Eurysaces must have been quite wealthy to amass the great fortune needed to build such a large tomb. Beyond this little is known about him. However, scholars almost universally assume that Eurysaces was an ex-slave, or freedman; that is, he is thought to have been a slave and subsequently manumitted and thus held citizen status in Roman society. In brief, Eurysaces' identity as a libertinus, or freedman, is deduced for the following reasons. The name Eurysaces, a Greek rather than a Latin name, has led some to conclude that he had been a slave of Greek origin. (3) In addition, the labor-intensive activities of baking were typically associated with slaves, but nonelite citizens, which included freed slaves, could own bakeries in addition to working within them. And finally, and perhaps most problematically, the monument's remarkable appearance has suggested to more than a few a naive ostentation specifically associated with a freedman's taste (or lack thereof). Whether consciously or not, throughout the schola rship on the tomb, scholars' belief in Eurysaces' identity as a wealthy (nouveau riche) ex-slave has been used to explain this monument's nontraditional appearance.

At the end of the late Republican and beginning of the Imperial period (ca. 50-20 B.C.E.), the presumed date of Eurysaces' tomb, perhaps the most decisive distinction that one could draw in Roman society was between the free (mostly citizens, but also foreigners) and the enslaved. Slaves were viewed simply as their masters' commodities and held no citizen rights, such as legally recognized marriage and blood-family ties or voting privileges. Among the free, the category of citizen was the largest, as it comprised both freeborn citizens (ingenui) and those who were freed slaves (libertini). Freeborn citizens included Rome's elite individuals, the small fraction of wealthy families of nobility who ruled Rome, and the nonelite, who were born with citizen status but were not office-holding individuals (not because they could not legally hold office, but because they did not have the social standing and wealth to do so). Freeborn nonelite individuals, who made up a significant portion of Roman society, typically w orked for a living, and they constituted a tremendously diverse group. In this category belong wealthy merchants, manufacturers, tavern owners, and so on, as well as working individuals who could barely make ends meet. Libertini also had citizen status and acquired most citizen rights. However, because of their status as former slaves, they could not hold elective office, which meant that a freed slave could never achieve elite status in Roman society. Libertini thus experienced social mobility but operated under a glass ceiling. As a group, libertini were also hugely diverse; only their formerslave status united them. Taken as a whole, the category of nonelite included almost all of Rome's people--slaves, freed slaves, and most of Rome's freeborn citizens--thus making it a highly complex category. (4)

Traditionally, the history of Roman art has focused almost exclusively on elite culture, the segment of society that produced the art and literature that scholars depend on so heavily to understand the past. Most books on Roman art are filled with images of imperial Rome, with very little attention paid to nonimperial art. More recent examinations have focused much-needed attention on Rome's nonelite individuals. This trend began in the 1970s with the influential work of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli and Bianca Maria Felletti Maj, who were instrumental in defining, respectively, a plebeian and Italic (that is, nonelite) rather than an aulic or Hellenic (that is, elite) sculptural style in Roman art. (5) The last twenty years have witnessed a flourish of activity as scholars attempt to recover Rome's varied and multifaceted histories by addressing issues such as social status, visibility, and motivations in self-representation among ordinary Romans, ex-slaves, and even slaves. (6)

This article is both indebted to and a critique of recent scholarship in Roman art. The monument of Eurysaces figures prominently in studies of Roman archaeology and art history, yet it has rarely been the subject of in-depth analysis. Typically, Eurysaces' presumed freedman identity has been used to speculate about some of his motivations in commissioning this tomb and to explain the tomb's perceived ostentatious display of the baker's financial success, as if freed slaves necessarily commissioned garish art. It is perhaps ironic that recent discussions of the tomb provide only a partial, sometimes disparaging, picture of the tomb. My aim is twofold: to offer alternative, but by no means definitive, ways to understand Eurysaces' tomb in the cultural landscape of ancient Rome and, more important, to introduce the simple point that how we look at and talk about a monument greatly affects how we represent history, and vice versa. Specifically, I propose a two-pronged approach to the monument. This article will contest the assumption that the unusual appearance of Eurysaces' tomb is necessarily bound to his presumed legal status as an ex-slave; it critically probes scholarly readings of the monument that essentialize the nature of its patronage. This essay will also attempt to expand our appreciation of the tomb by offering interpretations of the monument rooted in the dynamics of Roman commemorative practices. I begin by examining the reconstructions of the tomb and the reading of Eurysaces' ex-slave identity based in large part on those reconstructions. After exposing the layers of assumptions that have been made about this monument and Eurysaces' status as a former slave, I consider how Eurysaces' tomb functioned in the everyday lives of Romans by taking into account how it addressed viewers and performed in dialogue with other tombs of this period. My goal is to initiate the process of dissolving the dichotomy of elite versus nonelite that is so entrenched in scholarship. In this regard, I aim to resituate the m onument in Roman art history by demonstrating that Eurysaces' tomb frankly celebrates his baking enterprise and by suggesting that the monument's unconventional use of architectural form and decoration arose from a visual strategy for Eurysaces to make himself memorable.