If you think the tomb of Cestius is unusual, the weirdest tomb by far in Rome, from ancient Rome, is the one that I turn to now. And this is the tomb of the baker Eurysaces, the tomb of the baker Eurysaces that was put up in Rome in the late first century B.C. And that, again, is another tomb in the age of, from the age of Augustus. But in this case, we believe, although the inscription doesn't tell us this for sure, but we believe it is highly likely that Eurysaces is from a different level of Roman society, not an aristocrat but a working man who may, who probably either he himself or his family were slaves originally; eventually freed. He takes up the profession of bread making and he ends up ends up building this extraordinary tomb that I'm going to show you in some detail, in Rome. As we look at this particular view, we see the Tomb of Eurysaces, as it looks today, it's right over here. We see it is, it is, it has behind it a great travertine gate, which is actually later in date. It dates to the time of the emperor Claudius. We'll talk about it next week. So you have to think that away for the moment. That was not standing when the tomb of Eurysaces was put up. You can also see however that this gate was placed in a, an aqueduct system. That aqueduct was begun during the time of Augustus. So you can imagine that at least some of that aqueduct system stood at the time that this tomb was built. The tomb as you can see here, was a three-storied structure, very eccentric in its appearance. The ground line today is much lower than the modern ground line. So you have to go right up to the monument. You can look down at the first story. So you're only seeing a part of the first story here. You can see that it is made of tufa blocks. You can also see the interior is concrete. The core of the structure is concrete, and then on the second and third stories it, it, the tomb is faced with travertine. So travertine, again, used for tomb facing in the age of Augustus, and we see this very unusual design where there are these great these great pi, you know not piers, cylinders. Great cylinders, great cylinders that are placed here vertically, and then cylinders placed in the next tier horizontally. Vertically placed cylinders, they're not columns, you don't see any capitals. They're very fat. So they are cylinders vertically and then horizontally. And some scholars have suggested, and I think quite convincingly, that these may actually make reference to what were grain measures, grain measures were these cylindrical structures, and silos, in a sense, in which they stored grain in ancient Roman times. So that is very possible since we know that this man was a baker that this may make reference to these grain storage cylinders that were used in the process of baking. With regard to the siting of the tomb, this is particularly interesting. I show you this plan over here, which indicates to us, here you can actually see the plan of the tomb of Eurysaces, and you can see that it is very unusual in shape, it is trapezoidal in shape, why is it trapezoidal in shape? It probably is trapezoidal in shape because the tomb was located on a piece of property that was between two major roads of this, of the, of Rome that exited and entered the city at this particular point, the so-called Via Labicana, and the Via Praenestina. So two major Roman roads that come into the city at this point. And remember the Tomb of Eurysaces, like all Roman tombs during this period were, was outside the Servian Walls. So built outside the walls but between these two, two two streets. Now, this model over here which, by the way, comes from a museum in Rome that again is off the beaten track, but I can highly recommend, the Museo Civilità Romana, which is in a building built by Mussolini in the 1930s for a World's Fair. And the buildings, and it and other buildings like it out there, in a place, part of Rome that we call EUR from Esposizione Universale di Roma, that whole area built up by Mussolini for the World's Fair, but the buildings were so substantial that they decided to keep them, and they still stand, and this museum was placed in them, it, it, in one of them. It is a museum of casts, where you can go and see works of Roman art and architecture, from not only Rome but from around the world, all in one place. Now, they're not originals, they're casts, but its a great, be a great place to study for the exam, for this course for example, because you could walk around and see so many of the buildings that we've talked about. And there are these wonderful models of many of them. And we see here a model of this aqueduct, the later, the later gate here and the tomb of Eurysaces, and this shows you very well the way in which these two streets the Labicana and the Praenestina came into Rome at this point converged exactly on the facade of this tomb. And this, it is clearly, it is clear that Eurysaces, and I'll tell you how he did this in a moment, had enough money that he was able to buy what was certainly one of the most choice pieces of real estate outside the walls of Rome, one in which everyone who came into Rome from either of those two thoroughfares would see the facade of this tomb. This is a man who wanted to be remembered for posterity. It's another example of how tombs were used for the purposes of retaining memory over time. This is also interesting because it shows what happened. What you see with the dotted lines here is one of these later gates that was made for the Aurelian walls. And in this case, the tomb of Eurysaces was right smack dab in the middle of where they wanted to build a, a, outcropping of this wall. In this case, they decided that they were not going to build the wall into it, but that they were going to build the wall on top of it. But fortunately again, they did not destroy, they did not destroy it completely. They did shear off the front of the tomb, which actually took away the facade, but they allowed the debris to fall into the tower, and then they covered it up. So when, so when this tower was eventually torn down to free the tomb of Eurysaces they found the fourth wall and the debris from that wall including a portrait statue and an inscription inside the debris, which was extremely fortunate, and which allows us to reconstruct the monument. Here you see the model, the model in this EUR Museum that shows you what the tomb looked like in antiquity. You see the three levels, the three tiers. You see the entrance to the burial chamber here. And this is the facade that we're looking at, this is the part that no longer survives. This is the fourth wall of the facade now gone. But we can again reconstruct it from those remains and you see them here, and you see was relatively plain on three tiers except for a portrait statue of Eurysaces and his wife. An inscription down below. And you need you think away the frieze up there, because the frieze was probably not on this side of the monument, although there was a frieze around the other three sides. You can see one of those sides here, and I'll show that frieze to you momentarily. This is a view of the tomb again where we can see so well those cylinders on two stories. And you can also see here that in the area between the vertical and the horizontal cylinders on three sides of the monument, there is an inscription and it repeats over and over again. And it tells us that this monument was put up by Eurysaces, Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces who was Pistor and Redemptor. Pistor and Redemptor, that means master baker and contractor. The contractor is a very, the most important part. Master baker and contractor, we know that this is a man who made bread and sold it to the Roman armies. This was a pretty lucrative thing to do in the age of Augustus when there was so much military conquest. He made a fortune selling bread to the Roman armies, and it is with that fortune that he was able to buy this choice piece of real estate and to put this extraordinary monument in the late first century BC.
