Judith Stove
Imagine – instead of the luxury shops of Rome’s Corso, the gritty streets and grand palaces which surround its piazzas – the Campus Martius (the Field of Mars) as it was in the 190s AD: a vast and beautiful open parkland, dotted with temples, massive altars, and, dominating the landscape, two towering columns, those of Antoninus Pius, and of Marcus Aurelius himself. Rainbow-painted friezes spiral up each tower, leading the eye all the way to the gleaming statue atop the height.
Across the Via Flaminia (as the Corso was then called), triumphal arches of Antoninus and of Marcus Aurelius also stretched. Of these many commemorative and honorific structures, all have vanished except the mighty column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna, and the pedestal of Pius’. Let us take a closer look at these monuments.
An Emperor Dies
As Penelope Davies has detailed in her classic study Death and the Emperor (2000), from Julius Caesar and Augustus onward, the rituals around imperial death, agreed divinity, and formal cult honours followed a strictly observed script. It was the responsibility of the nominated imperial successor, in cooperation with the senate, to ensure both deification and commemoration of the deceased.
Hadrian, who in adopting Antoninus Pius on condition of his also adopting Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as heirs, initiated the dynasty, asserted his position upon the death of Trajan in 117. Trajan had died in Cilicia, in the far east of what we now call Turkey. Hadrian received Trajan’s remains and sent them on to Rome. These, in all probability, were his ashes following cremation, which were brought back to the capital and interred within Trajan’s Column.
When Hadrian, in turn, died at Baiae, the fashionable resort town near Naples, in 138, it fell to Antoninus Pius to bring back his remains. Antoninus had Hadrian buried “in the gardens of Domitia [the wife of emperor Domitian]; moreover, he had him placed among the deified emperors, although everyone opposed it,” the Historia Augusta says – a reflection of how unpopular Hadrian had become by the end of his reign.
Marcus Aurelius, still only in his teens, was tasked with making appropriate arrangements for his (adoptive) grandfather, which included organising gladiatorial games. For his part, Antoninus built a temple for Hadrian at Puteoli, “instead of a tomb” (pro sepulchro). Evidently the vast mausoleum, now the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which Hadrian had designed for his own interment, was not yet complete. In 140, Antoninus arranged for Hadrian’s remains to be exhumed and interred in the mighty mausoleum, which would be the final home for men, women and children of the imperial house.
By the time that Antoninus himself died more than twenty years later, in 161, Marcus and his co-heir Lucius Verus were old hands at the rites:
They laid the body of their father (corpus patris) in the Tomb of Hadrian with elaborate funeral rites (magnifico exsequiarum officio), and an official funeral procession marched in parade on a holiday which came after.
The Antoninus Pedestal
Along with the cult arrangements, Marcus and Verus ordered the creation of a permanent memorial: the column of Antoninus Pius. Students of history and of Stoicism have regretted that all of Marcus’ mature creative writing, other than the Meditations (and, possibly, one or two speeches preserved in the patchy historical record), has vanished. Yet here is a work which, chronologically, sits between the juvenilia of Marcus’ correspondence with his Latin tutor Cornelius Fronto, and the Meditations. Let us appreciate the pedestal of Antoninus’ column as a surviving creation probably designed by Marcus, in collaboration with Verus, and attempt to ‘read’ it in this light.
The four sides of the pedestal are presented as follows: on the north face (noting that the pedestal is no longer in its original setting), the dedicatory inscription: DIVO ANTONINO AVG. PIO | ANTONINVS AVGVSTVS ET | VERVS AVGVSTVS FILII, “To the Divine Antoninus Pius, Antoninus Augustus [Marcus] and Verus Augustus [Lucius], his sons [dedicated this].” We should note the emphatic placement of filii (“sons”) at the end of the message: Marcus and Lucius are presenting a united front in their piety to their (adoptive and now divine) father.
The eastern and western panels are carved with a pair of matching and similar reliefs. These both appear to show some of the complex cavalry and infantry manoeuvres which featured in imperial funerals, of which we have a detailed account in several authors, who took part in the funeral of Pertinax in 193. The horses and their riders are shown in such high relief that they appear to be surging out of the panel, in places given small protruding brackets to support one or more legs.
