Vesta, the virgin goddess of the hearth, home, and family in Roman mythology, had had a large, albeit mysterious role in Roman religion.
Although she is analogous to Hestia in Greek mythology, Vesta is much more important to the Romans than Hestia had been to the Greeks.
Little is known about the goddess, as unlike other Roman deities, she, like Hestia, had no distinct personality, was never depicted and went without mention in myths.
Vesta's presence has long been symbolized by the sacred fire that burns at her hearth and temples, guarded by her priestesses, the Vestales, who renew the fire every March 1 until 391, when Theodosius forbids public pagan worship.
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, the cultured and prominent son of a prominent father, Lucius Aurelius Avianius Symmachus, in the patrician gens Aurelia, had held the offices of proconsul of Africa in 373 and urban Prefect of Rome in 384 and 385.
A representative of the traditional cursus honorum, Symmachus is a pagan at a time when the senatorial aristocracy is rapidly converting to Christianity.
In 382, the Emperor Gratian, a Christian, had ordered the Altar of Victory removed from the Curia, the Roman Senate house in the Forum.
Symmachus had led a delegation of protest, which the emperor had refused to receive.
Two years later, Gratian had been assassinated in Lugdunum, and Symmachus, now Prefect of Rome, had renewed the appeal to Gratian's successor, Valentinian II, in a famous dispatch that had been rebutted by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.
Symmachus's career had been temporarily derailed when he delivered a panegyric to the short-lived usurper Magnus Maximus, but he shortly recovered and in 391 is granted the consulship, the highest honor in the empire.
In an age when all religious communities credit the divine power with direct involvement in human affairs, Symmachus argues that the removal of the altar has caused a famine and its restoration would be beneficial in other ways.
Subtly he pleads for tolerance for traditional cult practices and beliefs that Christianity is poised to suppress in the Theodosian edicts of 391.
Symmachus petitions Theodosius to reopen the pagan temples; he is opposed by Ambrose.
The Symmachi–Nicomachi diptych is a Late Antique ivory diptych dating to the late fourth or early fifth century whose panels depict scenes of ritual pagan religious practices.
Produced in Rome sometime between 388 and 401, or in Milan, by the identical border details in the ivory panel of the Maries at the Tomb.
The panels are generally believed to celebrate the alliance through marriage of two senatorial families, the Symmachi and Nicomachi.
The most likely candidates are the daughter of Senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and Nicomachus Flavianus, the son of his colleague and friend Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, although it has also been suggested that the panels may instead commemorate the marriage of Symmachus' son, Quintus Fabius Memmius Symmachus with the granddaughter of the aforementioned colleague.
Diptychs are often commissioned by leading Roman families to celebrate important events, most often the attainment of the consulship.
The diptych form, at least originally, serves as a pair of covers for wax writing tablets.
Both its style and its content reflect the short-lived revival of traditional Roman religion and Classicism at a time when the Roman world is increasingly turning to Christianity and rejecting the Classical tradition.
Just as the majority of the Roman world has rejected polytheism in favor of Christianity, so too it has left behind the techniques of proportion and perspective that characterized the art of its forebears.
