Not the easiest of images to track down a great for comparative iconography.  See academic publication  (no images) for discussion.

Click on images to see them better.  Notice the Macedonian shields.  The great feathers on the  sides of two of the warriors helmets.  The Rhyton is also really wonderfully depicted.  I don’t know what those attendants to the horse riders are carrying to my Roman eye they look like fasces, but I guess they must be torches as Tsimbidou-Avlonitou says.

This curious episode is from Plutarch’s Life of Sulla comes shortly after Plutarch’s meditation on Sulla’s potentially inappropriate relationship with Bocchus including his choice of signet ring design.  On that signet ring Sulla sits in the the chair of a quaestor, Bocchus and Jugurtha kneel.  Here there seems to be a circle of three equal chairs but with Sulla’s in the dominant position.   So why did this episode create so much controversy?  Perhaps the Parthian King thought Orobazus was acting like a king by accepting the chair?  The Romans did send stella curulis to kings as an honorific gift.  Earlier post on this topic.

But what from a Roman perspective had Sulla done wrong?   Was it letting the foreign king and representative of foreign king sit at all?  Was it that in this context his sitting seemed regal?

The longer one spends in a database the more the errors and weaknesses appear.  I love CRRO it has so much potential and is lovely and fast and easy to use and stable.

But… because nothing is perfect… I’m finding little data entry errors…

Crawford lists RRC 335 as late 90s BC, which any one used to thinking BC will know is likely to mean 95-90 BC or thereabouts.  However the entries in CRRO were clearly made by some well meaning individual more used to thinking in A.D./C.E.  All the  types are entered as a mixture of 99-96 or just 96, none of which represents what Crawford intended.  And Mattingly 1998 agreed estimating 91 BC for these moneyers:

Chart is taken from p. 206 of Mattingly’s collected works.

So this is the first appearance of Apollo on the obverse of a Roman coin type since the creation of the stable denarius system (so 211 BCE).*  It is the very smallest of the bronze: 1/12 of an As.  So originally you’d have needed  120 of these to equal a single denarius and after the re-tariffing of the denarius 192.   Needless to say not many were made, and most were lost, and few come to us in as good of a condition as this specimen!

But what is really interesting about this appearance of Apollo is that he’s displacing ROMA.  Roma had been consistently the goddess of the uncia denomination since the creation of this bronze system.  The rest of this series (RRC 285) follows the traditional combination of denominations and gods, but not this one.   The series is also strange in its rejection of the prow reverse that has been the standard on the bronze and instead shows attributes of each of the typical gods.   Why forego Roma?  Was it just too complex to choose an attribute for her?  This seems weak.  Or did Apollo hold some special meaning?  We are unlikely to know.

FYI –  CRRO 241/6 (not is Crawford but identified by Russo 1998: no. 88) is catalogued as Mercury not Roma.  This is just a typo.  It is Roma in Russo and all known specimens. 

*- Yes, I’m deliberately overlooking the odd quincussis from Luceria made at the end of the Second Punic War.

This is the typical numismatic image associated with Quirinus, but Hollstein (JNG 2011) has revived the opinion of Fulvius Ursinus (sometimes called Fulvio Orsini) that in fact RRC 268/1 is a representation of the god, not a recent ancestor of the moneyer who was a priest of the god.  I find this convincing.  It harmonizes well with Servius’ commentary on Aen. VI, 859 which describes Quirinus as the Mars who presides over peace.

Servius’ Latin:

tertiaque arma patri suspendet capta quirino et tertia opima spolia suspendet patri, id est Iovi, ‘capta Quirino’, qualia et Quirinus ceperat, id est Romulus, de Acrone, rege Caeninensium, et ea Iovi Feretrio suspenderat. possumus et, quod est melius, secundum legem Numae hunc locum accipere, qui praecepit prima opima spolia Iovi Feretrio debere suspendi, quod iam Romulus fecerat; secunda Marti, quod Cossus fecit; tertia Quirino, quod fecit Marcellus. Quirinus autem est Mars, qui praeest paci et intra civitatem colitur: nam belli Mars extra civitatem templum habuit. ergo aut ‘suspendet patri’, id est Iovi: aut ‘suspendet patri Quirino’. varie de hoc loco tractant commentatores, Numae legis inmemores, cuius facit mentionem et Livius.

I’m not sure why but this portion of the Bocchus Monument just isn’t illustrated that much.  It’s important as a piece of mid 1st century BC comparative iconography for the use of the horse and rider motif on coinage.  On which I’ve blogged previously.  I’m indebted to this other blogger for the wonderful photographs documenting the Centrale Montemartini Museum so very well!  This post is almost as good an in person visit it is so thorough.  (It’s one of my favorite museums of all time.)

Trofimova (p. 55) believes that the Achilles representation on the obverse of this coin of Pyrrhus is a form of Alexander Imitation.  This grows out of and supports her argument in her second chapter regard ‘The Influence of Portraits of Alexander  on the Hellenistic Iconography of Achilles’ (p.33-58).

An earlier post on this coin and others on Pyrrhus generally.

One of the things I find most curious about private Roman art is how images correspond across vast distances of time and space.    We often talk about this in relation to Roman ‘copies’ of original Greek statues, but less so for 2 dimensional art.  Interestingly in 2D works the composition often echo rather than copy.

This is from the 1st Century AD Bay of Naples (now inv. no. 9110 in the Naples collection):

This is the same subject represented at Zeugma on the Euphrates in Mosaic some 200 years later.

The theme of both is Achilles among the daughters of Lycomedes, a cross-dressing hero narrative not unlike Herakles and Omphale.  A nice teaching example again for gender and sexuality.