Britannicus in toga

This is carved from greywacke, a hard dark-green stone that was costly and stubborn to work, so the boy in the toga clearly mattered to whoever commissioned him. He has long been identified as Britannicus, son of the emperor Claudius, born around the year 41 into what looked like a clear path to power. Then Claudius married Agrippina and adopted her son. That boy became Nero, and Britannicus was quietly moved aside. He died in 55, not yet 14, taken ill at a family dinner. Roman writers say poison and pointed at Nero, though a sudden death in a Roman childhood needed no crime to explain it. The statue was found in 1651 on the Caelian Hill in Rome and brought to Florence as an antiquity. The name Britannicus is a long-standing identification rather than a proven one. What is not in doubt is the garment, the toga praetexta, the purple-bordered toga that marked out a freeborn Roman child.