Mourning and the Making of Ancestors in the Testamentum Relief

Abstract

A Trajanic funerary relief, known as the Testamentum Relief, depicts the members of a Roman household (a matron, a slave, and a father represented by his portrait) in the act of mourning a young man. Comparisons with kline sculptures, funerary reliefs of craftsmen, and shield portraits suggest a social background for the family among freedmen and their descendants in Rome and Ostia in the early second century A. D. Recent scholarship on the Roman family provides the basis for a discussion of the significance of commemorative art in rituals of mourning. Rather than documenting the transmission of wealth in the family, as previously thought, the relief indicates that the family properly honored its dead by commemorating them with works of art, which effectively transformed the dead into ancestors.