Resurrecting Dead Romans:  The Rediscovery of Grave Goods in Louisville, Kentucky

Linda Maria Gigante

University of Louisville

In recent years non-elite Romans have received considerable attention from Classicists specializing in social history, philology, and art.  These studies have been principally concerned with funerary artifacts and epitaphs identifying slaves and former slaves.  This evidence reveals the preoccupation in life of non elite Romans with their social and legal identities, for it was their funerary art and, in particular, their epitaphs which guaranteed them immortality.

The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, houses one of the largest collections of Roman funerary monuments in North America.  They were purchased in Rome in 1911 by a prominent Louisvillian who donated them to the Museum in 1929.  Ash urns, lamps and offering vessels, and hundreds of epitaphs had been removed from tombs in the late 1890s. The inscriptional evidence indicates that slaves, freed men and women, and members of their families were buried in these tombs during the imperial age.

This paper focuses on the Speed's collection and the ways in which it has been used to introduce Humanities students at the University of Louisville to Roman civilization.  Through a hands-on study of the objects and research on topics lke the role of the Roman family in funerary ritual, the students' understanding of Roman culture has been substantially enriched.  The culmination of their research was an on-campus exhibition of pieces from the collection.  The students worked on designing the installation, wrote the explanatory texts, transcribed and translated the Latin inscriptions, and provided contextual information intended both to inform the viewer about the Romans' funerary customs and to prompt them to think about rituals of death in our own culture.  The interdisciplinary nature of this project exposed students to the many dimensions of Roman studies and enlightened them on the value of the Humanities to explicate the world in which they live.