Death in Louisville, Roman Style

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A fascinating episode in the history of Roman archaeology in America took place in Kentucky in the early years of the last century.

In 1911 Louisville businessman and community leader Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston traveled to Italy, purchased Roman funerary monuments and shipped them to Louisville. A November 1912 article in the local paper, The Courier Journal, announced the collection’s arrival:

To Louisville from far distant Rome, where for centuries they slept until disturbed by the ruthless hands of the early Christians, have come fragmentary bits of an ancient civilization to attest mutely but with surprising eloquence to the desecration of an old necropolis. Yet the movement that disturbed this sleep of the Romans is the gain of Kentucky’s metropolis in education: for the antiquities, saved from the ruins of ancient Rome, will become a much desired object lesson for modern Kentuckians.

The newspaper reporter then quoted the esteemed collector:

Mr. Thruston says that he expects to have some of the learned professors read the inscriptions for the purpose of ascertaining whether they have historic value. He entertains the belief that some of the urns, very ornately carved 042in bas reliefs, may have held the remains of famous Romans. Perhaps a tribune’s ashes have come to Louisville.

Ballard Thruston’s assessment of his objects was too grandiose. The funerary monuments he had purchased did not belong to the elites of Roman society but rather to slaves, freed men and women, and members of their families. But it is precisely the non-elite nature of these objects that, in the view of today’s “learned professors,” gives a special “historic value” to this collection.¹

Rogers Clark Ballard was born in Louisville in 1858, the youngest son of Frances Ann Thruston and Andrew Jackson Ballard.² (In 1884 he adopted his mother’s family name as his surname.) After graduating from Yale University, he accepted a position with the Kentucky Geological Survey, surveying the mountainous terrain of eastern Kentucky and drafting maps.

In 1887 he joined his elder brother’s investment company, which speculated in mineral and timber lands in Appalachian Kentucky and western Virginia. For 22 years Ballard Thruston surveyed, purchased, plotted, registered and litigated land holdings. His meticulous maps—along with narrative abstracts he wrote on Appalachian social and legal history—fill 13 large folio volumes now in the collection of Louisville’s Filson Historical Society.

By 1909 Ballard Thruston was sufficiently comfortable to retire from business and devote his energies to historical research and community service.³ Like many wealthy Americans of his day, he also sought European “cultural enrichment” and embarked, with members of his family, on a grand tour of Italy in 1911.⁴ Upon reaching Rome, Ballard Thruston contacted the F. C. Clark Tourist Agency and solicited the services of one of its agents, Riccardo Iannicelli, to assist him in acquiring antiquities. Under Iannicelli’s guidance, the Americans visited the Carmelite Church and Monastery of Santa Teresa d’Avila, in the northern part of Rome, not far from the Villa Borghese.

Some years before, in 1895, the Carmelites had purchased land in this part of Rome for a new religious complex. As the foundations of the buildings were being 043dug, workmen unearthed a number of ancient tombs. The British archaeologist Thomas Ashby (later the director of the British School in Rome) was called in to investigate the site.⁵ After Ashby photographed and measured the modest structures, their contents were removed. The tombs were then filled in, construction on the church continued, and the artifacts were stored on the Carmelites’ property.⁶

With Iannicelli serving as translator, Ballard Thruston purchased the collection of funerary artifacts: terracotta and marble ash urns, lamps, offering vessels, bas reliefs and hundreds of inscribed stone epitaphs. He then contracted Iannicelli to make arrangements to ship the artifacts to Louisville, paying him nearly 7,000 lire (roughly $20,000 today) for the entire enterprise. His Italian tour completed, Ballard Thruston returned to Louisville, where he awaited the arrival of his new antiquities collection.

Arrangements at the Italian end, however, were not without problems. The authorities questioned the Carmelites’ right to sell the objects and claimed that the artifacts were worth more than Ballard Thruston had paid for them. Ballard Thruston wrote to Iannicelli on January 18, 1912, directing him to call on the American Consul General, Chapman Coleman, to help straighten out the matter.

On the same day, Ballard Thruston sent a letter to Consul Coleman, explaining the problem:

There is a small Monastery just outside of one of the gates of Rome, where in their excavations they found quite a number of early Pagan relics, which they had for sale for quite a while without a purchaser. Our courier, Mr. Riccardo Iannicelli, learning from us that we were desirous of purchasing some of this type of antiquities, told us of it, and through him, we arranged to buy the entire collection, packed with export duty paid, for 6300 lire, which we paid a day or two before leaving Rome.

Ballard Thruston added that his own sense of honor was at stake, for he had promised to donate part of the collection to the local Jefferson Institute of Arts and Science, which housed an eclectic collection of birds, butterflies and fossils. “That fact,” he wrote, “has since been published in our papers, and I confess that I would like very much indeed now to have the collection.”

Iannicelli’s negotiating skills and 044Coleman’s political clout apparently worked. In a letter dated February 3, 1912, Coleman informed Ballard Thruston that a “happy solution” had been reached in the matter of his “pagan antique relics.” After removing 18 pieces (one inscribed ash urn, 16 epitaphs and a relief panel with a scene of the Nile), the Italian authorities allowed 28 crates to be shipped to New York. From there, the collection traveled by rail to Louisville, arriving in April 1912.

