But where does the Morgantina Treasure fit into all this?
Before the city fell to the Romans in 211 BC, its inhabitants, aware of the fate that awaited Morgantina at the hands of the conquerors, buried their valuable possessions beneath the floors of their houses and other buildings before the legions arrived. But beneath one of these houses, a particularly wealthy inhabitant of the city had concealed something extraordinary. Yet it was not the archaeologists who had painstakingly been investigating the site for years, who were destined to find it. Practically as soon as the archaeologists had begun work on the site in the mid-1950s, local looters known as clandestine or tombaroli (tomb-robbers) had also began their nefarious activities. In the early years the clandestini used pick axes to break through the walls of ancient houses and tombs in their search for treasures that they could then sell on the black market. But in the 1970s, with the advent of metal detectors, their methods changed, with the result that a number of valuable coin hoards were taken illegally from the site.
In 1980, Malcolm Bell, who was then directing excavations at Morgantina, noticed unauthorized digging taking place on a nearby hill. As the majority of the site is on private land and local officials seemed uninterested in taking action against the clandestini, Bell could do nothing about it. In the months following, Bell began to hear rumors about an exquisite set of silver objects that had been unearthed by local looters, and, although the gossip even described some of the pieces in detail, no substantial information about where the objects had been taken to or by whom emerged. In autumn 1987 Bell was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when he saw a collection of silver on display that struck him as closely fitting the description of the looted objects from Morgantina. Bell subsequently wrote to the museum voicing his suspicions and asking to examine the objects, and at the same time wrote to the Italian authorities informing them of the display. Despite repeated letters to the Met throughout the following years Bell was not given permission to view the objects, and eventually his requests were simply ignored.
In 1996 Bell was asked by the Italian authorities to investigate the structures on the hill where the silver was supposed to have been found. Almost as soon as digging began in 1997 it was obvious to Bell’s team that someone had been there before them. The soil was churned up and, when they hit the floors, they discovered two large holes that could conceivably have held the silver treasure seen in the Met. An Italian 100-lira coin minted in 1978 was also found in one of the holes, important evidence for the looting of the site and its approximate date. The discovery of another coin, missed by the looters and minted more than 2,000 years earlier, between 214 BC and 212 BC, fitted with the date when the Romans attacked Morgantina and added weight to the theory that the silver hoard was concealed at this time.
Eventually in 1999 the Met allowed Bell the chance to examine the silver in its collection. This viewing soon convinced him that Morgantina was indeed the origin of the collection, but Bell also noticed something else of interest scratched in Greek onto the surface of two of the pieces. This graffito had been translated by museum curator Dietrich von Bothmer as reading “from the war,” but Bell believed that it actually read “of Eupolemos” meaning that the objects belonged to a man named Eupolemos. Astoundingly one of the very few family names recorded from Morgantina, on a third-century real estate deed relating to property near the find spot of the silver, is Eupolemos. But was this evidence enough for the Met to admit the origin of the objects and return them to their place of origin? As it turned out, there was another important part of the story that had emerged a few years earlier.
In 1996 a leading Sicilian clandestini named Giuseppe Mascara was arrested on charges of antiquities trafficking and, in attempt to reduce his sentence, provided information about the looting of the Morgantina silver. In sworn testimony Mascara described the finding of the silver in 1979, its location, and even details about the decoration on several of the pieces. Silvio Raffiotta, the chief investigating magistrate for central Sicily and a native of Aidone, presented the evidence to the Met, but it dismissed Mascara’s claim, citing him as unreliable due to his criminal background. It was after this rebuff by the Met that Raffiotta arranged for Bell’s 1997–98 excavations, based on details of the location of the silver provided by Mascara.
