The Boscoreale Treasure

In April 1895 workmen digging out a Roman farmhouse at Boscoreale, on the lower slopes of Vesuvius north of Pompeii, broke into a vaulted pit in the room where the villa's wine had been pressed. Inside lay more than a hundred pieces of silver plate, gold jewellery and a leather bag holding about a thousand gold coins. The villa, known as the Villa della Pisanella, had been buried by the eruption of AD 79, and whoever stowed the valuables there never came back for them.

The excavation was a private one on private land, and the finds went straight to the market. The Naples museum was offered the treasure and judged the price too high; most of it left Italy and was bought by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who gave it to the Louvre in 1896. Other collectors and dealers supplied the remaining pieces, and a few went to the British Museum. Whether the export was legal is still argued over: Italy's first strong export law came only in 1902, but the treasure's route to Paris was murky at the time. The coins were sold off without anyone recording them properly.

What survived as a group is the most complete Roman silver service known. It covers every part of elegant dining: cups and jugs for wine, serving dishes and platters, mirrors and toilet vessels. Several pieces carry the name Maxima scratched or punched on them, probably the last owner of the set. Some vessels were already antiques when the eruption came, heirlooms made generations earlier.

Its fame rests on a handful of extraordinary pieces. Two skyphoi carry state propaganda in miniature: on one, Augustus sits enthroned while defeated barbarians submit; on the other, Tiberius rides in a triumphal chariot and sacrifices before a temple. A dish shows a woman in an elephant-skin headdress surrounded by symbols of Africa, read by some scholars as Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Queen of Mauretania. A pair of cups carry skeletons of Greek poets and philosophers under garlands, a joke about death to be enjoyed with a full glass.

The hoard is often compared with the Hildesheim silver found in Germany and with the plate found in Pompeii's House of the Menander. Together they show what a rich household of the early Empire set on its table. Boscoreale adds a sense of the moment of loss: the silver was packed away carefully in a cistern-like store, probably in the hope of rescuing it later, while its owners fled or died.

Excavations at the villa recovered a woman's body nearby, and it is tempting to connect her with Maxima. There is no evidence that the two are the same, and the identity of the owners of the villa remains a matter of educated guesswork.