Colombario di Pomponio Hylas

The Sovrintendenza Capitolina places the columbarium on a side road off the ancient via Latina and records that it was discovered in 1831 by the Marchese Pietro Campana. It is named from the freedman Pomponius Hylas, whose funerary inscription, a tablet in glass-paste mosaic, is above the stair down to the burial chamber. Other inscriptions place the construction between the principate of Tiberius and that of Claudius, 14 to 51 AD, with continued use in the Flavian period, 69 to 96, when the Hylas mosaic and some decorative changes are dated, down to the Antonine age, 138 to 161. A steep stair leads into a rectangular room under a vault finely decorated with plant motifs; the niches for the ash-jars sit in small aedicular structures with colonnettes and tympana, painted and stuccoed. In the central aedicule of the end wall two figures are painted, probably the tomb's founders, named on the marble tablet below as Granius Nestor and Vinileia Hedone. The figurative programme centres on Orpheus.