Description:
A flat relief stela with a round upper end, made of white, fine crystalline marble. Depicted is the triple-bodied goddess Hekate, each of the figures wearing a long chiton and a polos. The middle figure is holding torches in her hands, and is offering sacrifices, standing between two altars.
In the lower part is an inscription by the person who dedicated the stela, reading:
ΒΑΛΕ ΒΑΛΗΣ ΔΕΚΟΥΡΙωΝ
ΕΥΧΗΝ ΑΝΕΘΗΚΕΝ
The decurion Valerius Valens
dedicated (this) in fulfilment of a vow
A decurion was a Roman cavalry officer in command of ten men. Of the name of the dedicator only the nomen gentilicium (Valerius, abbreviated) and the cognomen (Vale(n)s) are given, which in Greek were written with a B (the Greek β being pronounced as a “v”).
Unfortunately it seems impossible to identify this person, the more so because only two of his three names are given. Existing databases contain thousands of names of military people, many of which have identical tria nomina; sources regularly offer very few adjacent details of persons. For example Valens is a typical military name which, combined with lack of other biographical or prosopographic details, makes disambiguation impossible. In addition militaries had higher mobility than other groups, so identical names appearing on monuments in different locations may, or may not, refer to the same person (Lumezeanu - Varga (2019), p. 37).
Published:
Angelos Chaniotis - Joannis Mylonopoulos, "Epigraphic Bulletin for Greek Religion 2003 (EBGR 2003)”, Kernos 19 (2006), p. 363, no. 61.
Parallel:
An almost identical parallel can be found in the British Museum London (inv.no. 1877,0513.1), from which it becomes clear that the figure on the left holds a nail and a key, and the one on the right a dagger and a serpent.
Dating:
Eastern Mediterranean, circa 2nd-3rd century C.E.
Size:
Height 41 cm.
Provenance:
Dutch private collection; with Gorny & Mosch Giessener Münzhandlung, München, Germany, 16 June 2004, no. 355; before in an old German private collection.
Condition:
Intact, with some encrustation and wear, especially to the faces; the back side roughly hewn.
Price:
€ 7,500
Stock number:
C1362
Background information:
The origins and nature of Hekate are still debated. Did she come from mainland Greece, as some scholars believe, or from Thrace, Thessaly, or even Mesopotamia? The earliest evidence comes from both mainland Greece and Asia Minor. In literature, Hekate first appears in Hesiod’s eighth-century Theogony, while the earliest archaeological evidence for her worship consists of a small statuette from Athens and an altar from Miletos, both from the sixth century BC. The most commonly accepted theory places the origins of Hekate in Karia (Anatolia) (Herring (2022), p. 6).
Although Hekate is depicted exclusively with a single body in Lagina, images of the triple-bodied goddess were common in the rest of Karia, and in the rest of the ancient world. It should be noted that her worship in Lagina in the Hellenistic and Roman periods was also different from that elsewhere in the Greek world, including in Karia (Herring, p. 6-7).
While a popular deity in personal religious rites, she was rarely featured in mythology or state cult. Small shrines (called a hekataion, see below) sanctified to her were placed at spaces she oversaw including road junctions, city gates and doorways of private homes and temples, even of those dedicated to other divinities. Votives, curse tablets and spells called upon Hekate for assistance as the patron of witchcraft and leader of the restless dead. In art, her triple-bodied form oversaw road junctions and her torches illuminated liminal spaces (Herring, p. 1).
As a triple-bodied deity, Hekate was associated with the dangers of the road; see for example Sophokles (5th century B.C.), who in his Rhizotomoi (Root-Cutters) mentioned Hekate Enodia (the "Wayfarer"), goddess of the roads (Calvo Martínez, p. 4-5). This mainly alludes to those places where a road splits, so the intersection of three roads - strictly speaking not crossroads, as is often stated, because that suggests a four-way meeting of two roads, but rather a junction in the shape of a Y (Green (2007), p. 128). The Greek triodos and the Latin trivia (both “three roads”) indicate this, and the relation of Hekate with those places is reflected in her name Trivia, a name also used for the goddess Diana, who was also worshipped as the triple goddess at the meeting of three ways (Kline, 2000; Green (2007), p. 133-134): compare the invocation of Diana as Hecate: treble-formed Hecate, the three faces of the virgin Diana (P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneid, 4:511).
