ABSTRACT

In 1683, however, the distinguished Italian antiquary, Raphael Fabretti, one of the most active field archaeologists of the seventeenth century, published a monument in the Capitoline Museum of Rome, which goes by the name of the Tabula Iliaca, the Picture o f Troy.1 This was only the first of what is now a considerable series of ancient relief-sculptures,2 not only representing scenes from the Tale of Troy, but identifying them and the personages in them by short explanatory titles. The discovery had a double importance, first as supplying a clue to the meaning of a very large number of other ancient reliefs and other monuments of various dates and styles, and opening a new and fertile storehouse of Homeric commentary; and secondly because the Tabula Iliaca included scenes from other epic poems besides the Iliad, and gave the names of these, and also of their respective authors. This threw quite a new light on the scanty references of ancient grammarians to the other poems of the socalled Epic Cycle; and this was the more important, seeing that it was already known that these poems had been among the sources of Virgil for the second book and other parts of the Aeneid, where the Iliad and Odyssey were not applicable, and that this whole class of reliefs turned out to be more or less careful copies of an original which could be referred to so early a date as the first century B.C. The effect of Fabretti’s publication was immediate. In 1699 Lorenz Beger supplemented it by printing, at Berlin, a rich corpus of other such illustrations of Homer, under the title, The War and Destruction

1 De columna Traiani syntagma: accesserunt explicatio veteris tabellae anaglyphae Homeri Iliadem atque ex Stesichoro Arctino et Lesche Ilii Excidium continentis, et Emissarii Lacus Fucini description pp. 315-84. It is a noble work, with a fine, full-size drawing and a good descrip­ tion.