![]() ![]() The mythic hippocampus has been used as a heraldic charge, particularly since the Renaissance, most often in the armorial bearings of people and places with maritime associations. Although similar but not identical to Roman sea-horse images, it is unclear whether this depiction originates from images brought over by the Romans, or had a place in earlier Pictish mythology. The symbolism of the carving (also known as " Pictish Beast") is unknown. The sea-horse also appears in Pictish stone carvings in Scotland. Katharine Shepard found in the theme an Etruscan belief in a sea-voyage to the other world. Hippocampi appear with the first Oriental-phase of Etruscan civilization: they remain a theme in Etruscan tomb wall-paintings and reliefs, where they are sometimes provided with wings, as they are in the Trevi Fountain. On the middle of the base on which the car has been wrought a Sea holding up the young Aphrodite, and on either side are the nymphs called Nereids. On the car stand Amphitrite and Poseidon, and there is the boy Palaemon upright upon a dolphin. The offerings inside were dedicated in our time by Herodes Atticus, four horses, gilded except for the hoofs, which are of ivory, and two gold Tritons beside the horses, with the parts below the waist of ivory. In the fore-temple are images, two of Poseidon, a third of Amphitrite, and a Sea, which also is of bronze. On the temple, which is not very large, stand bronze Tritons. Poseidon's horses, which were included in the elaborate sculptural program of gilt-bronze and ivory, added by a Roman client to the temple of Poseidon at Corinth, are likely to have been hippocampi the Romanised Greek Pausanias described the rich ensemble in the later 2nd century AD ( Geography of Greece ii.1.7-.8): Likewise, the hippocampus was considered an appropriate decoration for mosaics in Roman thermae or public baths, as at Aquae Sulis modern day Bath in Britannia ( illustration, below). When an earthquake suddenly submerged the city, the temple's bronze Poseidon accompanied by hippocampi continued to snag fishermens' nets. Thus it was natural for a temple at Helike in the coastal plain of Achaea to be dedicated to Poseidon Helikonios, (the Poseidon of Helicon), the sacred spring of Boeotian Helikon. The Greek picture of the natural hydrological cycle did not take into account the condensation of atmospheric water as rain to replenish the water table, but imagined the waters of the sea oozing back landwards through vast underground caverns and aquifers, rising replenished and freshened in springs. The appearance of hippocampi in both freshwater and saltwater is counter-intuitive to a modern audience, though not to an ancient one. Thus hippocampi sport with this god in both ancient depictions and much more modern ones, such as in the waters of the 18th-century Trevi Fountain in Rome surveyed by Neptune from his niche above. This compares to the specifically "two-hoofed" hippocampi of Gaius Valerius Flaccus in his Argonautica: " Orion when grasping his father’s reins heaves the sea with the snorting of his two-hooved horses." In Hellenistic and Roman imagery, however, Poseidon (or Roman Neptune) often drives a sea- chariot drawn by hippocampi. In the Iliad, Homer describes Poseidon, who was god of horses ( Poseidon Hippios), earthquakes, and the sea, drawn by " brazen-hoofed" horses over the sea's surface, and Apollonius of Rhodes, being consciously archaic in Argonautica, describes the horse of Poseidon emerging from the sea and galloping away across the Libyan sands. Coins of the same period from Byblos show a hippocampus diving under a galley.Ī gold sea-horse was discovered in a horde from the kingdom of Lydia in Asia minor, dating to the 6th century BC. Coins minted at Tyre around the 4th century BC show the patron god Melqart riding on a winged hippocampus and accompanied by dolphins. ![]()
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