Antiquities Exhibits

The Phrygian cap later known as a liberty cap is a soft conical cap with the apex bent over, associated in antiquity with several peoples in Eastern Europe and Anatolia, including Phrygia, Dacia, and the Balkans.  By the 4th century BCE (early Hellenistic period) the Phrygian cap was associated with Phrygian Attis, the consort of Cybele, the cult of which had by then become graecified. At around the same time, the cap appears in depictions of the legendary king Midas and other Phrygians in Greek vase-paintings and sculpture. The Phrygian cap also came to be applied to several other non-Greek-speaking peoples ("barbarians" in the classical sense). Most notable of these extended senses of "Phrygian" were the Trojans and other western Anatolian peoples, who in Greek perception were synonymous with the Phrygians, and whose heroes Paris, Aeneas, and Ganymede were all regularly depicted with a Phrygian cap.  While the Phrygian cap was of wool or soft leather, in pre-Helle...

 Although many of us are familiar with the story of Marsyas, a musically gifted satyr who found an aulos (a type of flute) discarded by Athena and challenged Apollo to a musical contest and lost, being flayed for his hubris, the Romans viewed Marsyas quite differently.  Among the Romans, Marsyas was cast as the inventor of augury and a proponent of free speech and "speaking truth to power". The earliest known representation of Marsyas at Rome stood for at least 300 years in the Roman Forum near or in the comitium, the space for political activity. Depicted as a silen carrying a wineskin on his left shoulder and raising his right arm, The statue was regarded as an indicium libertatis, a symbol of liberty, and was associated with demonstrations of the plebs, or common people. It often served as a sort of kiosk upon which invective verse was posted.  Marsyas was sometimes considered a king and contemporary of Faunus, portrayed by Vergil as a native Italian ruler at the time ...