Tabulae Iliacae

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Tabula Iliaca Capitolina, Roman artwork, 1st century AD

The Tabulae Iliacae ("Iliadic tables", "Iliac tables" or "Iliac tablets"; singular Tabula Iliaca) are a collection of 22 stone plaques (

Greek epic poetry, especially of the Iliad and the Trojan War.[1] They are all of early Imperial Roman date, and seem to have come from two Roman workshops, one of which seems to have been designed to satisfy a clientele of more modest aspirations.[2]

National Museum, Warsaw
, so-called "Tabula Rondanini"

Description of tablets

The term is conventionally applied to some twenty-one

Arctinus. McLeod suggests literary fakery designed to impress the nouveaux-riches as embodied by the fictional character Trimalchio, who is convinced that Troy was taken by Hannibal; Nicholas Horsfall[5] finds the "combination of error and erudition" designed to impress just such eager newly educated consumers of culture with showy but spurious proofs of their erudition: "The Borgia Table is a pretense of literacy for the unlettered," is McLeod's conclusion.[6] Michael Squire, in "The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae" (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), reviewed in "BMCR" [7]
sees in them a more sophisticated product.

Tabula Iliaca Capitolina

One of the most complete examples surviving is the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina, which was discovered around Bovillae, near Rome. The tablet dates from the

Augustan period, around 15 BCE. The carvings depict numerous scenes of the Trojan War, with captions, including an image of Aeneas climbing aboard a ship after the sacking of Troy.[8] The carving's caption attributes its depiction to a poem by Stesichorus in the 6th century BCE, although there has been much scholarly skepticism since the mid-19th century.[9] Theodor Schreiber's Atlas of Classical Antiquities (1895) included a line-by-line description of the tablet with line-drawings.[10] The Tabula Iliaca Capitolina is currently in the Capitoline Museums
in Rome.

Sources

References

  1. ^ David Petrain, Homer in Stone: The Tabulae Iliacae in Their Roman Context (Cambridge University Press, 2014), "Introduction".
  2. ^ Anna Sadurska Les tables iliaques (Warsaw, 1964), esp. p. 11.
  3. ^ Sadurska 1964 carefully catalogued a corpus of nineteen tabulae; two more had been added to the list by 1985, according to W. McLeod, "The 'Epic Canon' of the Borgia Table: Hellenistic Lore or Roman Fraud?" Transactions of the American Philological Association 11 (1985), pp. 153-65.
  4. ^ The Second Verona Table (Sadurska's 9D, was bordered with two rows of panels.
  5. ^ Horsfall, "Stesichorus at Bovillae?", Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1997:26-48) especially pp 33-35; McLeod 1985: 163-65
  6. ^ McLeod 1985:165.
  7. ^ "BMCR" 2013.02.32: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2013/2013-02-32.html
  8. ^ "The Legend of Aeneas and the Foundation of Rome." http://vergil.classics.upenn.edu/comm2/legend/legend.html Archived 2009-06-01 at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 4 November 2007.
  9. ^ "The Aeneas-Legend from Homer to Virgil." http://theol.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/BremmerJN/1987/117/aeneas.pdf[permanent dead link]. Accessed 4 November 2007.
  10. ^ Theodor Schreiber, Atlas of Classical Antiquities (London, 1895), pp. 176-179. http://www.mediterranees.net/art_antique/oeuvres/iliaca/schreiber_en.html. This page also links to a very large image of the tablet. Accessed 23 April 2013.
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