Arizona republican., 1910-11-11
A VATICAN DISCOVERY
Professor Frothingham's Search for
an Emperor's Tomb

Considering that the tomb of every
| Roman emperor has been supposed to
be destroyed, one cannot escape a GER
| tain feeling of delicacy in claiming to
have discovered that of Marcus
Aurelius
Everyone who has visited the Vati-
can museum of sculpture in Rome,
has passed ASCERTAIN tomb, and has
supposed that he read the truth about
it in his Baedeker 1t is an immense
cenotaph of pOrphyry, the largest
sarcOphagus that antiquity has left
us. Its surface on all sides is COW
cred with figures cut, with consum-
mate mastery, in high relief, in the
| irOn-like purple surface of this hard
est of marbles. In 1921 or 42S A D.,
| this sarcOphagus was taken by the
| Emperor Constantine in order to bury
| in it his mother, the Empress Helena,
and was placed in the center of a
mausOleum which he built for her out
side the walls of Rome
Historians seemed to have the clear
est kind of evidence that this was
the tomb of Helena; one can follow
its vicissitudes in medieval and later
documents from the time of her death
to the day when the sarcophagus was
so beatifully-tOo beautifully restor-
ed and placed in the museum. But
the surprising part is that archaic
logoists should have acquiesced in
this opinion, without seeing that from
the style and subject of its reliefs this
sarcOphagus must have been made at
much earlies time. 1t is only an
other occasion when archaeologists
saw what they expected to see and
were told to see. and did not use
their-oWn eyes. They were told that
this sarcophagus was cerved under
Constantine; and as Constantine
time was period of abject decadence
in the art of sculpture, they invested
these reliefs with every defect which
they attributed to age; with cOnfu-
sion in the composition and crudity in
the figures. The unprecedented eye
sees in them perhaps the greatest
masterpiece in relief work produced
by Roman art
l studied the tomb itself for a clew
to the identity of the parsonage for
which 1t was built. But I could ar
rive at no conclusion till l studied the
cover-a slanting 4-pitch roof with a
flat top to carry the urn containing
the emperor's ashes In the center
of each long side lay a lion-all alone;
a sort of heraldic appearing lion, re-
Ginning, with pays crossed 1t was
only too easy to see in them the lion
of the sign of hezodiac Leo" and
to understand that the person buried
here was CORN under Leo" Was ii
Antoninus Plus? Marcus Aurelius?
Lucius Verus? Commodus?
found, by investigating their
birthdays, that only two emperors in
all history were ruled by Leo; they
were Marcus Aurelius and Claudius
Gothicus. Was it foolish to imagine
that belief in such a fraudulent
science as astrology could be express
ed-would be allowed-on an official
impedial monument? Certainly not
Augustus had his sign, Capricorn. en-
graved on his coinage and it is set
over his head in his great Vienna
cameo. The death of Claudius Goth
icus was commemOrated in a medal
lion with lion occupying the entire
reverse If it was done for one or
these emporers, how much more read
lily for the imperial philosopher whose
belief in StOicism was coupled-as II
nearly always was-with a belief in
rockingham, in No
vember Century.