A Roman statue known as Pasquino, discovered in 1501 and famous for becoming a target for anonymous political satire, originally depicted a warrior carrying a corpse. This specific mythological composition was also found at the residence of Herodes Atticus, one of the wealthiest men in the Roman Empire. At his villa in Loukou, located in the Peloponnese, this figure stood alongside another monumental sculpture showing Achilles holding Penthesilea, the Amazon he had just killed and with whom he reportedly fell in love upon her death. The latter statue retains extraordinary details, including an eagle on the hero's helmet.
Rebecca Levitan, a Professor of Greek Art at King's College London, suggests in a study published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology that these two works formed an artistic composition intended to express pain, prestige, and possible feelings of guilt. Her interpretation links the scenes from the Trojan War to the family tragedies and controversies surrounding the aristocrat. Central to this narrative is the death of Annia Regila, Herodes's wife, who died while eight months pregnant in 160 AD. Her brother, Bradua, accused Herodes of involvement in an assault allegedly committed by a freedman of the household, who was presumed to have struck the woman in the abdomen.
Herodes was ultimately acquitted, with the intensity of his public mourning contributing to his defense. He later erected an odeon in Athens dedicated to Regila. However, suspicions regarding his conduct were not new; the rhetorician Fronto had attributed cruelty and a homicide to him around 140 AD, and he faced another accusation of tyranny in 174 AD. Levitan proposes that Herodes may have identified with Achilles as a man tormented by having caused the death of someone he loved, a reading that connects the sculpture to the accusations surrounding Regila's death, though it could also simply express his sorrow over the loss.
The villa where these sculptures were found remained unidentified for much of the 19th century. Although William Martin Leake documented fragments of a colossal figure there in 1806, he mistakenly confused the ruins with ancient Thyrea. Ernst Curtius later recognized their Roman character, but the link to Herodes was established in 1906 through inscriptions reused in a nearby monastery. Excavations beginning in 1980 recovered approximately 6,500 square meters of a complex estimated to cover 20,000 square meters.
Herodes, born in 101 AD and serving as Roman consul in 143, taught rhetoric to future emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. His fortune allowed him to transform the residence into a monumental complex featuring gardens, fountains, and around fifty statues dedicated to family members, philosophers, and imperial figures. The main courtyard measured 55 meters in length and housed a garden crossed by channels, conceived as an intellectual meeting space. Levitan identified a correspondence between the sculptures and mosaics located beside them; each mythological composition had a reproduction on the pavement, with a 63-meter channel adding water reflections. The mosaic of Pasquino, preserved at about 60%, even includes the pedestal of the represented statue.
While the researcher suggests visitors could compare these images while walking, the dating of some pavements to the fourth and fifth centuries indicates that parts of the ensemble may belong to later reforms. This uncertainty prevents proving that Herodes personally designed the entire composition or used the sculptures specifically to express remorse for Regila's death.
Sources: elDiario.es.