For their part, the foot-soldiers in the centre are also perched on a ledge, as if defending a narrow defile. They look in all directions, as if ready to receive an attack. In some ways, this work anticipates depictions on Marcus’ column, in its explicitly military mood, and the capture of frenetic action through the use of high relief and a range of perspectives. Unlike the column, however, its focus is funerary, as underlined in the south-facing relief.
Recalling the reminder from the great scholar of Roman reliefs, Mario Torelli, that we are to read a relief, as if a Latin text, from left to right, at bottom left is a male figure personifying the site of apotheosis, the Campus Martius. Resting on a pile of stones, he holds up an obelisk, the central feature of the Horologium of Augustus. A link is thus made with Augustus’ funerary complex, his mausoleum, and his cosmic concerns.
At the top, and slightly left of centre, Antoninus and Faustina I, face across one another in a relaxed pose. Between two eagles, they are borne aloft on the wings of a large, nude male figure, shown facing and engaging the viewer. At bottom right is a female representing Rome, with a war helmet and resting on a shield. Roma’s shield depicts the babies Romulus and Remus suckling from the wolf, another reminder that, according to Livy, Romulus himself, great prototype of Augustus and the rest, was translated to heaven from the Campus Martius. To follow Torelli again, we can speculate as to whether this image of the Lupercal denoted a renewal of the ancient traditions, with the twins reinforcing the ‘brotherly’ bond between Marcus and Verus.
This, then, is Antoninus’ and Faustina’s apotheosis, their ascent to heaven as gods. The figure carrying them has been interpreted as Aeon (aiōn, Greek for “age”) and is often taken to represent eternity. A predecessor in the genre was the apotheosis shown on the Arch of Titus (ruled 79–81), where the emperor soars vertically, awkwardly supported by a single eagle. Another precursor was the panel commissioned by Hadrian for his wife Sabina, showing her carried aloft by a winged figure. On the Antonine pedestal, the main agent of the ascent is Aion (time/age/eternity), personified at centre stage, all-powerful. As read by Davies, the scene underscores the familial: Faustina carries Juno’s sceptre; family continuity is being emphasised. Marcus, after all, was married to the pair’s surviving daughter. The focus on Aeon, in addition, connects the familial to the eternal.
A key intertext here may have been Cicero’s Stoic-inflected Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio), as recounted in Book 6 of De Re Publica, a work surviving to us only in fragments. In the surviving passages, Cicero has the younger Scipio dream that he meets his (adoptive) grandfather, Scipio Africanus. The older man prophesies future greatness for the younger, but he also outlines important principles of the future life, particularly as a prospect for earthly leaders:
All those who have preserved, aided, or enlarged their fatherland have a special place prepared for them in the heavens, where they may enjoy an eternal age of happiness (beati aevo sempiterno. (6.13)
The younger Scipio’s birth father Aemilius Paullus adds:
Imitate your grandfather… me, your father; love justice and duty, which are indeed strictly due to parents and kinsmen, but most of all to the fatherland. Such a life is the road to the skies, to that gathering of those who have completed their earthly lives, and who live in yonder place which you now see (it was the circle of light which blazed most brightly). (6.16)
Here, then, we see explicitly the link between the familial – adoptive as well as biological – and the eternal, as well as the patriotic Roman, expressed in the Antonine pedestal. There is also stress upon the key virtues for rulers – “justice and duty” – which, we know from the eulogy in Meditations 1, Marcus considered that Antoninus had embodied. Here we find, once again, personal, familial, national, and universal connections.
The inclusion of Augustus’ Horologium obelisk highlights, as well as its Augustan location, its important function, which was to measure and in some sense capture time itself. Time – its extent, its meaning, its passing – was a preoccupation with the Stoics and with Marcus in particular, as we find in many reflections from the Meditations. To take but two examples:
The periodic movements of the universe are the same, up and down from age to age [and here the word Marcus uses is indeed “aeon”: ex aiōnos eis aiōna]. (9.28.1)
The proper time and limit nature fixes… everything which is useful to the universe is always good and in season. Therefore the termination of life for every man is no evil… it is well-timed for the world, promoting it, promoted by it. This is how we become godlike – following God’s path and reason’s goals. (12.23, Long and Hays, adapted)
Bringing the interconnections full circle, so to speak, the red granite from the broken shaft of Antoninus’ column would, in the 18th century, be utilised to repair Augustus’ Horologium obelisk, which now stands for both in the Piazza del Montecitorio, the ancient site of altars to the deified Antonines.
