Tabulae Iliacae

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Tabula Iliaca Capitolina , Rome, Museo Capitolino 316

The Tabulae Iliacae (German "Ilias-Tafeln") are small reliefs from the Augustan period with depictions from the myth of the Trojan War .

So-called "Tabula Rondanini", a Tabula Iliaca now kept in the National Museum in Warsaw

The best known is the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina . Made of white marble, it was found not long before 1683 in the ruins of the ancient Bovillae or the villas surrounding the city and is now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, inv. MC 0316. It takes its name from the table of contents of the Homeric epics, carved on it in the smallest Greek letters, which represented the events of the Trojan War. The relief field shows an upright, closely described pillar in the middle, to the left of it a symmetrical representation of the destruction of Troy and in front of the city gates the grave of Hector; the camp and the departure of Aeneas ; Likewise on the right side of the pillar, the individual scenes of the Trojan War are indicated in narrow stripes by means of small relief images, as an illustration of the inscribed content headings of the chants. The left third of the plate with the pillar and the adjacent side has not been preserved. An inscription names a certain Theodoros as the maker of the compilation that was made for teaching purposes. The same name can also be found on the reverse of a similar relief discovered in or near Rome and now kept in the Paris Coin Cabinet. The high value of the Tabulae Iliacae is based on the fact that it gives literary history a reliable basis for investigations into the mostly completely lost poems of the epic cycle , which continued the Homeric epics Iliad and the Odyssey .

A few such panels are known, including a fragment from the Borgia collection in Naples, one in Berlin and the so-called Farnese Heracles relief in the Villa Albani in Rome. It is generally assumed that they all had the same school purpose and were created in Augustan times using Alexandrian knowledge.

source

literature

  • Otto Jahn : Greek picture chronicles. Bonn 1873.
  • Anna Sadurska: Les tables iliaques. Warsaw 1964.
  • Nicholas Horsfall: Tabulae Iliacae in the Collection Froehner, Paris . In: Journal of Hellenic Studies . Volume 103, 1983, pp. 144-147.
  • Nina Valenzuela Montenegro: The Tabulae Iliacae. Myth and history in the mirror of a group of early imperial miniature reliefs. Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89825-902-1 .
  • David Petrain: Homer in Stone. The Tabulae Iliacae in their Roman Context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014.
  • Michael Squire: The Iliad in a Nutshell. Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011.