Vatican Museums

The fragmented front of this sarcophagus (c. 300), discovered in Ostia in nineteenth-century excavations and subsequently restored using plaster, bears at the top the mutilated epigraph of Fyrmus, affectionately celebrating his "sweet holy soul". Below, there is the partially preserved figure of a fisherman (with a fishing line) and a representation of the mythical Thracian citharist Orpheus. It is known that, before the appearance of biblical themes, ancient Christians had to adapt the traditional figurative patrimony to their new spiritual needs: some themes, more "neutral" from a religious perspective, such as the fisherman and the shepherd, could therefore take on new meaning in the light of the New Testament and the figure of Christ, and even the "pagan" Orpheus, who in Greek mythology enchanted the beasts with the sweetness of his music, could symbolise the redemption generated by the Word of God.