A Remnant of Sulla's Sack: A Bronze Eros, the Mahdia Shipwreck, and Rome's Appetite for Greek Cultural Capital

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

Among the Dallas Museum of Art's most striking objects that I photographed there is a small bronze lamp holder depicting Eros as an ephebe attributed to a Greek workshop, perhaps in the eastern Mediterranean, dating to the late 2nd or early 1st century BCE. Depicted as a winged youth leaning dynamically forward in flight, the figure once functioned as a luxury fixture, its outstretched arm terminating in a bronze tendril that would have cradled an oil lamp. Desire, quite literally, provided the light.

Eros as a Lamp Bearer (late 2nd–early 1st century BCE). Desire providing the light. This bronze figure once supported an oil lamp in an elite Mediterranean household and belongs to the same workshop tradition as luxury bronzes associated with the Mahdia shipwreck. Photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch.

Iconography and the Question of Identity

The museum notes that this Eros is rendered with both male and female characteristics — a theologically deliberate androgyny reflecting late Hellenistic conceptions of desire as a force transcending gendered boundaries. Although writing centuries later, Philostratus the Elder's 3rd century CE Imagines describes Eros in precisely these terms, suggesting that the blurring of masculine and feminine traits in luxury representations of the god may already have been understood within elite 1st century BCE Greek cultural discourse as a sophisticated reflection of desire's inherently boundary-crossing nature.

A closer examination of the figure raises an additional iconographic question. The hairstyle—tight, layered curls swept back from the forehead with pronounced volume at the crown—bears comparison to the krobylos, the arrangement historically associated with Apollo and with aristocratic Athenian men in the Archaic and early Classical periods. The boundary between Apollo and Eros typologies in Hellenistic decorative bronze production was not always rigidly maintained, and workshops frequently drew upon a shared repertoire of idealized youthful forms. Rather than signaling a deliberate conflation of the two deities, the borrowing of Apolline coiffure may have served as a subtle acknowledgment of their familial relationship within the Olympian pantheon or, more broadly, of their participation in a common visual tradition of divine youthfulness.

Whether the DMA figure represents a deliberate conflation — invoking Apollo Phoebus, the light-bringer, in a piece literally designed to carry light — or simply reflects the eclectic workshop practices of late Hellenistic luxury production remains an open interpretive question, but one the object invites seriously.

The Classicizing Gesture

The figure's lean musculature, serious facial expression, absence of the exaggerated baroque emotionalism characteristic of Pergamene or Alexandrian Hellenistic work — is best understood in precisely this commercial and cultural context. Late Hellenistic Athenian workshops producing for Roman buyers deliberately invoked Classical Athenian aesthetic traditions as a form of prestige signaling, marketing their objects' cultural pedigree to patrons who associated Athens with the pinnacle of Greek achievement. The ephebic quality of this Eros is not a dating anomaly but an ideological choice: Athenian craftsmanship performing its own heritage for consumption by Rome's philhellenic elite.

Eros Before the Cherub

The DMA lamp holder also captures Eros at a historically specific moment in his long iconographic devolution. In Hesiod's Theogony he is a primordial cosmological force, one of the first entities to emerge from Chaos. By the Hellenistic period he had multiplied into flocks of decorative erotes populating luxury objects across the Mediterranean world. Roman taste would complete his transformation to the pudgy infant Cupid of sarcophagi and frescos depicting mischievous erotes coaxing goat-driven chariots across the walls in elite Roman homes such as the House of the Vettii. This figure stands between those poles: still muscular, still serious, still theologically complex — but already a lamp stand in a wealthy Roman dining room. The cosmic force that Hesiod placed at the origin of creation had become, by the early 1st century BCE, a very beautiful, very sophisticated piece of interior decoration. That trajectory is itself a kind of cultural history of the ancient world in miniature.

The Mahdia Connection

The museum's description notes that this bronze "has been associated with a trove of Greek luxury goods recovered from an ancient shipwreck near the town of Mahdia off the coast of Tunisia."

The Mahdia wreck, discovered by Greek sponge divers in 1907 and dated to approximately 80–60 BCE, yielded one of the most important assemblages of Hellenistic luxury goods ever recovered from the ancient Mediterranean. Marble sculptures, bronze furnishings, architectural elements, and decorative bronzes recovered from the site have been linked by scholars, most notably Günter Hellenkemper Salies, to Athenian workshops producing for Roman patrons in the aftermath of Sulla's sack of Athens in 86 BCE. The Dallas Museum of Art's Eros was not part of the wreck's cargo, but technical and stylistic similarities suggest that it emerged from the same broader workshop tradition.

The DMA Eros entered the art market independently and was acquired by the museum in 2005 with no documented ancient findspot. Its association with the Mahdia finds rests on technical and stylistic correspondences that place it within the same workshop tradition, though not among the shipwreck's recovered cargo. Even so, that connection situates the piece within a specific, historically identifiable moment of Athenian luxury bronze production serving Roman appetites for Greek cultural capital.

