Dion. Hal. 4.2:

There is also current in the local records another story relating to his birth which raises the circumstances attending to the realm of the fabulous, and we have found it in many Roman histories. This account — if it be pleasing to the gods and the lesser divinities that it be related — is somewhat as follows: They say that from the hearth in the palace, on which the Romans offer various other sacrifices and also consecrate the first portion of their meals, there rose up above the fire a man’s privy member, and that Ocrisia was the first to see it as she was carrying the customary cakes to the fire, and immediately p269informed the king and queen of it.  Tarquinius, they add, upon hearing this and left beholding the prodigy, was astonished; but Tanaquil, who was not only wise in other matters but also inferior to none of the Tyrrhenians in her knowledge of divination, told him it was ordained by fate that from the royal hearth should issue a scion superior to the race of mortals, to be born of the woman who should conceive by that phantom. And the other soothsayers affirming the same thing, the king thought it fitting that Ocrisia, to whom the prodigy had first appeared, should have intercourse with it. Thereupon this woman, having adorned herself as brides are usually adorned, was shut up alone in the room in which the prodigy had been seen.  And one of the gods or lesser divinities, whether Vulcan, as some think, or the tutelary deity of the house, having had intercourse with her and afterwards disappearing, she conceived and was delivered of Tullius at the proper time. This fabulous account, although it seems not altogether credible, is rendered less incredible by reason of another manifestation of the gods relating to Tullius which was wonderful and extraordinary.

Plut. Rom. 2.3-6:

and others still rehearse what is altogether fabulous concerning his origin. For instance, they say that Tarchetius, king of the Albans, who was most lawless and cruel, was visited with a strange phantom in his house, namely, a phallus rising out of the hearth and remaining there many days.  Now there was an oracle of Tethys in Tuscany, from which there was brought to Tarchetius a response that a virgin must have intercourse with this phantom, and she should bear a son most illustrious for his valour, and of surpassing good fortune and strength. Tarchetius, accordingly, told the prophecy to one of his daughters, and bade her consort with the phantom; but she disdained to do so, and sent a handmaid in to it.  When Tarchetius learned of this, he was wroth, and seized both the maidens, purposing to put them to death. But the goddess Hestia appeared to him in his sleep and forbade him the murder. He therefore imposed upon the maidens the weaving of a certain web in their imprisonment, assuring them that when they had finished the weaving of it, they should then be given in marriage. By day, then, these maidens wove, but by night other maidens, at the command of Tarchetius, unravelled their web. And when the handmaid became the mother of twin children by the phantom, Tarchetius gave them to a certain Teratius with orders to destroy them. This man, however, carried them to the river-side and laid them down there. Then a she-wolf visited the babes and gave them suck, while all sorts of birds brought morsels of food and put them into their mouths, until a cow-herd spied them, conquered his amazement, ventured to come to them, and took the children home with him. Thus they were saved, and when they were grown up, they set upon Tarchetius and overcame him. At any rate, this is what a certain Promathion says, who compiled a history of Italy.

A little modern discussion.

Birds are an interesting portion of the numismatic evidence…

I’d really like Coarelli 2013 to be right and to have Lar mean forebearer, and it might, just about.  But CIL I(2) 2843 isn’t going to be any help alas.

The new reading is by La Regina 2014.

Reading Coarelli 2003 again I wonder if his argument might be strengthened if he considered “Colle delle Picche” to possible derive from picus not pica.  Both derive from pingo, it is thought.  And the picus is of course the bird of Mars.

On the whole his landscape speculations and optimistic readings of Festus and Strabo are a bit much for me, but I did start thinking about woodpeckers again.

Thorvaldsen I940

One Baby.  No Twins.  Likely no wolf.  That canine looks far more like the loyal dog of the shepherd.

I received a very happy email from the Münster coin cabinet!    There publicly stated policy is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License. This unlike Yale’s public domain images, or York and Dublin’s CC BY-SA 4.0 would exclude scholarly publications or at least some scholarly publications.  However, upon inquiry they offer blanket permission for scholarly publications!  There are 119 republican coins online now.

The ANS policy is very permissive as well and is probably the best choice for images for journal articles.  However, they begin charging for books with print runs that exceed 500.  And I at least believe one should be allowed to dream of larger print runs and even paperback editions.

That’s no wolf, it’s a goat!

Cf. Strabo:

“for the Curetes, like these, are called genii or ministers of gods by those who have handed down to us the Cretan and Phrygian traditions, which are interwoven with certain sacred rites, some mystical, the others connected in part with the rearing of the child Zeus in Crete and in part with the orgies in honour of the mother of the gods which are celebrated in Phrygia and in the region of the Trojan Ida.”

Dated by the BM to 300-200BC.  1849,0620.4.  Just another piece of contextualization for earlier posts on Elephants.

Where the Roman people offended at being compared to dogs by Scipio?  Was the suggestion of the need of collar offensive?  The collar is a real thing:

Varro says this:

To protect them from being wounded by wild beasts, collars are placed on them — the so‑called melium, that is, a belt around the neck made of stout leather with nails having heads; under the nail heads there is sewed a piece of soft leather, to prevent the hard iron from injuring the neck. The reason for this is that if a wolf or other beast has been wounded by these nails, this makes the other dogs also, which do not have the collar, safe.

Wolf Collars are still a thing.  And someone even advocated their introduction by American ranchers back in 2011.