Appiades Fountain

In front of the Temple of Venus Genetrix in Rome’s Forum Iulium stood a fountain decorated with statues of water nymphs. The Romans called them the Appiades — figures associated with the Aqua Appia, the city’s oldest aqueduct, constructed in 312 B.C. as the first of Rome’s great water supply systems — and their sculptor was a Greek artist named Stephanos, working in Rome in the first century B.C.

The primary ancient sources for the fountain are Pliny the Elder, who mentions the Appiades and names Stephanos as their maker in his Natural History (36.33), and Ovid, who refers to the figures twice in his Ars Amatoria, placing them near the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum Iulium. Together these references establish that the fountain was a recognisable feature of the forum in the Augustan period, prominent enough for a poet writing about where to meet women in Rome to use it as a casual landmark — the kind of monument people navigated by rather than necessarily stopped to contemplate.

The Forum Iulium itself was Julius Caesar’s most ambitious building project in the city: a new public forum dedicated in 46 B.C., dominated at one end by the Temple of Venus Genetrix, the goddess from whom Caesar claimed divine descent. The precise position of the Appiades fountain within the forum remains debated. The American archaeologist Roger Ulrich, whose fieldwork at the site spanned the 1980s, placed it directly in front of the temple podium on the basis of excavated basin remains: two shallow square pools connected by hydraulic channels to a larger central basin. The Italian archaeologist Filippo Coarelli, Professor of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the University of Perugia, argued instead that it stood against the party wall of the adjacent Atrium Libertatis. The physical evidence is too fragmentary for either reconstruction to be definitive.

Five bronze statues of draped women, discovered in the 1750s at the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum and long labelled simply as dancers, have recently been reidentified as likely copies of the Appiades. Kenneth Lapatin, working with imaging data showing that specific facial and physical features of the Herculaneum bronzes closely resemble those of a marble athlete signed by Stephanos, argues that both sets of sculptures came from the same workshop. The Villa dei Papiri was almost certainly owned by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law — a connection that would explain how a near-contemporary duplicate of Caesar’s forum sculptures ended up in a luxury villa on the Bay of Naples.

If the identification holds, it means the Appiades have survived not in Rome, where the Forum Iulium was rebuilt under Trajan and burned again in A.D. 283, but in the volcanic preservation of Herculaneum. The five bronzes, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, would become among the most politically resonant sculptural groups to survive from the late Republic: objects made for one of Rome’s most charged public spaces, copied for the father-in-law of the man who commissioned them, and preserved by catastrophe rather than intention.

Further reading:

1. Ulrich, Roger B. “Julius Caesar and the Creation of the Forum Iulium.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 97, no. 1, 1993, pp. 49–80. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/505839. Accessed 15 July 2026
2. Mattusch, Carol C., and Henry Lie. The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum: life and afterlife of a sculpture collection. Getty Publications, 2005.
3. Richardson, Lawrence. A new topographical dictionary of ancient Rome. JHU Press, 1992.

APPIADES: a fountain in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix in the forum Iulium. In two passages (Ars Am. i. 82; Rem. Am. 660) Ovid speaks of one Appias, and in one passage (Ars Am. iii. 452) of Appiades, whence it is to be inferred that several statues of Appias, probably a water nymph, surrounded the fountain. Pliny (NH xxxvi. 33) states that Asinius Pollio had a statue of the Appiades by Stephanus, and this may have been a copy of that in the forum Iulium. The name has not yet been explained, as the aqua Appia did not extend to this part of the city (RE ii. 237-8; Jord. i. 2. 440).