Although the evidence against the Met was building up, it took another revelation to fully convince the museum to change its position on the origin of the silver. To reveal details of what this involved, we must look into how the Met obtained the silver in the first place. After the artifacts had been looted from Morgantina sometime in 1979/1980 (probably in two batches, as indicated by the two holes in the house floor) they were sold by two tombaroli, Vincenzo Bozzi and Filippo Baviera, for 110 million lire ($27,000) to Orazio Di Simone, a Sicilian antiquities dealer based in Lugano in Switzerland, who then sold them to U.S. dealer Robert Hecht, Jr., for $875,000. The Metropolitan Museum of Art reportedly bought the silver in two lots from Hecht in 1981–82 for $2.74 million, which again tends to support the theory that the artifacts were looted from the ancient house in Morgantina on two separate occasions. In 1984, the Met announced its new acquisition: a 15-piece set of “some of the finest Hellenistic silver known from Magna Graecia,” which it thought could have been made in “Taranto or in eastern Sicily.”1 This reference to both Sicily and southern Italy (Taranto) was uncertain enough to make details of the origins of the silver as vague as possible.
In 2005, when the Met was still stalling over the return of the silver, Robert Hecht was indicted by the Italian government, along with Marion True, the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for conspiracy to traffic in illegal antiquities. Another co-defendant in the case was Italian dealer Giacomo Medici (also Hecht’s business partner) who had been convicted in 2004 of dealing in stolen ancient artifacts. Medici’s illegal antiquities operation was believed to be one of the largest and most sophisticated in the world, and when his warehouse space in Geneva Freeport was raided in September 1995, hundreds of pieces of ancient art were discovered; one set of Etruscan dinner plates alone was valued at $2 million. On May 12, 2005, Medici was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison and a fine of 10 million Euros. Evidence taken in the raid on his Swiss premises resulted in the indictment of Hecht and True by the Italian government in 2005.
However, in November 2007, the criminal charges against True were dropped, as the statute of limitations had expired, and her trial ended without resolution. In January 2012 Hecht was acquitted on the grounds that that the statute of limitations on the charges against him had expired. Hecht died in Paris just a few weeks later, at the age of 92.
It is probable that the publicity surrounding the Hecht/True trial finally persuaded the Met to come to a decision about the Morgantina hoard, and in 2006 an agreement was finally reached between the Italian government and the museum. This repatriation agreement allowed the Met joint custody with the Aidone Archaeological Museum of the silver hoard, which would travel between New York and Aidone every four years for exhibit. The agreement also allowed for the Morgantina silver to remain displayed in New York on loan until January 2010. Various other antiquities of Italian origin were included in the repatriation claim, including the Euphronios krater, an almost perfectly preserved early sixth-century BC vessel exquisitely decorated with two scenes, one from the Trojan War and the other depicting Athenian youths arming themselves for battle. The painter of the vase, Euphronios, was a pioneer in the art of red-figure vase painting. Interestingly, the Met had bought this object in 1972 for $1 million from a certain Robert Hecht. The Euphronios krater had been looted the year before by tomb-robbers from an Etruscan tomb in the Greppe Sant’ Angelo, near the town of Cerveteri, 30 miles northwest of Rome.
In a related repatriation case, a life-size sculpture known as the Morgantina Aphrodite, or sometimes the Getty Aphrodite (though it is more likely to depict either Demeter or Persephone), was returned by the J
. Paul Getty Museum in California to Sicily in 2011. The museum had bought the fifth-century classical sculpture in 1988 for $18 million, apparently unaware that the statue had been looted from a sanctuary at Morgantina in the 1980s. One of the Getty Museum’s main suppliers of antiquities during the 1980s was none other than Robert Hecht.
