A Tabula Iliaca is a generic label for a calculation of the days of the Iliad

Iliad

The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

, probably by Zenodotus

Zenodotus

Zenodotus was a Greek grammarian, literary critic, and Homeric scholar. A native of Ephesus and a pupil of Philitas of Cos, he was the first librarian of the Library of Alexandria...

, of which numerous fragmentary examples are now known. The Tabulae Iliacae, of which some examples survive, all in fragmentary condition, are pinakes

Pinakes

Pinax may refer to:*Pinax, a votive tablet that served as a votive object deposited in a sanctuary or burial chamber*Pinakes, a 3rd-century-BCE work by Callimachus, the first library catalog system*Pinax...

of early Imperial

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

 date, which all seem to have come from two Roman workshops, one of which seems to have been designed to satisfy a clientele of more modest aspirations.

The term is conventionally applied to some twenty-one marble panels carved in very low relief

Relief

Relief is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is thus to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane...

 in miniature rectangles with labeling inscriptions typically surrounding a larger central relief and short engraved texts on the obverse. Little can be said about their sizes, since none survives complete. It appears that the largest rectangular tablet is 25 cm by 42 cm. The border scenes, where they can be identified, are largely derived from the Epic Cycle; eleven of the small marble tablets are small pictorial representations of the Trojan War

Trojan War

In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...

 portraying episodes from the Iliad, including two circular ones on the Shield of Achilles

Shield of Achilles

The Shield of Achilles is the shield that Achilles uses to fight Hector, famously described in a passage in Book 18, lines 478-608 of Homer's Iliad....

. Another six panels depict the sack of Ilium. On the reverse of the Borgia Tabula, a list of titles and authors of epic works, with stichometry

Stichometry

Stichometry is a term applied to the measurement of ancient texts by στίχοι or verses of a fixed standard length.It was the custom of the Greeks and Romans to estimate the length of their literary works by measured lines...

, a listing of the number of lines in each epic; though these have occasioned great interest, W. McLeod demonstrated that, far from representing the tradition of Hellenistic scholarship, in every case where facts can be checked with the accepted canon, the compiler of the Borgia Table errs, citing an otherwise unattested Danaides, ascribing a new poem to Arctinus. McLeod suggests literary fakery designed to impress the nouveaux-riches as embodied by the fictional character Trimalchio

Trimalchio

Trimalchio is a character in the Roman novel The Satyricon by Petronius. He plays a part only in the section titled Cena Trimalchionis . Trimalchio is a freedman who through hard work and perseverance has attained power and wealth...

, who is convinced that Troy

Troy

Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...

 was taken by Hannibal; Nicholas Horsfall finds the "combination of error and erudition" designed to impress just such eager newly-educated consumers of culture with showy but spurious proofs of their erudition: "The Borgia Table is a pretence of literacy for the unlettered," is McLeod's conclusion.

One of the most complete examples surviving is the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina, which was discovered around Bovillae, Rome. The tablet dates from the Augustan period, around 15 BCE. Its carvings depicts Aeneas

Aeneas

Aeneas , in Greco-Roman mythology, was a Trojan hero, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. His father was the second cousin of King Priam of Troy, making Aeneas Priam's second cousin, once removed. The journey of Aeneas from Troy , which led to the founding a hamlet south of...

 climbing aboard a ship after the sacking of Troy. The carving's caption attributes its depiction to a poem by Stesichorus

Stesichorus

Stesichorus was the first great poet of the Greek West. He is best known for telling epic stories in lyric metres but he is also famous for some ancient traditions about his life, such as his opposition to the tyrant Phalaris, and the blindness he is said to have incurred and cured by composing...

 in the 6th century BCE, although there has been much scholarly scepticism since the mid-19th century. The Tabula Iliaca Capitolina is currently in the Capitoline Museums

Capitoline Museums

The Capitoline Museums are a group of art and archeological museums in Piazza del Campidoglio, on top of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, Italy. The museums are contained in three palazzi surrounding a central trapezoidal piazza in a plan conceived by Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1536 and executed over...

in Rome.