I’ve got a bee in my bonnet lately about coloured marbles – an obsession reactivated by a recent visit to the small (but divine) exhibition at the Capitoline Museums devoted to the subject. My very favourite and historically fascinating type is the so-called Lucullan marble (more commonly known now as ‘africano’) and sourced from Teos, not far from modern Izmir. It’s a striking one – nearly all black, with inclusions in pinks and reds. Dramatic, splashy, and reasonably difficult to transport to metropolitan Rome, where all these considerations were widely appreciated.
The most scandalous use of the material was in the first century B.C., in the hands of the (gratingly) ambitious Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, who (after accumulating wealth in various unscrupulous ways) had the means and the nerve to construct a temporary theatre in the Campus Martius featuring an abundance of columns of this Lucullan marble, each over 10 meters high. This is according to the disapproving Pliny, who also noted that the little pleasure pool included therein introduced the first hippopotamus and crocodile to Rome. These were all mostly accepted flexes in the political landscape.
However, the shameless Scaurus repurposed those splashy columns within the atrium of his domus on the Palatine, laying bare the tensions between Hellenistic luxury and traditional Roman restraint in the late Republican period. Their size, their material, and that they were were repurposed from public to private use all caused outrage. To quote Pliny: ‘can we say that there is now anything that have have for the exclusive use of the gods”?
Precious little remains of Scaurus’ infamous home – widely seen as the catalyst of his political downfall – remain. And the columns themselves are long gone. What is clear, is that he made crucial miscalculation (and the ostentatious marble played a key part) in a period when Romans were ferociously unforgiving towards ill-concealed signs of ambition….
(But…would really like a chunk of marmo africano on my desk – something to contemplate)
