Original scientific paper
The funerary monument of the family of Aurelius Ianuarius from Dobrinci near Ruma (Caput Bassianense)
Branka Migotti
; Odsjek za arheologiju Hrvatske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti
Abstract
In this paper a marble funerary stone from the site of Dobrinci (Caput Bassianense) near Ruma (Bassianae, Serbia) is discussed extensively for the first time (fig. 2). It was put up by the military tribune of Legio II Adiutrix Aurelius Ianuarius and his wife Aurelia Valeria for their 10-year-old son Aurelius Ianuarinus and for themselves (CIL 3, 10208). Although the monument has been kept in the AMZ from 1915, this knowledge has subsequently faded, so the author of this contribution mentioned it recently in two different papers as stemming from northern Croatia. This mistake is corrected in the present paper within a full discussion of
the whole of the monument. Otherwise, its epitaph (fig. 3) has been known from 1880 and discussed many times in various contexts of the military history of south-eastern Pannonia, but the knowledge that the monument was kept in the AMZ and that its relief was also accessible for an analysis seems to have escaped the commentators. Before tackling the stone, the paper addresses the issue of the nature of its findspot – the surroundings of the military camp at Dobrinci. Its surface (18.25 ha), as well as the findingss of bricks with legion stamps, suggest that it was built by the Second Assistant Legion, although not as it own camp but for a considerable military corpus made of various units, whose presence was necessary from the 1st to the 4th centuries in the much endangered rear of the Danube limes in south-eastern Pannonia.
The funerary stone of the Aurelii family is not a stele but a built-in grave relief from an aedicule, as is suggested by five clamp holes on its back side (fig. 4). The relief niche contains the portraits of the son in the middle and his parents at the sides behind him. In spite of a
quite incompetent and stiff execution and much damage to the faces, the portrait characteristics and coiffures of all three figures can be connected with imperial portraiture and thus dated to the last third of the 3rd century AD.
Keywords
Aurelius Ianuarius; funerary relief; Legio II Adiutrix; Dobrinci; Caput Bassianense
Hrčak ID:
186054
URI
Publication date:
8.9.2017.
Visits: 1.507 *