Due stele iconiche di classiari ravennati con ritratti di bambini

Several contributions focus on iconography and inscriptions concerning childhood and youth in Roman time, also by paying attention to lower classes and to families which don’t resemble the canonical ideal of the legitimate familia. In such perspective, this paper analyses two tombstones from Classe (Ravenna) dated to the first half of the I century A.D., where the inscription is accompanied by the portrait of a young boy. It emerges that the construction of funerary identity consists in the reelaboration of iconographic and stylistic models which were common, at that time, in Ravenna and its vicinity: thus, commissioners used and adapted them according with their economic capacity and their commemorative aspirations. The inscriptions are also quite interesting: the first is one of the few attestations of a missicius, while the other mentions a centurio classiarius, who was embarked on a ship that probably had the rare name of a river in Persia