The Seuso Roman silver treasure

The Seuso Treasure is one of the finest hoards of Roman silver ever discovered.

what is the seuso silver treasure?

The Seuso Roman silver Treasure, in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, consists of 14 stunning pieces of late imperial Roman tableware:

Four huge platters, variously decorated; a washbasin; five large jugs; two elaborate water buckets; an embossed amphora; and a perfume casket. They were almost certainly not made as a single set: they date from the 4thโ€“5th centuries and there is a range of about five decades between the oldest and the youngest pieces, and they include items worked in very different styles. The elegant washbasin and the two jugs with incised geometric designs, for example, which are assigned by some scholars to a โ€œWesternโ€ workshop, while the jug and amphora with Dionysiac scenes of frenzied maenads and inebriated satyrs, is more opulently โ€œEasternโ€.

where and when was it found?

The exact findspot of the Seuso Roman silver treasure remains unclear. In the 1970s a young man called Jรณzsef Sรผmegh stumbled on a Roman hoard packed into a wide copper cauldron in the vicinity of the village of Polgรกrdi, east of Lake Balaton. Sรผmegh did not live long to enjoy his find. He died in mysterious circumstances at the age of just 24 and the treasure vanished. The trail of the pieces when they cropped up on the art market was for decades deliberately blurred by dealers, smugglers, heisters and crooks. The Getty Museum was interested in purchasing the silver, but pulled out because its provenance documents turned out to be forgeries. By the time it ended up in the hands of Lord Northampton in England, it numbered 14 pieces, perhaps a lot fewer than had originally been stashed away, hurriedly and in panic, by a Roman family clinging to the coat-tails of their civilisation as it fled from the barbarian invasions of Central Europe. After long and intricate negotiations, Hungary finally succeeded in repatriating the Treasure in two tranches, in 2014 and 2017.

how did the treasure get its name?

Why the โ€œSeusoโ€ Treasure? It was customary for the owners of valuable Roman pieces to scratch their names on them. The name Seuso appears in a dedication on the large Hunting Plate: a huge salver with a central busy scene of figures dining under a canopy. Above an area of water teeming with fish is the word โ€œPELSOโ€, the Roman name for Lake Balaton. Circling the central scene is this inscription: H[A]EC SEVSO TIBI DVRENT PER SAECULA MVLTA POSTERIS VT PROSINT VASCVLA DIGNA TVIS (โ€œMay these, O Seuso, yours for many ages be, small vessels fit to serve your offspring worthilyโ€). Small vessels these are certainly not: the total weight of the pieces is a massive 68.5kg. Experts suggest that some of the silver came from a set that was presented to Seuso as a wedding gift (one of the picnickers on the Hunting Plate is a woman sporting a hairstyle in the manner of the empress Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus). Anything smaller that may have belonged the setโ€”cups, spoons, toothpicksโ€”has not come to light.

Hunting Plate from the Seuso Roman  silver treasure
Detail of the Hunting Plate from the Seuso silver treasure, with the word PELSO bottom left.

do similar treasures exist?

Stylistically and in terms of subject matter there are a number of parallels. The Hunting Plate from the Seuso Roman silver treasure shows similarities to the Cesena Plate in Italy (for an image, see here). The scenes of hunting, with animals being chased into nets, slaves butchering them, and a family seated on a stibadium (curved couch) under an awning slung between trees, feasting and feeding titbits to a dog while their horses are tethered in the background, is identical in many details to the 4th-century mosaic floor of the Sala della Piccola Caccia in the Villa del Casale in Sicily.

so who was seuso?

One way in which the Seuso hunting plate differs from others like it is in the absence of a scene of sacrifice to the Roman goddess Diana, and experts think this might be significant. Between the first and the last words of the inscription round the rim, encircled in a laurel wreath, is a tiny Chi Rho. Seuso might have been a Christian. Nothing otherwise is known of him. His name is not Roman: he was probably a Celt. And from the scenes depicted on his tableware, we can surmise that he was a landowner and keen hunter who lived a gracious life in one of the fine villas that existed in Pannonia. A veteran general, perhaps, grown wealthy from service to an empire into whose culture and lifestyle he was fully assimilated. The heterogeneous nature of the hoard suggests that he might have received rich gifts as rewards for his service.

More personal details are entirely lacking but it is tempting to speculate. The strapline of the Hungarian National Museumโ€™s 2018 Seuso exhibit was โ€œWealth, Erudition, Powerโ€. Certainly, Seuso must have been wealthy and with that wealth would have come a certain degree of power. But how erudite was he? How deep did his Romanisation go? Petronius, in his Satyricon (1st century AD), the famous send-up of a vulgar, nouveau riche banquet, puts the following words into the mouth of Trimalchio, the host:

โ€œI absolutely love silver. Iโ€™ve got about a hundred wine cups showing how Cassandra killed her sonsโ€”the boys are depicted lying dead in the most lifelike way. Then thereโ€™s a bowl my patron left me with a scene of Daedalus shutting Niobe into the Trojan Horse. All of good heavy make. I wouldnโ€™t sell my connoisseurship at any price.โ€

This does not seem particularly hilarious to us now, but cultivated Roman readers would have tittered. Trimalchio is revealing his own lack of education: he began his life enslaved; he came to Rome from some far-flung corner of the Empire and now, as a freedman, is posing as a person well versed in the culture of the native elite. He muddles Cassandra with Medea, Niobe with Pasiphaรซ and the Trojan Horse with Daedalusโ€™ wooden cow. Was Seusoโ€™s grasp of Graeco-Roman myth as hazy as this? We have no idea. But what the Petronius extract does suggest is that it was normal for possessors of fine works of art to make a show of knowing what they had. The pictorial world of ancient Rome was very uniform. From Britannia to the Balkans, people would have seen the same scenes depicted in exactly the same way, in sculpture, pottery, metalwork, painting and mosaic. โ€œIโ€™ve got two exquisite silver-gilt pails with the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra,โ€ Seuso might have boasted, โ€œAnd a gorgeous platter showing Meleager having just dispatched the Calydonian Boar.โ€ It is a signal of Romeโ€™s remarkable achievement in co-opting and homogenising so many different civilisations that all of Seusoโ€™s dinner guests would have known what he was talking aboutโ€”or at least felt it necessary to pretend they did.ย It is also an extraordinary privilege to be able to admire those objects now, vestiges of provincial pomp, of days of laughter and conviviality in some long-gone lacustrine willow grove.

For more on Budapest and the Hungarian National Museum, check out our guide.