Sir, – In his interesting article on the single currency of the Roman empire (“Economic history reminds us how the world works. Are we paying attention?”, Weekend Review, Opinion, August 20th), David McWilliams makes reference to the Arch of Sergii at Pula in Croatia, as if there was someone called Sergii.
The family commemorated on the arch bore the Roman name Sergius (plural Sergii), an ancient Roman clan that had largely disappeared from the record until the attempted coup d’état of Catiline (Lucius Sergius Catilina) in 63 BC, denounced in a famous series of orations by the great orator and one of the consuls of that year, Marcus Tullius Cicero.
The central person honoured on the arch at Pula was Lucius Sergius Lepidus, a military tribune (staff officer) of the 29th legion that saw service in the campaign ending at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, in which Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
Lepidus’s statue in the centre of the arch was flanked on one side by that of his father Lucius Sergius and on the other of his uncle, Cornelius Sergius, who both held high civil office in the Roman colony of Pula (the statues no longer survive).
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Perhaps the most interesting thing about the arch of the Sergii is that it was commissioned and paid for by the mother (not wife) of Lucius Sergius Lepidus, Salvia Postuma Sergia.
The Salvii were a more obscure clan than the Sergii, at least until Marcus Salvius Otho became emperor on January 15th, AD 69 (the year of the four emperors).
He was defeated by the next short-lived emperor Aulus Vitellius and committed suicide on April 16th, 69.
Women could exercise no legislative or electoral power at this time, but it is interesting to see Salvia Postuma (the Postuma part of her name indicating that she was the last child of her father) exercising civic power with this lavish and prominently located display of architectural patronage at Pula, presenting herself as a loyal wife of her husband Lucius, devoted mother of their soldier son and respectful sister-in-law to her husband’s brother, neatly conforming to the social agenda of the emperor Augustus. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN McGING,
Regius Professor
of Greek Emeritus,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2