The late first-century B.C.E. to second-century C.E. tombs uncovered at the Santa Teresa site were part of a large cemetery located outside Rome’s ancient walls near the Via Salaria.⁷ They were modest structures known as columbaria, small above-ground, contiguous buildings arranged in four rows and separated by three narrow streets. (The tombs are called columbaria because the niches within them, designed to hold cremation urns, resemble dovecotes.) Most of Rome’s non-elite population were buried in communal tombs like these.⁸

The size and decoration of a Roman tomb proclaimed the wealth and status of the family who built it. A funerary inscription (epitaph) either outside the tomb or in the burial chamber gave the name and lifespan of the deceased, as well as the name of the person(s) who paid for the monument and his or her relationship to the deceased. Family members routinely visited the tomb to pay their respects and to leave gifts of food, flowers and grave goods in the burial chamber.

Although many columbaria have been found outside the walls of Rome, almost all of them were emptied of their contents without careful documentation. The epitaphs and grave goods in Ballard Thruston’s collection, in contrast, have a known provenance and provide evidence of burials in a specific cemetery.

Since communal tombs like those at the Santa Teresa site housed the remains of 045Rome’s non-elite population, it is not surprising that the grave goods found there are simple objects. The ceramic artifacts in the collection are, for the most part, well preserved. A number of small bottles (about 4 inches in height) for oils or unguents remain largely intact. Mass-produced coarse-ware bowls, also about 4 inches high, may have once contained food. There are also fragments of red-slip vessels, such as flat plates and shallow bowls, some of which are decorated and stamped with a workshop logo. Many of the oil lamps, which provided illumination in the burial chamber and were left behind as gifts, are embellished with decorative elements and workshop stamps.

Two types of ash urns were found in the tombs: undecorated, mass-produced terracotta urns with lids (ollae); and costly marble chests (cineraria). The latter are decorated with inscriptions identifying the deceased and relief carvings of garlands of fruits and flowers, ox skulls (bucrania) and birds pecking at fruit in baskets.

Ballard Thruston’s collection also includes terracotta relief panels, each of which measures about 12 by 16 inches. The images depicted on these molded and painted decorative plaques are primarily mythological. One of the best-preserved panels shows two satyrs plucking grapes from entwined vines and placing them in baskets. It is tempting to imagine that these relief panels, probably dating to the early imperial period, once formed ornamental friezes inside the tomb chambers.

The most important artifacts in Ballard Thruston’s collection are the epitaphs—inscribed stone slabs that were either nailed beneath the burial niches or placed outside the tombs.⁹ Although some of the inscriptions simply indicate the names of the deceased, others provide the names of members of the immediate family and the age of the deceased at death. Interestingly, no recorded age at death was over 40—a reminder of the limited life expectancy of the Romans. Some epitaphs also give information about the social status (freeborn, freed or slave) and the occupation of the deceased.¹⁰

One inscription (CIL 6.38877) identifies a slave named Secundinus, whose monument was paid for by Ulpia Agrippina, the woman who owned him. It reads:

D(IS) M(ANIBVS)

SECVNDINO

VERNAE SVO

QVI VIX(IT) ANN(IS)

XIII FEC(IT)

VLPIA AGRIP

PINA B(ENE) M(ERENTI)

To the spirits of the underworld

Ulpia Agrippina made (this) for her

Well-deserving home-born slave,

Secundinus, who lived 13 years

Among the occupations documented on the epitaphs are painter (pictor), estate overseer (vilicus) and imperial household slave. The latter’s modest epitaph (CIL 6.33555) identifies Daus as a slave of Caesar (Davs Caesaris), Unfortunately, the identity of the emperor cannot be determined.

One of the more poignant aspects of the inscriptional material in the collection is the large number of epitaphs memorializing children.¹¹ Because of disease and poor nutrition, infant mortality rates in Rome were exceptionally high. The following inscription (CIL 6.33694), speaks to the sorrow of parents at 046the death of their young son:

D(IS) M(ANIBVS)

Q(VINTI) PASSERI AGATHO

PI FILI DVLCISSI

MI QVI VIXIT AN

NIS VII MENSIB(VS)

XI DIEB(VS) XXII

PASSERIVS AGATHO

PVS ET ACIE PARENT(ES)

To the spirits of the underworld

Passerius Agathopus and Acie, parents,

(Dedicated this) to their sweetest son,

Quintus Passerius Agathopus,

Who lived 7 years, 11 months, 22 days

In 1929 Ballard Thruston donated his Roman collection to Louisville’s J.B. Speed Memorial Museum (now known as The Speed Art Museum), founded two years earlier by Hattie Bishop Speed in memory of her husband, James Breckinridge Speed. The collection remains there to this day.¹²

Why did Ballard Thruston purchase this collection in the first place? I believe he regarded funerary monuments as points of connection between those who once lived, those who are living, and those who are yet to be born. According to Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark, Ballard Thruston “visited archives, libraries and courthouses … along the whole east coast, and in England and Scotland, in pursuit of ancestors.” His “all-consuming interest was the human element of the past.” For Ballard Thruston, who died in Louisville in 1948 at the age of 88, “tombstones symbolized in enduring tangible form the continuity of the human presence on this globe … [They] were vital and indispensable parts of the annals of civilization itself.”

Although Ballard Thruston could not interpret the epitaphs in his collection, he intuitively understood that they were a testament to the Romans’ devotion to their families and to their concern that the memory of their loved ones live on.

A fascinating episode in the history of Roman archaeology in America took place in Kentucky in the early years of the last century. In 1911 Louisville businessman and community leader Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston traveled to Italy, purchased Roman funerary monuments and shipped them to Louisville. A November 1912 article in the local paper, The Courier Journal, announced the collection’s arrival: To Louisville from far distant Rome, where for centuries they slept until disturbed by the ruthless hands of the early Christians, have come fragmentary bits of an ancient civilization to attest mutely but with surprising eloquence to […]