That the figure survives detached from its original lamp fixture assembly is itself historically telling. This condition is consistent with the broader pattern of Hellenistic bronze luxury goods entering the Roman market as individual pieces stripped from their original domestic contexts — whether through military plunder, forced sale, or the deliberate disassembly of Greek household assemblages for easier transport and resale. The DMA Eros, separated from the composite fixture of which it was once a functioning part, embodies in its very incompleteness the extractive processes that drove the late Hellenistic luxury trade.

If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!

The Fierce and the Fine: Boar Imagery and Warrior Identity on an Etruscan helmet

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

For some strange reason I have always been particularly drawn to metalwork and found this beautifully decorated Corinithin-style Etruscan helmet incised with images of boars really spectacular when I photographed it at the Dallas Art Museum.

Corinthian-style Etruscan helmet incised with images of boars, Bronze, 5th century BCE, photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch.

Further research revealed the Corinthian helmet type was developed in Greece around the 7th century BCE and became the dominant helmet form across the Mediterranean world. The Etruscans adopted it enthusiastically, but — as was characteristically Etruscan — they didn't simply copy it. By the 5th century BCE, Etruscan craftsmen were producing what scholars sometimes distinguish as the Italo-Corinthian or pseudo-Corinthian variant: the helmet was increasingly worn pushed back on the head as a status display rather than pulled down over the face in combat, which meant the nasal guard and cheekpieces became more decorative than functional. The extraordinary incised imagery on this example fits squarely within that tradition of transforming martial equipment into prestige objects.

The quality of bronze-working visible here — the crisp, fine-line incision, the decorative border registers around the eye openings with their dotted and chevron banding — reflects the very high technical standard of Etruscan toreutics (metalwork). Etruria had direct access to copper and tin deposits, and Etruscan bronzework was prized across the ancient Mediterranean. Greek authors noted this explicitly.

The boar carried extraordinarily dense symbolic weight in Etruscan thought, operating simultaneously on martial, religious, and social registers:

Martial valor. The wild boar was the supreme emblem of ferocious, untamed fighting spirit. Unlike the lion — a more "royal" symbol often borrowed from Near Eastern and Greek iconographic traditions — the boar was native to the Italian landscape and carried an authentically local charge. Boar hunts in Etruria, as across the ancient world, were understood as training grounds for warfare: the animal was genuinely dangerous, requiring coordinated group effort, courage, and skill. Depicting boars on a helmet was thus not merely decorative; it was an assertion about the warrior's character.

Chthonic and liminal associations. Etruscan religious thought associated the boar with the boundary between the living and the dead. The animal appears on funerary objects and tomb paintings in contexts that suggest a role as a psychopomp or protective figure in the underworld journey. This gave boar imagery on armor a doubled meaning — protective in life, and perhaps efficacious for the passage into death that combat might bring.

The hunt as elite ritual. Boar hunting scenes appear extensively in Etruscan art from the Orientalizing period onward, and participation in the communal boar hunt was a marker of aristocratic status. Displaying the boar on prestige military equipment signaled membership in this warrior-hunting elite.

Possible divine connections. Some scholars have suggested links between the boar and Etruscan chthonic deities, though the syncretic nature of Etruscan religion makes precise identification difficult. The boar's tusks appear as apotropaic amulets in Etruscan contexts, suggesting a prophylactic function as well.

The combination of the Corinthian form with dense figural incision is distinctively Etruscan — Greek Corinthian helmets were typically plain or had relatively restrained decoration. An Etruscan warrior wearing this helmet was doing something quite sophisticated: appropriating Greek prestige military form while asserting a specifically Etruscan iconographic vocabulary. It speaks to the confident cultural synthesis that characterizes the best Etruscan art of the 5th century BCE.

I understand I was especially fortunate to photograph this piece as Corinithian style helmets of this quality are rare in American museums.

If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!

Fecunditas, Castitas, Gravitas: The Herculaneum Woman as a Visual Formula for Roman Female Virtue (2nd Century CE)

 by Mary Harrsch © 2026

Another beautiful piece I photographed at the Dallas Art Museum includes this Roman marble portrait of a veiled woman (Dallas Museum of Art, 1973.11), dated to the mid-2nd century CE. She exemplifies a central paradox of Roman sculptural production: the use of mass-produced, standardized body types to represent elite individual identity. This statue is a product of a visual system that prioritized legible social messaging over unique artistic invention.

Heavily draped figure of a 2nd century CE Roman woman articulating fecunditas (fertility), castitas (chastity), and gravitas (dignity). Photographed at the Dallas Art Museum by Mary Harrsch. 

My research revealed the DMA portrait draws upon what is formally classified in archaeological literature as the "Small Herculaneum Woman" type, one of two canonical draped female forms (alongside the "Large Herculaneum Woman") identified from finds in the Theater at Herculaneum . Originating from Greek Late Classical models of the 4th century BCE associated with the Praxitelean tradition, these types were systematically replicated across the Roman Empire from the Augustan period through the 3rd century CE . Jennifer Trimble’s foundational study reframes this phenomenon not as mere copying but as visual replication—a deliberate strategy where workshops produced standardized, "off-the-rack" bodies (often in Pentelic or Proconnesian marble) onto which separately carved, individualized portrait heads were attached .

