Antiquities Exhibits

This morning while browsing artifacts in the collections of the Getty Villa, I came across this exquisite gilded silver sculpture of a Triton forming the handle of an oinochoe.  As I described in a post a couple of years ago, the original sea god, Triton, was the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite according to Hesiod's Theogony. Triton is usually represented as a merman, with the upper body of a human and the tailed lower body of a fish. At some time during the Greek and Roman era, Tritons became a generic term for mermen in art and literature. A female version (tritoness) was eventually introduced as well. Triton was said to dwell with his parents in  a golden palace claimed to be located at Aegae on the island of Euboea in a passage from book 5 of Homer's Iliad. It describes how  Poseidon "lashed his long-maned horses and drove to Aegae, where he had his famous palace" after having destroyed Odysseus' raft with a storm. Later in Book 13 of the Iliad, Poseidon "...

In Greek and Roman Mythology, the Giants, also called Gigantes, were a race of great strength and aggression, though not necessarily of great size. They were known for the Gigantomachy (Gigantomachia), their battle with the Olympian gods for supremacy of the cosmos. Historically, the myth of the Gigantomachy (not to be confused with the Titanomachy) may reflect the "triumph" of the new imported gods of the invading Greek speaking peoples from the north (c. 2000 BCE) over the old gods of the existing peoples of the Greek peninsula. For the Greeks, the Gigantomachy represented a victory for order over chaos—the victory of the divine order and rationalism of the Olympian gods over the discord and excessive violence of the earth-born chthonic Giants. More specifically, for sixth and fifth century BCE Greeks, it represented a victory for civilization over barbarism.  Archaic and Classical representations show Gigantes as man-sized hoplites (heavily armed ancient Greek foot soldier...

 According to Pausanias, who wrote in the later second century CE, there were originally three Muses, worshipped on Mount Helicon in Boeotia: Aoide ("song" or "tune"), Melete ("practice" or "occasion"), and Mneme ("memory").  The earliest known records of the Muses come from Boeotia and some ancient authorities point to Thrace as the origin of this myth.   Writing in the first century BCE, Diodorus Siculus claims Homer and Hesiod state there are actually nine Muses, though.  According to Hesiod's account (c. 600 BCE), generally followed by most writers of antiquity, the Nine Muses were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (i.e., "Memory" personified), which represented personifications of knowledge and the arts, especially poetry, literature, dance and music.  Ironically, Hesiod says the Muses brought to people forgetfulness, that is, the forgetfulness of pain and the cessation of obligations, though. For poet and ...