Funerary Chamber of Manlia Felicitas
Location
Sublocation
Via Appia
Sublocation Description
An early Roman road (via publica) originating at Rome and terminating at Brundisium, the Via Appia was begun in the fourth century B.C. by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus. The Latin author Statius described the Via Appia as "queen of the long roads".
Garden
Funerary Chamber of Manlia Felicitas
Keywords
Garden Description
In 1937 a French student, Louis Vignon, searching for new catacombs around the third mile of the Via Appia near the tomb of Caecilia Metella, discovered a subterranean funerary chamber accessible via a descending stair that ended at a landing which opened perpendicularly into the middle of one of its walls. Each of the other three walls contained an arcosolium decorated with frescoes depicting animal and vegetal life against a background of herbs and flowers beneath hanging garlands punctuated by aquatic fowl, doves, and the heads of youths; beneath the frescoes the lower walls were paneled in polychrome marble. The figured scenes—at the back, opposite the entrance, a pair of peacocks flanking a niche; to the left a pair of Cupids draping a gazelle in a long ribbon; to the right a pair of gazelles on either side of a twisted tree—belong to a stock of Hellenistic motifs evocative of the gardens of the blessed popular at Rome during the Julio-Claudian period and, especially, the reign of Augustus, to which Wuillemier thought the monument belonged.
When Vignon returned to the site thirteen years later, the underground chamber could not be located, but at the edge of the site, near an ancient aedicula fronting the Via Appia, he found a marble funerary inscription in a pile of broken stones evidently recovered from a second subterranean room beneath the aedicula. Underground galleries extending off the subterranean room and from the intersection at the entrance to the tomb chamber seemed to Vignon to join the two structures to each other in a large subterranean complex (Fig. XXX). The inscription (AE 1952, 35)—an epitaph to a freedwoman Manlia Felicitas set up by her fellow freedman and husband of thirty-five years, P. Manlius Epigonus, her daughter Manlia Flora, and her daughter's husband L. Calpurnius Servatus—declares that the "twenty-fourth part" (pars semunciaria) (either of the entire estate or of an acre, about 40 meters square) "in these gardens of the Manlii" (in his hortis Manlianis) entrusted by Manlia Salvilla (evidently the patroness of Epigonus and Felicitas) to Epigonus for him to hand over to Felicitas, Felicitas had wanted to belong to their daughter Flora. It is uncertain whether "these Manlian gardens" refer to a tomb garden proper or to a suburban estate (horti): both are well attested in conjunction with suburban tombs (see vol. 1, 208). Reference to a "twenty-fourth part", the (indirect) involvement of the patroness Salvilla, and the early imperial fashion of styling suburban estates as "gardens" named after their owners (regularly expressed in adjectival form) here favor the latter. Whether the inscription, which in form and formula appears not later than the second century, can be put into any direct relation with the subterranean chamber with arcosoli, a tomb type more characteristic of the fourth century, remains doubtful. But the discovery of both on the same property perhaps suggests a continuous use of the site as a funerary space for two centuries.
Dates
130CE
Bibliography
J. Bodel, Roman Tomb Gardens, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 208-209. link
P. Wuilleumier , Sur la Voie Appienne: Les horti Manliani, Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres,1951, 34-41; Archaiologike Ephemeris, 1952, 35; Quilici 1977: 39 (horti Manliani) worldcat
G.-L. Gregori , Horti sepulchrales e cepotaphia nelle iscrizioni urbane, Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma BCom 92 (1987-88) [1989]: 180 n. 35, 185. worldcat