Memento Mori

To bid farewell to the outgoing year—and good riddance to it—I’ve prepared a small selection of ancient Roman artifacts from the cool, semi-subterranean halls of Tunisia’s Bardo Museum. This time, let’s skip the textbook mosaics and talk instead about marble sarcophagi, votive reliefs, and funerary sculpture dating from the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD.

Roman Africa possessed a remarkably distinct taste for funerary art. While master craftsmen in the capital forged standardized motifs from high-grade marble, local provincial stonemasons frequently infused canonical mythological subjects with a unique, naive, and almost tangible charm.

Our cover image features a votive bas-relief from Utica (3rd quarter of the 2nd century AD) dedicated by a certain Venustus. It depicts a sacrificial sow—an animal traditionally sacred to the mysteries of Ceres, the goddess of fertility and agriculture. Notice the details: the sow is crowned with a laurel wreath, and a complex ritual ornament is carved along its back. For Roman agrarian cult practices, this is pure poetry of blood, harvest, and gratitude to subterranean deities. The ancient soil of Tunisia fed Rome for centuries, and local cults of Ceres flourished with extraordinary strength, weaving themselves seamlessly into the Roman pantheon.

The bounty of the land, embodied by the allegories of the four seasons, is also reflected in the Carthaginian sarcophagus of a young man from the late 3rd century. An interesting detail: the figure of the deceased in the center holds a scroll, symbolizing his education and culture.

Take a look at this triad of sarcophagi:

• The top one once again depicts the seasons, but the center features the Three Graces instead of the deceased. Crafted in Rome ca. 300 AD, it was later reused in the baptistery of an early Christian church in Oued R’mel.
• The middle sarcophagus is decorated with classic wavy strigils flanking a central architectural doorway leading to the underworld, flanked by figures of the departed spouses (1st half of the 3rd century AD, from the vicinity of Curubis, modern Korba).
• The bottom sarcophagus presents the nine muses—a monumental testament to how provincial ancients sought to emphasize their education and high culture even on the threshold of eternity (1st quarter of the 3rd century AD, Ghar el-Melh).

And here are two funerary stelae. The first was erected for a Marcus Licinius Fidelis from Lyon, who spent exactly half his life—16 out of his 32 years—serving as a cavalryman in the Legio III Augusta (prior to 75 AD, Ammaedara, Haïdra), and depicts him alongside his beloved horses. The second commemorates a priestess of Ceres, illustrating rituals of devotion to the goddess (1st century, Mactaris).

Another exhibit—no longer a stele, but a full sculpture, yet still funerary—depicts the deceased in the guise of Hercules. Over his tunic, he wears a lion skin with its paws tied at the chest and belt. In his right hand, he holds a small bunch of poppies, which a dog sitting by his leg is sniffing. The final image for today is another votive stele, dedicated this time not to the fertility goddess Ceres, but to the patron of commerce, Mercury.

There is a quiet reassurance in these silent stones from the Tunisian basement. The Roman Empire has long since faded into history books, its provinces replaced by new civilisations, yet the faces of legionaries, priestesses, and ordinary citizens immortalised in marble continue to gaze across the centuries—reminding us that the desire to leave a mark behind remains stronger than any empire.