In 2010 the Met returned the 16 pieces of the Morgantina treasure to Italy, and in March of that year the collection went on display at the Palazzo Massimo, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome. It had taken 30 years for the objects to return to Italy. In December 2010, the treasure finally returned home to Sicily, to the small archaeological museum in Aidone. In May of the following year, the Morgantina Aphrodite was also unveiled at the museum, inspiring the local community with hope for a better future in their economically depressed town. Indeed, the mayor of the town, Filippo Gangi, seemed to voice the hopes of whole community when he said that the return of these valuable artifacts could “trigger an unprecedented economic development” in Aidone.2
Because the Morgantina Treasure has been identified and repatriated, we now know the context of the objects and we can go some way toward telling the story behind them. We can connect Eupolemos, the owner of the silver, with the house in which they were found and perhaps even with Syracuse, the place where the objects were made. He may even have been a refugee from Syracuse fleeing the Romans and looking to find safety in Morgantina. The discovery of the buried silver more than 2,000 years later, however, shows that he never found that safety and in all likelihood was killed or enslaved at the time of the Roman assault on Morgantina in 211 BC.
So does the story of the Morgantina Treasure represent hope for the future of Italy’s ancient remains? Well, in the wider context of looting in the country, not quite. The question remains: What if it had been clandestini who discovered the initial remains of Morgantina in 1955? The story might have been very different.
Although a number of looted pieces like the Morgantina Treasure have been returned to Italy throughout the past 10 years, this is usually the exception rather than the rule. Italy is particularly rich in ancient tombs, temples, and settlements, and as a consequence there are thousands of clandestini operating in the shadows. In 2010 Italy’s Carabinieri art squad announced that they had recovered almost 60,000 pieces of looted or stolen artwork and ancient artifacts worth an astounding $239 million. But is it the local looters who are the problem? The people who actually dig up the loot are usually poor farmers or laborers in need of extra money in order to survive, and ignorant of the worth of their finds. Consequently they sell on their ill-gotten gains to middlemen for a tiny percentage of the actual value of the object. But crucially, the tomb-robbers are the first link in a chain that often leads to the best known art collectors and museums in the world. But it is with the next link in the chain, the middlemen, often locals, but with some knowledge of the items they are dealing with, where the picture of the looting of Italy’s ancient heritage begins to cloud over. These middlemen are notoriously hard to identify and prosecute. From the hands of the middlemen the looted objects are spirited out of the country, usually to international traffickers in Switzerland, a country aptly described as the black hole of illegal antiquities. Then the antiquities, complete with faked paperwork, head to London or New York, to private collections, auctions, or museums. As we have seen, once the looted objects have found a home in a museum outside Italy, it is extremely difficult to get them back.
The tragedy is that for every looted ancient object from Italy that appears on the illegal antiquities market, thousands more are destroyed by the looters who smash through the archaeological site, sometimes even using bulldozers, in their zeal for the cash that these objects can bring. The context is gone, and a page torn from the history book of ancient Italy.
CHAPTER 7
The Sevso Treasure
The Sevso Treasure is a hoard of 14 late Roman silver objects of exceptional quality, reported to be worth more than $200 million on today’s market. The astonishing story of this cursed (according to its current owner) treasure is rife with plots and counterplots, suspicious deaths, and back market double-dealing. The treasure was looted from an unknown Roman palace or villa sometime in the 1970s, and appeared in London in the early 1980s with an export license from Lebanon, later shown to have been forged. The silver was subsequently purchased by the Marquess of Northampton and in 1990 was on display in New York ready for auction later the same year. But before this could happen, the governments of Lebanon, Hungary, and Yugoslavia lodged legal claims to it. In 1993, however, an American court rejected these claims and ruled that the Marquess was the legal owner of the controversial silver. This decision caused an uproar in Hungary, whose claim, backed by a number of experts, was that the hoard had been discovered in their country in 1978 by a quarry worker (later found hanged) and illegally exported. In 2007 it was sensationally reported that another 200 silver objects from the original hoard were known to exist, but their whereabouts remain unknown. Today the Sevso Treasure, left without any secure provenance and tainted by its dark history, is regarded as unsalable.
