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The Bronze Mace from Willingham Fen, Cambridgeshire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

A. Alföldi
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Extract

The bronze votive object shown on plate I forms part of a hoard which must have come from some small shrine or sanctuary. Professor M. Rostovtzeff's essay with its detailed interpretation has already called general attention to this find.

The swollen lower part of this typical Hercules club most certainly belongs to the stem adorned with figures and shown with it, though there is a break between the two parts. This must be so, not only because the diameters correspond, but also because the carefully engraved grooves which encircle both the upper part and the lower broken-off part of the club prove their original connection.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 1-2 , November 1949 , pp. 19 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © A. Alföldi 1949. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 M. Rostovtzeff ‘Commodus-Hercules in Britain’, JRS. XIII, 1923, 91 ff. The objects are in the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge. Miss C. Hugon kindly translated my note.

2 Ancient Cambridgeshire (Camb. Antiq. Soc. 8vo Publications xx, 1883), 84 ff.

3 Mattingly, H., Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum IV, 1940, pl. XII, 6 and 16, XIV, 2, XVI, 7 and 19Google Scholar; XVII, 16, XXI, 19.

4 o.c. 95.

5 Clarke, L. C. G. (Antiq. Journ. VI, 1926, 178Google Scholar and Heichelheim, F. (Camb. Antiq. Soc. Proc. XXXVII, 1937, 56 ff.Google Scholar, and P-W Suppl. VII, 220 f.; cf. P. Lambrechts' Contributions à l'étude des divinités celtiques, 1942, 64 ff., 89) were persuaded by Rostovtzeff's argument and knowledge to accept the association of club and imperial head.

6 E. G. Rizzo, Monumenti della pittura antica scoperti in Italia, sez. in. Roma, fasc. 3, 1937, 57 ff., fig. 38 from a copy by Marozzi with restorations added (which was then in the German Archaeological Institute in Rome), fig. 37 from the original.

7 Annali dell' Ist. XLVII, 1875, 215 ff.

8 ‘Die hellenistische-römische Architekturlandschaft,’ Röm. Mitt. XXVI, 1911, 6 ff., Abb. 2.

9 Rizzo, o.c. 57.

10 Das neue Bild der Antike II, 1942, 60.

11 Le pitture antiche d'Ercolano III, 1762, 273, Taf. LIII, Rizzo o.c. fig. 40.

12 The hunting of a hare with a club is depicted on a white Attic lekythos in the British Museum (D.60). If Rizzo's illustration is not misleading, an animal's head is to be detected in the Herculanean painting too; it seems to be attached to the cult club the bottom left, but A. Maiuri kindly tells me that on the original there appears to be no head.

13 cf. Schreiber and Rizzo, o.c, who give a list of these analogies.

14 Beyen, H. G., Die pompejanische Wanddekoration I, 1938, Taf. xiv, Abb. 26Google Scholar.

15 Professor Maiuri kindly writes, ‘alia sommità della colonna non ostante il colore caduto, si può distinguere un oggetto disegnato nella tavola delle Pitture d'Ercolano.’

16 Bull. Comrn. 1904, pl. 6, 7.

17 o.c. M. P. Nilsson tells me that in the Orphic poems and in the Oracula Chaldaica heads of animals are often mentioned as symbols of peculiar deities; he also called my attention to the animals on the body of Aion on cult-reliefs. I do not think that these interesting Oriental parallels have any direct connection with the Willingham Fen club.

18 For the most recent discussion see P. Lambrechts, o.c. 64 ff.

19 A. Grenier, Les Gaulois, 1945, 344, has already compared the monster with human face under the rider of the ‘Juppiter Giant-columns’ with the benevolent genius of Earth. The same Celtic deity with the analogous monster under foot can be seen in the youthful war-god of the bronze Danubian reliefs, whose provenience has been treated by the late Fr. Drexel, in Strena Buliciana, and quite recently by A. Radnóti, in Archaeologiai Ertesitő, 1946–8 (in connection with the new bronze Mithras-relief from Brigetio).

20 K. Meuli, Phyllobolia für P. von der Mühll, 1946, 263 (esp. n. s) ff. He will soon return to this problem, discussing representations of this practice in Roman sculpture, in the Festschrift für E. Bechler, 1948. Cf. also Th. Schreiber, Hellenistische Reliefbilder, 1894, pl. 4, etc.