Let’s Just Call Him Mercury!

(or Hermes.)

Capture1.JPG

So I don’t think we should follow Crawford’s hesitation to identify the head on RRC 341/1.   He doesn’t hesitate to identify the youthful head with a winged diadem on a terminal bust as Mercury on RRC 418/2 and we also have a whole slew of 5th century style portrayals of Hermes on what are likely to be Roman Republican glass pastes, some even wearing wings (these are all in Berlin).

Capture.JPG

Capture.JPG

 

Update 9/11/22:

I still think Hermes is the most likely identification for the obverse of the above type but I did pause and think about it when I saw this figure on a sarcophagus in Berlin yesterday (Altes Museum).

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s