The name of the Sevso Treasure derives from an inscription on one of the silver plates, which reads:
Hec Sevso tibi durent per saecula multa
Posteris ut prosint vascula digna tuis
Let these, oh Sevso, yours for many ages be,
Small vessels fit to serve your offspring worthily
Small vessels? The inscribed silver “Sevso” plate is 27.5 inches in diameter and weighs almost 20 pounds, and the combined weight of all 14 pieces comes in at a staggering 154 pounds or so. The lavishly decorated silver tableware that makes up the Sevso Treasure was accompanied by a large copper cauldron, within which it was discovered. As luck would have it, this huge cauldron had preserved its contents from oxidation, so the silver was in excellent condition, although much of it showed signs of use. According to Dr. Marlia Mango of the University of Oxford, the treasure dates from between AD 350 and AD 450, though some Hungarian scholars, among them Dr. Zsolt Visy, of the University of Pécs, maintain that the objects were all manufactured within the fourth century AD. Interestingly, radiocarbon dating of soot on the copper cauldron dates it to sometime between AD 140 and AD 410, but with an error margin that could extend it as late as AD 610. This latter date is when Dr. Mango believes the treasure was buried.
The treasure consists of a collection of four large plates, five ewers (pitchers), two buckets, a cosmetic casket, an amphora, and a basin, all elaborately decorated with hunting, feasting, and mythological scenes; images of everyday life; and intricate geometric forms. Unusually for a hoard, there were no spoons or coins, items that are often found together with sets of Roman tableware. The Sevso plate itself, also known as the Great Hunting Dish, is one of the earliest pieces in the collection, probably dating from the mid- to late fourth century AD. The Hunting Dish has at its center a medallion decorated with scenes of hunting and an outdoor banquet, and the Achilles Plate, at 28.3 inches in diameter the largest object in the Sevso hoard, depicts the legend of Achilles. The spectacular Meleager Plate is decorated with a central medallion showing the Greek hero Meleager after killing the Calydonian boar, flanked by the huntress Atalanta and four other Calydonian Hunters. The rim of this huge vessel is decorated with a frieze showing a range of mythological scenes including the Judgment of Paris and the story of Perseus and Andromeda.
Other impressive pieces from the Sevso Treasure include a large drinking vessel known as the Hippolytus Jug, which has two beautifully crafted handles in the shape of leopards and a ewer 1 1/2 feet tall and embossed with a Dionysiac procession. This vessel was probably used for serving wine while other vessels in the assemblage were used for eating, drinking, and for washing hands. Tantalizingly, most archaeologists agree that these 14 objects are only part of what was once a much bigger hoard.
Dr. Zsolt Visy divides the 14 objects in the Sevso Hoard into two groups, those with repoussé decoration (embossing or pressing
shapes into metal), namely the Achilles plate, Meleager plate, amphora, Dionysiac ewer, Hippolytus ewer, two Hippolytus buckets, and the casket; and those decorated using a black inlay called niello, these being the geometrically decorated plate, Hunting plate, two geometrically decorated ewers, a ewer decorated with animals, and the basin. She also believes that within these two main groups only a few can be assigned to the same workshop or craftsman. Dr. Mango also considers the objects to be the work of a number of different craftsmen, and thinks that they were manufactured in various parts of the Roman Empire and collected throughout a long period. A number of the objects, including the amphora, Dr. Mango believes, may have been made in the eastern Mediterranean region, perhaps Constantinople, whereas others may have come from a workshop in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece.
Scholars are of the opinion that “Sevso” was either a Roman general or an extremely wealthy Roman client, probably of non-Roman background, judging by the origin of his name, and the silver probably a lavish wedding gift. Interestingly, the Chi-Rho sign (an early Christian monogram, formed by superimposing the first two letters of the word “Christ” in Greek: Chi [X] and Rho [P]) used to signify the beginning and the end of the inscription on the Hunting Plate shows that Sevso and his family may well have been Christians, or at least believed in the efficacy of this Christian symbol. And that, really, is all we know of Sevso; the rest is conjecture. But what of the extraordinary journey of the treasure itself?
7.1. View of Lake Balaton. Image by Nobli. Licensed under the Creative commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license on Wikipedia.
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