It’s New Year’s Day night. We’ve re arranged the books in our home and are eating chocolate cake and looking at pictures from Turkey and thinking about how good life is. Here are few things from that trip I forgot about.
This is a statue of Trajan from the theatre at Perge now in the Antalya museum. Notice that it changes the typical representation of the Griffins into an apotheosis of Herakles/Hercules! This is a remarkably atypical rendering of apotheosis. Is it a commentary on Trajan’s own divinity?
The thing to read on Herakles’ apotheosis is Holt 1992 and Rasmussen 2005.
From the same museum, here are some unusual bronzes:
I’ve no idea in what context there would have been a desire to represent a dead bird (eagle?!).
This (below) seems to be an apotropaic object with multiple phalluses. Not terribly unusual of a theme, but also not as common in Asia Minor as elsewhere is my impression:
Liv Mariah Yarrow 