The Esquiline Treasure

In the summer of 1793 workmen digging at the foot of the Esquiline Hill in Rome came upon a mass of silver in the ruins of a Roman house. The Esquiline had been a favoured address of the Roman aristocracy for centuries, and what they found was the plate of one of its great families. Within a year the antiquary Ennio Quirino Visconti, later head of the Capitoline Museum, had published an essay on the find for the prelate who administered the convent on whose land it lay.

No inventory was drawn up at the time. The silver was restored over the following decades, sold and resold, and other ancient pieces were added to the group along the way, so that by the 1860s about 61 items circulated under its name, against the 25 or 27 that the early accounts describe. Most of it ended up with the French collector and diplomat the Duc de Blacas, whose collection was bought entire by the British Museum in 1866. Two pieces went elsewhere: a patera now in the Petit Palais in Paris and a jug in Naples.

The centrepiece is the Projecta Casket, a gilded silver chest about 56 cm long, worked in relief. On its lid a man and a woman appear in a wreath held by cupids, above the inscription SECUNDE ET PROIECTA VIVATIS IN CHRISTO, 'Secundus and Projecta, may you live in Christ'. Around them Venus sits in a shell and sea nymphs ride monsters; on the box below, servants bring caskets, toilet things and candlesticks to a lady at her toilet. Its pair, the domed Muse Casket, hung from chains and held five little silver flasks for perfumes or oils; a servant on the Projecta Casket carries one just like it.

Other pieces point to public rank. Four seated silver figures of the Tyches of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, the presiding goddesses of the empire's great cities, probably capped the posts of a chair or litter, the kind used by a high official. Plates carry monograms, one read as 'Projecta Turci', and a fluted ewer is inscribed for a woman named Pelegrina.

That reading has made the hoard a puzzle for historians. Projecta is often identified with a young woman of that name whose verse epitaph, written by Pope Damasus, records her death in 383 aged sixteen, soon after her marriage; her husband would then be Lucius Turcius Secundus, of a family that held high offices and stayed largely pagan. Others reject the link and see two different women. The British Museum follows Kathleen Shelton in dating the silver to about 330-370, while Alan Cameron argued for around 380.

Whatever the exact owners, the Esquiline Treasure is rare evidence of silver made in Rome itself for the city's Christian and pagan elite at the end of antiquity. Its mix of Venus and nereids with a Christian blessing shows how easily the two worlds sat together on a rich family's dressing table.