Household shrine paintings in Pompeii typically depict two Lares, or household gods, the genius of the paterfamilias, and a serpent. The common interpretation for the presence of the serpent is that it represents the genius of the paterfamilias. This interpretation has problems with it, however, and the significance of the serpent must be reevaluated. Considering the size and prominence of the serpent in the lararium painting, the snake was significant in Roman religion, and indicates snake worship in cult practices. I will explore the significance of the serpents found in household shrines by analyzing lararium paintings found in Pompeii and the ways in which serpents are depicted. The serpent iconography will be compared to that of native Italic gods and goddesses who were associated with serpents, the use of serpents in Etruscan funerary art, and the use of snakes in Greco-Roman myth. This will illustrate that serpents held significance in Roman religion and serpents in the lararium had an apotropaic function that worked to ward off harmful spirits from the house, and grant fertility, health and prosperity to the familias.
Among the archaeological finds from the Etruscan artisans’ sanctuary at Cetamura del Chianti is a pair of bronze figurines, one partial and one complete, depicting a creature with the head and torso of a human female ending in a pair of fish-tails. These figurines served to decorate the handle attachments of a bronze wine-bucket, situla L, which was found in a well at the site, with an estimated date in first half of the third century BCE. Just what this figure represents is unclear. Its designation is that of a Skylla figure, often depicted in Greek art from the fifth century BCE onward as a half-maiden, half-sea-monster with dogs protruding from her waist and genital area. However, as this figure displays no canine iconography, and as Cetamura is a distinctly Etruscan site, it seems more suitable to categorize her among the several varieties of sea monsters and merpeople found in Etruscan art before and during the third century, the females of which are sometimes referred to generically as Skyllae. In this paper, I will examine the figure from Cetamura in comparison with a number of Etruscan and Italian artifacts which are similar in iconography, location, chronology, and function. This will ultimately demonstrate that, of the surrounding artistic and cultural influences, she most closely represents an Etruscan artistic tradition of sea-monsters, whose shapes, poses, and iconographic varieties persisted from the Archaic Period well into the Roman encroachments of the third century BCE.
In this presentation, I will examine and discuss the jewelry found at the site of Cetamura del Chianti, in Tuscany, Italy. I will also discuss comparable pieces, the information and context provided by them, as well as my own theories as to the use and significance of these pieces. Jewelry is an important aspect of studying the material culture of the Classical world. It could have been both a luxury good as well as something very common, and was worn by almost everyone, just as it is today. In the ancient world, jewelry was not merely decorative. Pieces of jewelry were produced individually by artisans rather than mass-produced and thus were very personalized to the wearer, revealing details of their life and and tastes. It also had individual religious and superstitious uses as well, such as good luck tokens or signifiers of devotion to a certain deity. Studying this aspect of jewelry can reveal information on wider cultural and religious trends. For comparable pieces, I examined artifacts from Pompeii and the surrounding towns also destroyed by Vesuvius. This is because of the vast quantity of jewelry and other small personal items found at the site, as well as the comparable time periods of inhabitation between the eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE and the period most of the Cetamura pieces are dated to. Much of the Roman jewelry found at Cetamura is from the late Republic and early Imperial periods, as is much of the jewelry found at Pompeii.
Today, running is considered a purely athletic activity, a test of physical strength, speed, and endurance which is unquestionably secular. For the ancient Greeks, however, running had more complex cultural and religious purposes, even for females. On the surface, given that athletics test physical strength and power, the existence of female athletics in ancient Greece is difficult to conceive, given the nature of Greek society, which promoted the subjection and inherent weakness of women. Yet, pottery shards found at Brauron in Attica depict young girls engaged in what appears to be competitive footraces clad in both short tunics and in the nude. For the ancient Greeks, footraces, erotic pursuits, and ritual were all inextricably linked and represented the taming of a “wild girl” into a marriageable Greek woman. This paper seeks to explore the significance of ancient Greek female athletic activity and its critical relationship with girls’ initiatory rites. As evidence for my claims, I will use contemporaneous textual records and archaeological evidence from the Temple to Artemis at Brauron, an important cultic location for elite Athenian females. Athletics for ancient Greek women were markedly different than the athletic games of their contemporary male counterparts and even further removed from our modern conception of athletics.
Aristocratic funerals in Rome were highly ritualized and interactive processions that celebrated the life of the deceased and his predecessors. By law and tradition, the men of the elite families would pass on wax portrait masks of their ancestors known as imagines, which were worn by actors portraying the dead during the funeral parade. These funerary masks were used as transformative objects of embodying the spirits of the dead. Not only did the actors adopt the likeness of the deceased, they wore his clothes, and took on mannerisms and personality traits known to the individual. Using anthropological theory on masks and sources written during the Republic and Empire, the goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how the Romans hired actors to not only portray the dead but to literally embody their ancestors in a performative, “magical,” and religious ritual that went beyond the enforcement of social hierarchy in Rome