It is with those road junctions that the triple-bodied Hekate had a strong connection. These were a fearful location, not only because thieves frequently loitered there, but also because they were associated with dark forces, including witchcraft, magic and ghosts – all of which fell under the purview of Hekate. In addition, the liminal nature of the road junctions, since they did not belong to any single location or road, mirrors that of the space between life and death over which Hekate ruled, and they provided an appropriate locale in the physical world at which to worship the goddess (Herring, p. 15-16).
Hekataia, statues of the triple-bodied goddess, were frequently placed there because each of the statue’s three bodies was believed to oversee a different road:
Thou seest Hecate’s faces turned in three directions that she may guard the crossroads where they branch three several ways (Ovidius, Fasti I, 141-142 in the translation by Frazer); Trivia, goddess of the crossways (Ovidius, Metamorphoses II:416, translated by Anthony S. Kline, 2000). For the altars of the goddess compare also Ovidius, Metamorphoses VII: 74-97: She went to the ancient altars of Hecate (…) He swore by the sacred rites of the Triple Goddess. Ovidius (Publius Ovidius Naso) was a Latin poet who lived in the first century B.C. - first century C.E.
The triple-bodied Hekate became popular in the fifth century BC. Pausanias (a travel writer who lived in the second century C.E.) wrote about the first triple-bodied statue, made for the Athenian Acropolis:
Of the gods, the people of Aegina worship in particular Hecate, in whose honour every year they celebrate her mysteries which, they say, Orpheus of Thrace established among them. Within the enclosure is a temple; the wooden statue of hers is the work of Myron. It has only one face and one body. It was Alkamenes in my opinion, who first made three images of Hecate attached to one another (Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.30.2; Jones, (1918); Tsotsou (2016), p. 2). Alkamenes was an ancient Greek sculptor of Athens, living in the 5th century B.C.
Although this statue is now lost, it is possible to reconstruct what it looked like, based on the known hekataia, which became popular in Greek and Roman art, and which have been found throughout the Mediterranean. One well-preserved example, made of marble and dating to the second century C.E., is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ( acc. no. 2012.477.12) (Von Bothmer (1961), p. 31, no. 120; pl. 39; Herring, p. 16, fig. 12). The sculpture depicts three women around a central pole, representing the three-bodied nature of Hekate.
Hekate is also known to carry torches, an attribute which carries over from Hekate’s representations in the Persephone myth (Herring (2022), p. 15); see also her epithet “Phosphoros”, “the bringer of light”; compare the Homeric hymn to Demeter, line 52.
Bibliography:
- Dietrich von Bothmer, Ancient Art from New York Private Collections. Catalogue of an Exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 17, 1959 - February 28, 1960 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1961);
- José Luis Calvo Martínez, The Goddess Hecate: A Paradigm of the Religious Syncretism of Late Hellenism (n.d.);
- James George Frazer, Ovid, Fasti (Loeb Classical Library) (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1931);
- C.M.C. Green, Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007;
- Amanda Herring, “Hekate of Lagina. A Goddess Performing her Civic Duty”, Anatolian Studies (2022), p. 1–25;
- W.H.S. Jones - H.A. Omerod, Pausanias. Description of Greece (Loeb Classical Library) (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1918);
- Angela Lumezeanu - Rada Varga, "The Process of Record Linkage on Roman Epigraphical Sources. Theory, Methods and Results", Digital Classics Online 5,2 (2019), p. 28-42;
- Eirini Tsotsou, Hekate in Pausanias’ Corinthiaka (2016).