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Golden Statues in Greek and Latin Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

J. E. G. Whitehorne
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Extract

Golden statues, either made of gold or gilded—the distinction is not always made clear —were exceptionally popular among many of the peoples of the ancient world and it is not difficult to see why. Easily worked, perennially bright and practically indestructible, gold surely had something of the divine about it. In Egypt for instance gold's qualities made it the flesh of the sungod; just like the sun itself, the hotter the fire, the purer and brighter the metal glowed. In Greece, too, gold had divine associations and by virtue of its indestructibility acquired a symbolical value far beyond its actual worth; practically anything that is worth having and keeping is ‘golden’ as far as Pindar is concerned. Even for such a hard-headed race as the Romans gold seems to have had an aura of magic about it, at least in early times. The clause in the Twelve Tables mentioned by Cicero, prohibiting the burial of any gold with the dead, except for their false teeth, surely springs as much from an instinct for the metal's mysterious properties as from any parsimonious desire to control funerary expenditure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , October 1975 , pp. 109 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1975

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References

NOTES

1. e.g. auratus (made from some material with an admixture of gold), aureus (made from gold), and inauratus (gilded) are often used very loosely in Latin: TLL s.vv. For a general account of gold and gilded statues in the classical period see Daremberg-Saglio, s.vv. Aurum; Statuaria.

2. Cic. Legg. ii. 60.Google Scholar On the magical and medicinal properties of gold see Pliny, , NH xxxiii. 25.Google Scholar

3. Schol. Ar. Ran. 720Google Scholar and Thompson, D. B., Hesperia xiii (1944), 173–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D.S.xvi. 56–7; Athenaeus vi. 231c–d.

4. Dio lxviii. 1. 1; Suet. Dom. 23Google Scholar; Pliny, , Pan. 52.Google Scholar For other reff. to Domitian's statues see Mooney's note on Suet. Dom. 13.Google Scholar

5. Strabo 794C and Fraser, P. M., Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972), ii. 111 n. 280.Google Scholar

6. Exodus 32; for a summary of the problems of the Golden Calf story see Rothkoff, A., Encyclopaedia ludaica vii. 709–12Google Scholar, s.v. ‘Golden Calf’, and cf. Perdue, L. G., Biblica liv (1973), 237–46.Google Scholar

7. Cic. De Orat. iii. 129Google Scholar; Pliny, , NH xxxiii. 24Google Scholar; Val. Max. viii. 15. 2; Philostr, . VS 493.Google Scholar According to Pausanias x. 18. 7 it was only gilded.

8. LSJ s.v. For the use of pitch on statues see Pliny, , NH xxxiv. 9.Google Scholar

9. Bevan, E., A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (London, 1927), 128 and n. 2Google Scholar; Jacoby, F., RE x. 2 1751–4, s.v. ‘Kallixeinos’.Google Scholar

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11. Gardner, P., BMC ‘The Seleucid kings of Syria’, 25–35 and pl. I. 8.Google Scholar

12. Grimal, P., Mélanges A. Piganiol (Paris, 1966), 1731–41.Google Scholar

13. Athenaeus v. 197c–203c.

14. Both Pliny and Dio refer with approval to the return of Domitian's gold and silver statues to the treasury; v. supra n. 4.

15. Cf. the procession of Antiochus IV Epiphanes; Polybius xxxi. 3 and Athenaeus v. 194c–195f.

16. Text in Sandbach, F. H. (ed.), Menandri Reliquiae Selectae (Oxford, 1972), 39–41Google Scholar; cf. Handley, E. W., Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (London, 1968).Google Scholar

17. Cf. Handley, , Fondation Hardt Entretiens xvi: Ménandre (Geneva, 1970), 4 n. 1.Google Scholar

18. Livy xl. 34. 5; Val. Max. ii. 5. 1.

19. Cic. In Pis. 25.Google Scholar

20. Homer, , Od. vii. 100–1.Google Scholar

21. Examples of these figures are collected by Chamoux, F., BCH lxxiv (1950), 70–81.Google Scholar The identification of the Idolino as a lampholder of this type by Rumpf, A., Critica d'Arte iv (1939), 17–27Google Scholar, and Webster, T. B. L., Hellenistic Poetry and Art (London, 1964), 297Google Scholar and Hellenistic Art (London, 1967), 173–5Google Scholar, is perhaps mistaken: cf. Chamoux, (supra), 77.Google Scholar

22. Curt. iii. 3. 16.

23. Milns, R. D., Latomus xxv (1966), 490–507.Google Scholar

24. Supra n. 4.