The Christian Zelig: Late Roman Aristocrats as Disciples of Christ

Michael Williams - King's College, Cambridge University

In the Museo Nazionale Romano, there is a sarcophagus (no. 770 in Deichmann's Repertorium) portraying a scene from the Christian gospels. At the very centre of the image stands an orans, a praying figure, flanked by two bearded apostles. Yet while the features of the apostles are portrayed in great detail, the face of the orans has been left blank.

These 'unfinished portrait heads' are relatively common on later Roman sarcophagi, and particularly in the fourth century AD. In general, they seem to represent the places in a frieze where a contemporary portrait was intended - most likely a portrait of the occupant of the tomb. Such images frequently presented the deceased in a narrative context: in stylised hunting or feasting scenes, for example, or as a participant in a famous episode drawn from myth. Late Roman sarcophagi thus often provided a kind of symbolic biography of the dead. Their lives were to be seen in terms of their re-enactment of the timeless pagan myths.

This could continue only as long as the narrative context was limited to the world of myth. In the fourth century, however, with the advent of Christianity as a significant force in the empire, the stories featured on Roman sarcophagi began to include some taken from the Christian canon. The essential claim of these stories was that they were historically true. To insert a late Roman aristocrat into the gospel story was therefore to be wilfully anachronistic. A contemporary late-antique figure was portrayed re-enacting the Christian past.

My paper will argue that this re-enactment of history served to tie together the world of the Bible and the world of Late Antiquity. The apparent repetition proposed an essential continuity between the past and the present: it implied the existence of a pattern in history, similar to the typological patterning seen in Scripture. Indeed, it portrayed the late Roman Empire as the heir to the biblical world, with as secure a Christian pedigree as was possible. The Christian present, it appeared, was not very different from the Christian past. After all, the orans on the tomb was able to inhabit both worlds at once.