Sarcophagus with Orestes and Iphigenia

In 44 BC the statesman Cicero wrote a dialogue on friendship, and in it the Roman politician Laelius recalls a night at the theatre. In a new tragedy by the poet Pacuvius, a king cannot tell which of two prisoners is Orestes. Pylades claims to be Orestes so that he will die in his friend's place, while Orestes insists that he is the one. The whole audience, Laelius says, rose to its feet and applauded.

Some two centuries later the same two friends fill this marble chest. The story is set in Tauris, on the Black Sea, where Orestes and Pylades come to bring back a sacred image of Artemis and find that her priestess is Iphigenia, Orestes' lost sister. Along the front the scenes run on from one to the next: the sanctuary of the goddess, Orestes tormented by a Fury, a spirit of vengeance, and the fight that ends in their escape.

Scholars place the sarcophagus around the middle of the 2nd century AD. It survives complete with its lid, 2.18 metres long, and the additions made by later restorers have been taken off again.