EL TEMPS DE LA MEMÒRIA

The Sarcophagus of the Seasons with clipeus

Found during the first official excavations carried out at Empúries in 1846 subsidised by the Provincial Government in an imprecise part of the cella memoriae on the eastern side of the late Antiquity cemetery. It was cleanly broken and has been restored without any loss. The lid is wholly preserved. It is made of high-quality white marble, probably from Luni.

In the centre of the casket there is a imago clipeata arranged inside a large shell with a conventional depiction of the deceased with himation and holding a rolled uolumen in his hands. It has a rich, crowded decoration on both sides, with eight characters standing, four on each side. They are all naked, except for a kind of cloak worn over the shoulder, and the third figure on the left of the central image, a good shepherd (criophoros), who is wearing a short tunic and sandals and carrying a lamb on his shoulder. This is the recurring image of a bucolic, peaceful world reminiscent of life after death on the Elysian Fields or the Isles of the Blessed. The figure next to it, the fourth, is the conventional representation of winter dressed in the style of Attis, with long breeches (braccae) and a cloak covering the head and part of the chest. To the right of the figure of the Good Shepherd is a representation of autumn, a naked figure with a cloak in front of the chest, and an eros riding a panther behind. On the far right of the coffin, again the representation of the genius of autumn with a cloak in front of his chest, holding a hare in his raised right hand and below a dog that would like to catch hold of it. To his right, the image of summer wearing a chlamys and crowned with spikes and, further over, the genius of spring crowned with flowers. Between them, a flowering tree with an eros among the branches. The shell-shaped clipeus is supported by two winged and crowned deities wearing cloaks. At the top, two small victories, also winged, help to support it. Below, the central image depicts the myth of Endymion and Selene, the former reclining and asleep, wearing a chlamys and holding a spear in his left hand, and the goddess descending from a biga (chariot) drawn by two skittish horses. The unbounded love of the goddess for the young shepherd led the father of the gods to grant him immortality and eternal youth through eternal sleep (somnus aeternus), a symbol of the immortality of the soul much appreciated and widely used among the educated people of the time. The frontal decoration of the cover is on either side a plain square cartouche supported by two winged erotes; on the right, the grape harvest is being carried out by naked putti and on the left peasants dressed in short tunics are picking olives and working in the mill. It is a superb work of Roman art that can be dated to the tetrarchic period, at the very beginning of the 4^th century.

It is from Tomb 410 of the late Antiquity cemetery of Neàpolis and, although while it is true that we do not know where it was located, a detailed analysis of the space makes it possible to propose, with some plausibility, that it would have presided over Burial Chamber A, annexed to the north of the cella in the most recent phase of its history, which should be dated to very near the end of the 6^th century or in the 7^th. Needless to say, it was the tomb of an important person. The sarcophagus would have been recovered and reused as the sepulchre of a charismatic personage of Emporian Christianity.