No. XLVII (2016)
Articles

A Travelling Speculator (CIL III 1650): A Glimpse of the Everyday Life of the Principales through the Window of Roman Funerary Art

  • Sanja Pilipović
Sanja Pilipović
Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2298/BALC1647007P

Published 01.12.2016

Keywords

  • stele,
  • speculator,
  • iconography,
  • carriage (rheda),
  • beneficiarius spear (Benefiziarierlanze),
  • Viminacium
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Pilipović, S. (2016). A Travelling Speculator (CIL III 1650): A Glimpse of the Everyday Life of the Principales through the Window of Roman Funerary Art. Balcanica - Annual of the Institute for Balkan Studies, (XLVII), 7–24. https://doi.org/10.2298/BALC1647007P

Copyright (c) 2016 Balcanica

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The focus of the paper is on the travel scene depicted on the funerary stele of L. Blassius Nigellio (CIL III 1650), a speculator of legio VII Claudia, from Viminacium. Seeking to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this scene from the everyday professional life of a Roman speculator, it draws attention to an iconographic pattern shared by a group of monuments of Roman principales (speculatores, frumentarii, beneficiarii consularis) among which the scene from Viminacium holds a very important place. It also takes a look at the origin and social status of the Upper Moesian speculator who could afford such a costly tombstone.