Almost everyone dreams of that one art & junk or cash-for-rares moment in life.

Discover a Van Gogh at a flea market, resell it for millions after a successful appraisal and spend a pleasant old age with it.

That's almost what happened to a Texan.

Laura Young has bought a marble bust in Austin in a Goodwill, as a chain of second-hand shops spread across the USA is called.

At $34.99. That would be cheap even for the pure marble material value.

But it was all the more favorable because it is an outrageously expensive Roman marble bust that is a good two thousand years old.

If you haven't slept in archeology class, Sextus Pompeius Magnus, the general of the late first century BC.

Images from Ms. Young's mobile phone in the American media now show in a very surreal way how the Roman bust, strapped to the car seat, drives around with her while the belt tenderly encloses the chin of the old Roman, who with his already melancholy gaze under heavy lids - Republican realism!

– who, with his damaged nose and tilted head, seems saddened by the dusty expanses of Texas highways.

In another private photo, Ms. Young is seen cheek to cheek with the marble Republican.

She proudly tells how "her" Romans had a place of honor on her mantelpiece, the same place where the merchant and patron James Simon also placed "his" Nefertiti,

Rome-Aschaffenburg-Austin and back

There is one catch: Ms. Young, who describes herself as an art collector and knew that the goodwill find was worth a lot, has owned the work since 2018. Unfortunately, the auction house Sotheby's identified Sextus Pompeius as looted art, which also explains how the general ended up in the New World: He comes from the so-called Pompejanum in Aschaffenburg in Lower Franconia.

King Ludwig I of Bavaria had it built between 1840 and 1848 based on the Pompeian villa Casa dei Dioscuri.

If this ancient study site is a replica, some of the statues in it were genuine, including Sextus.

The Pompeianum was damaged and robbed during World War II.

The US Army was stationed in Aschaffenburg, and one of the GIs took the bust to Austin in the post-war period, as did another Texan with the even more priceless Quedlinburg cathedral treasure, which only turned up again in 1990 in a bank safe in the provincial town of Whitewright and in 1993 on his place of origin was repurchased.

While in Wenders' film "Paris, Texas" Harry Dean Stanton wanders around in the bone-dry southern state, in the second part "Texas, Aschaffenburg" the marble head once acquired from the Bavarian king returns to its ancestral home.

But not immediately.

It's actually a pity that the bust has to be shown in the San Antonio Art Museum for so long and will not return to the "Aschebescher" Pompejanum until May 2023.