Column: Function and Form
Scholars differ on the dating of Marcus’ column. It may have been planned as early as the victories, celebrated in 176, which concluded the first phase of the Marcomannic Wars. The absence of any depiction of Commodus, who was present on the campaigns of the late 170s but not on the earlier tours, may suggest the earlier date. It seems to have been completed in about 193, when Adrastus, the procurator (supervisor) of the project, requested permission from emperor Septimius Severus (ruled 193–211) to use the leftover building materials for a new house for himself (CIL VI.1585 = ILS 5920).
Ancient surveys of Rome refer to the column as a columna cochlis (“snail-shell column”), a description which highlights the spiral staircase inside. That the staircase remained a drawcard is confirmed by Ammianus Marcellinus. He describes the first visit of the emperor Constantius II to Rome, in 357, conveying a sense of wonder:
It seemed to [Constantius] that whatever his eye first lit on towered over the rest. It might be the shrine of Tarpeian Jupiter… or the buildings of the baths as big as provinces, or the solid mass of stone from Tibur [Tivoli] that forms the amphitheatre [=the Colosseum], with its top almost beyond the reach of human sight, or the Pantheon spread like a self-contained district under its high and lovely dome, or the lofty columns with spiral stairs to platforms which support the statues of former emperors. (16.14)
The visitor who climbed the hundred-foot column to the viewing platform would have been treated to a panoramic view, taking in the many monuments of the Campus Martius.
Scholarship about Trajan’s Column may assist us to understand Marcus’ own. First, in addition to offering a monument to Marcus’ northern victories, and a striking landmark, his column could potentially have been intended as a mausoleum. Many scholars consider that this was the intention of Trajan’s Column, which was begun well within his lifetime. It was against convention for burials to take place within the pomerium, the ancient boundary of Rome, so plans for Trajan’s interment within the column may not have been widely canvassed.
As for Marcus’ column, experts differ on whether it is likely to have been conceived as a funerary monument. Regarding the spiral form of both, Davies compellingly argues that the staircase offered the visitor a phenomenological experience of ascent “designed to draw visitors into a dialogue involving them in an active process of commemoration”. In addition, we may be able to speculate about an ultimate inspiration for the spiral form.
Trajan’s Column was probably designed by Apollodorus of Damascus, about whose background – apart from his expertise as a military engineer – little is known. We do know, however, from the Roman writer Vitruvius, another military engineer from Julius Caesar’s reign, that the working architect was expected to have studied the great Greek theorists, including Pythagoras and Plato (De Architectura 9). Their principles of geometry, calculation, and proportion, afforded essential tools for design and execution in an age without formal training in the discipline.
We also know that one of Trajan’s intimate entourage was the Greek philosopher and sophist Cocceianus Dio, also known as Chrysostom (“golden-mouthed”). His famous speeches on kingship, delivered with Trajan in the audience, reveal a reliance on the classic Greek authorities: Homer, Plato, Aristotle. In Oration 1, Dio Chrysostom reports at length a “myth”, which – much in the manner of Plato’s myths – retells a lesson through a secondhand narrative: a version of the ‘Choice of Hercules’, here offering a message about the difficulty of good kingship.
One of Plato’s own myths, thus transmitted through Dio Chrysostom, may have inspired Trajan’s spiral column. Cicero’s De re publica had drawn upon Plato’s Republic, in Book 10 of which we find the famous myth of Er, evidently the chief precursor to Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio). The culminating position of both tales underscores their significance.
Plato has Socrates tell the tale about a man from Pamphylia (now southern Turkey), who “once upon a time was killed in battle” (614b). His body was brought home; twelve days later, placed on a funeral pyre, he came to life. The tale, then, like Cicero’s, concerns translation following death, and as purportedly from an eyewitness, brings an inbuilt claim to authenticity.
