Furia mulieris liberta Publius Furius Publi libertus Furia mulieris liberta Furia mulieris liberta Caius Sulpicius Cai libertus

In a contemporary relief (fig. 60) three women and two men, all libertini, are positioned either frontally or in three-quarter views and gaze out from the horizontal frame. The three women resemble one another and may be sisters, but this cannot be ascertained from the epitaph, which merely states that all three women and the man on the left are conliberti, that is, all freedmen of the Furius family: Publius Furius, the freedman of Publius Furius, and the women, freedwomen of a woman (again there is the retrograde C), probably the wife of Publius Furius. The man and the woman on the far right of the relief and the couple in the center turn toward one another, and

it is likely that they are married pairs. The woman at far left was very likely unmarried, but this is conjecture based on the composition of the figures; nothing in the epitaph confirms it. The man at far right is also a freedman, but from a different family. He is Gaius Sulpicius, the freedman of Gaius Sulpicius. All three women wear the nodus coiffure, popularized by Livia, Octavia, and Julia in the 30s and 20s B. C. The freedwomen in the Furius relief thus imitate the latest Augustan fashion in coiffures. We cannot, of course, know how often women actually wore such elaborate hairstyles, but it is clear that they wanted to be remembered as adhering to the latest court fashion.

The funerary reliefs of libertini of the Augustan age are entirely free of mythological and allegorical overtones. The reliefs depict, almost without exception, men and women dressed in civilian garments. The subtleties and pretensions of aristocratic iconography arc, for the most part, noticeably absent, that is, the approximation to deities, mythological figures, Greek athletes, and so on.