Vatican Museums

“The Senate and the Roman people undertook to reduce to a level plane, at the expense of the State, the clivus Martis”. The slab, which belonged to a monumental structure on the Appian Way, recalls a work of levelling the sloping section of the road which drew its name from the temple of Mars, erected, according to the historian Titus Livy, during the Gallic War in 388 B.C., and located at the first mile outside the Porta San Sebastiano, where the item was discovered. Recent studies suggest that the clivus corresponds to the section between Porta Capena and the river Almone, and that the road works which extended from the Tomb of the Scipioni were dictated by the need to solve hydro-geological problems, possibly due to the Augustan restoration of the annual equine parade on the 15^th of July. The inscription is dated between the age of Augustus and that of Nero, before the reign of Caligula if this latter was the instigator or the (incomplete) erasion of the text.