An exceptional collection of Roman statuary at the Musée Saint-Raymond, the archaeological museum of Toulouse in south-western France, was discovered at a very large and very difficult-to-explain Roman villa at Chiragan. Chiragan lies 60km south-west of Toulouse, near the village of Martres-Tolosane, on the banks of the River Garonne. The site of the villa became known in the 18th and 19th centuries when the first statues were unearthed. Several excavations in the 19th century culminated in a major investigation by Léon Joulin, who produced a fine report on the whole site and the surrounding area.
It is a sprawling villa site, covering more than 16 hectares, and the excavator divided it into two parts: the pars rustica, devoted to agricultural activities, and the pars urbana, the residential part. The agricultural part had three lines of buildings running right across the enclosures. These buildings were workshops, perhaps, or dwellings for the farm workers. The residential part began in the Augustan period in the 1st century AD as a large though otherwise fairly conventional courtyard building, but it was subsequently expanded with peristyle courtyards, several sets of sizeable baths, a belvedere, and a gallery measuring 170m long. Chiragan was a very large villa indeed.
Even more striking than the villa’s size was the body of sculptures it yielded, many of which were found in three large pits. They can be divided into three groups. The most complete set, dating from the late 3rd century AD, formed a dramatic tableau showing the labours of Hercules in a rather florid style. Then there were a number of Roman copies of the Classical and Hellenistic Greek sculptures, including a rather fine marble Athena lacking her head and arms, a copy of a 5th-century BC bronze work for Athens’ Acropolis attributed to Myron of Eleuthera. But the most remarkable group of all, occupying fully half of the museum’s first floor, is a series of heads, many of which could be recognised as being Roman emperors.