For our purposes, the key section, in which Er explains the process of judging the dead, is this:
After four days [newcomers to the next world] arrived at a place from where they could see clearly a straight shaft of light stretched out from above through the whole of the sky and the earth like a column (hoion kiōna), closely resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer… Stretching down from either end was the spindle of Necessity by means of which all the circles turn… The nature of the whorl (sphondulos) is as follows: its shape is like the ones we use, but you have to imagine what it’s like from his description of it, just as if in a large hollow whorl, scooped out right through, another of the same sort lies fitted inside it… The total number of whorls is eight, each lying inside the other. Their edges seen from above are circles, forming from the back a continuous single whorl around the shaft, the latter being driven right through the centre of the eighth (616b–e). (trans. C. Emlyn-Jones & W. Preddy)
There are obscurities here, both verbal and conceptual, and scholars have offered varying interpretations. None the less, several elements clearly emerge: a shaft of light like a column; a “spindle of Necessity”, controlling the constant cosmic cycles; and, somehow relating to the shaft of light or surrounding it, a “whorl” – that is a helical structure containing a nested sequence of smaller helices. That this structure is related to the three Fates emerges later, as we are told that Clotho, the Fate of the present, turns the spindle, Atropos of the future touches the inner circles, and Lachesis of the past touches both (617c–d).
Plato’s shaft of light unites the earth and the heavens for the benefit of the newly dead, while a tall, helical structure expresses the constant cosmic revolutions, the inscrutable influences of Fate, and the passage of time. Could Dio Chrysostom have suggested to Trajan and to his resident architectural genius, Apollodorus, that they might attempt to express a revolutionary – in two key senses – form in funerary architecture, based upon this vision in Plato?
An additional clue may be that Dio Chrysostom’s final appearance in recorded history concerns a funerary site, that of his own family. In about 111, the writer Pliny, governor of Bithynia at the time, wrote to Trajan about a dispute in Dio’s home town. Dio had returned from Rome to Prusa, apparently causing great controversy by placing a statue of Trajan within a temple, adjoining the graves of his (Dio’s) wife and son. Opponents claimed that Dio had not submitted the correct planning documentation.
Pliny had inspected the site, finding Trajan’s statue safely in the library of the complex, while Dio’s family burials were at a safe distance in the courtyard. Wisely, Trajan advised Pliny (Letters 10.81, 82) to dismiss the uproar, simply reiterating that correct documents must be provided.
Whether or not Plato’s myth was an influence in Trajan’s decision to commission a helical column as his funerary monument, it may well have been a factor in Marcus’. Undoubtedly, Marcus knew the myth of Er. He seems to have memorised sections of Plato’s work, as he quotes them at several points in the Meditations. We also know that, as per the Stoic tradition, he was ever conscious of the approach of death. So one of Plato’s most evocative – if enigmatic – tales about the afterlife, in combination with the precedent of Trajan’s, is very likely to have entered Marcus’ deliberations about an appropriate way for posterity to remember, or (as he was convinced would occur) to forget him:
The words which were formerly familiar are now archaic: so also the names of those who were famous in the past, are now in a manner archaic, Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Leonnatus, and a little after also Scipio and Cato, then Augustus, then also Hadrian and Antoninus. For all things soon pass away and become a mere tale, and complete oblivion soon buries them. (Meditations 4.33)
We are fortunate indeed that the memory of Marcus, greatest of the Antonines, survives not only in his great book, but in his equestrian statue, his column, and the pedestal reliefs which he may have co-designed.
Judith Stove is a researcher and writer based in Sydney, Australia, focusing on Jane Austen and her reception, as well as on Stoicism and other Classical virtue ethics. She co-hosts the podcast “Soul-Searching With Seneca”, at The Walled Garden, and is assistant editor of the online journal Stoicism Today. This article is an edited extract from her forthcoming book, Marcus Aurelius and His Legacy: Seeking Rome’s Kingdom of Gold (Pen & Sword, Barnsley, 2025). She has previously written for Antigone about Cicero’s sadly lost work, the Hortensius.
Further Reading
Cassius Dio, Roman History (Epitomes of Books 73 and 74)
Historia Augusta, Lives of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius
Martin Beckmann, The Column of Marcus Aurelius: The Genesis and Meaning of a Roman Imperial Monument (Univ. of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2011).
Penelope Davies, Death and the Emperor: Roman Imperial Funerary Monuments from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius (Cambridge UP, 2000).
Mario Torelli, Typology and Structure of Roman Historical Reliefs (Univ. of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1992).