ABSTRACT
A unique funerary monument of a togate girl and her mother (Plate 11.1) is a particularly appropriate subject for a chapter in a collection which originated as a homage to Beryl Rawson, whose contribution to the study of Roman children has been so significant (Rawson 1986b, 1991b, 1997a). Belonging to the Palazzo dei Conservatori collection of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, the piece has recently been brought out of storage and displayed again in the refurbished former hydroelectric plant at Montemartini, which now serves as an additional gallery for the museum.1 The monument, commonly thought to represent a mother and daughter, is rendered in standing relief and was probably designed for display on a tomb façade.2 Originally a male figure of a husband and father (now missing) probably stood on the left, as suggested by the inclination of the woman’s body and by several parallel reliefs with a similar composition, such as the group of parents and a small girl now in the Villa Doria Pamphilj (Plate 11.2).3 They belong to the corpus of funerary monuments of freed slaves (masculine libertini, feminine libertinae) who were depicted in standing reliefs like these or in bust reliefs.4 This form of commemoration was most popular among libertini from the middle of the first century BCE to the early Julio-Claudian era, and enjoyed brief revivals in the Flavian, Trajanic, and Antonine periods. Dated by their hairstyles, the girl’s toga exigua and the mother’s stance and proportions to the middle of the first century BCE, the Conservatori group falls into the earliest category of such monuments and, despite the now absent male figure, is one of the best preserved of the standing relief type. A brief consideration of the
group reveals its singularity and the crucial role that children played in these reliefs as vehicles for parental self-representation.
