“Kings have knelt before my spear, and their peoples
too,
how many are the embraces of the Ocean around the
earth.
I am the son of Philip, by Heracles a descendant of
Zeus,
and of my mother Olympias, of the race of the Aeacids.”
This inscription is in Greek as it appears on the Tabula Chigi, in which Alexander speaks in the first person.
This Tabula
Chigi is a tablet made of antique yellow marble, 15.5 x
We don’t know for whom or why these panels were created. They may have served to decorate some libraries or to disseminate a story, or they simply had a votive function. The latest opinion is that they were a kind of conversation piece for the ‘nouveaux riches’ who had no access or the skills to read literary texts.
Another study
has suggested that the Chigi iliaca were meant to be read and understood by a
selected group of connoisseurs of Greek calligrams (sets of words arranged in
such a way that they form a thematically related image). So far, we know
twenty-two tabulae iliacae existed.
The tablet shows
two female figures facing each other, Europa and
This unique tablet has been on display during the exhibition “The instant and eternity. Between us and the ancients” together with 300 exceptional artifacts from Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Italic, medieval, modern, and contemporary civilizations. For the occasion, a section of the Baths of Diocletian, part of the National Roman Museum in Rome reopened after decades of closure.
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