Sculpture showing sow with cubs

Sculpture showing a sow with cubs. A unique Roman work of art, made of marble, located in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (Denmark). The artifact dates back to the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.

In Virgil’s famous “Aeneid” (Book VIII), when Aeneas, a fugitive from Troy, finally reaches Italy, he has a dream in which the god Tiberinus predicts that his son Ascanius will found the mighty city of Alba, in the place where he will see a white a sow with thirty piglets. On the day when Ascanius finds the promised sow, he and his father sacrifice the animal to the goddess Juno.
It is worth mentioning that Romulus and Remus, according to tradition, come from the royal family of Aeneas.