A Texas Woman Paid $35 for a Marble Bust at Goodwill—Turns Out, It's an Ancient Roman Artifact

The House Beautiful editors love a good deal, but this is unheard of: A Texas woman named Laura Young purchased a 2,000-year-old Roman marble bust for a mere $34.99 at—wait for it—a Goodwill in Austin. The bust, which experts believe resembles the Roman military leader Sextus Pompey (c. 67–35 BCE), has a mysterious past that even historians can't pin down, but one thing they do know for certain is that Pompey belongs in Europe. So next month, the 52-pound sculpture is headed back.

Young purchased the bust in 2018 because she was looking for something "interesting" to finish off her space, she told CNN last May. At the time, she had no idea that she had just paid less than $40 for one of few surviving intact sculptures from the most prolific and longest lasting ancient empire.

How Pompey made his way from the Roman empire, which collapsed in 476 AD, to the shelves of an American thrift store in 2018 is a bit unclear, but we do know that he spent quite some time in Germany, where he was last spotted in the 1950s. Throughout much of the late 19th century and early 20th century, the bust decorated Pompejanum, a stylistically accurate replica of a traditional Roman villa in Aschaffenburg, about 30 minutes outside Frankfurt, Germany. Just after the Second World War, however, it's believed that a U.S. soldier looted the site, stole the bust, and brought it back to America, where it has lived ever since. How exactly it ended up in a Goodwill of all places will most likely remain a mystery.

After Young realized what she had (Sotheby's confirmed the bust's age and likely origins), she turned over her new—or shall we say old—find. The bust is currently on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art, where it will enjoy pride of place until it's sent to Germany's Glyptothek art museum. Young admitted to CNN that saying goodbye is "bittersweet."

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