The choice of the Herculaneum type was a conscious performance of ornatus and pudicitia (propriety and modesty). Rather than a portrait likeness in the modern sense, the body functioned as a carrier of established social virtues. The heavy drapery and the capite velato (veiled head) signal the subject’s role in religious ritual, frequently associated with priesthoods of the imperial cult . Current scholarship has moved decisively away from 19th-century interpretations that read these figures as generic personifications (Muses or Demeter). Instead, as Annetta Alexandridis argues, these statues articulated the "canon of Roman female virtues"—fecunditas (fertility), castitas (chastity), and gravitas (dignity)—for real, historically situated women .

A significant methodological challenge for the DMA example, however, is its lack of archaeological provenance. The gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cecil H. Green provides no data on findspot or pre-1973 collection history. Such gaps are critical: without a secure context, analysis is limited to stylistic attribution and typological comparison (i.e., the Small Herculaneum type), preventing the spatial and epigraphic analysis that has enriched studies of statues found in situ at sites like Perge or the Athenian Agora .

Further Academic Reading:

Trimble, Jennifer. Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Daehner, Jens, ed. The Herculaneum Women: History, Context, Identities. Getty Publications, 2007.

Alexandridis, Annetta. "Neutral Bodies? Female Portrait Statue Types from the Late Republic to the Second Century CE." In Paradoxa, 2010.

If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!

From Petra to Rome: A Nabataean Gold Necklace in the Roman World, Luxury, movement, and identity in the 2nd–3rd century CE

by Mary Harrsch, © 2026

Photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art (Accession No. 1995.26), this elegant gold necklace illustrates the sophisticated jewelry traditions that flourished in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire during the 2nd and early 3rd centuries CE. The museum attributes the piece to Nabataea, the former kingdom centered on Petra that was incorporated into the Roman Empire in 106 CE.

The necklace consists of a series of gold settings containing polished garnet cabochons, a gemstone particularly favored by Roman jewelers. Garnets were imported through long-distance trade networks extending to India and Sri Lanka, making them both fashionable decorative elements and indicators of access to the empire's extensive commercial connections. Nabatea served as a crossroads between Roman, Hellenistic, Arabian, and Near Eastern artistic traditions. That cultural blending helps explain why the design feels somewhat different from jewelry typically excavated in Italy itself.

Roman Gold Necklace with Garnet Cabochons (2nd–3rd Century CE), Photo by Mary Harrsch, Dallas Museum of Art,

Particularly striking is the elaborate central pendant, composed of multiple garnet settings surrounded by suspended chains terminating in small gold drops. My research revealed these dangling ornaments, known as pendilia, were designed to move with the wearer, creating a dynamic display of reflected light. Roman jewelry was intended not only to be seen but also to animate the body in motion.

The smaller decorative elements distributed around the necklace appear to represent stylized leaves or floral motifs. Such vegetal ornament was common throughout Roman decorative arts, appearing in wall paintings, mosaics, metalwork, and jewelry. The combination of floral forms, richly colored garnets, and intricate goldwork reflects the blending of Hellenistic, Near Eastern, and Roman artistic traditions characteristic of the eastern Mediterranean provinces.

Unlike the more restrained jewelry often associated with early Imperial Rome, eastern Roman luxury jewelry frequently emphasized color, movement, and visual complexity. Pieces such as this one foreshadow the increasingly elaborate aesthetic that would later characterize Byzantine jewelry.

As both a personal adornment and a portable store of wealth, a necklace of this quality would almost certainly have belonged to a woman of considerable means. Today it offers a fascinating glimpse into the craftsmanship, trade networks, and cultural diversity of the Roman Empire at its height.

If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!

From Ningishzida to Hermes: The Near Eastern Roots of the Kerykeion

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

This is one of the finest surviving examples of a Greek kerykeion — the iconic staff of Hermes, messenger of the Olympians and guide of souls between the worlds of the living and the dead that I photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Bronze kerykeion (caduceus), Greek, early 5th century BCE. Dallas Museum of Art. In Greek art, this staff identifies Hermes—herald, traveler's patron, and guide of souls. But its central motif—two serpents twisting around a rod—appears on Mesopotamian cylinder seals and ritual objects more than a millennium earlier, carried by the Sumerian snake-god Ningishzida. Is this visual inheritance or independent invention? The question remains open, but the parallel is impossible to ignore. Photograph by the Author.

Beneath the head of each serpent, the bronze-smith has rendered a distinct wattle or beard—a stylized, fleshy protrusion. This is not a naturalistic detail. No snake native to Greece (not the adder, the rat snake, nor the Aesculapian snake venerated in the healing cults of Asclepius) possesses a beard. Greek artists were perfectly capable of naturalistic rendering when they chose to be. The presence of this artificial feature therefore signals something else: the artist was following an iconographic convention, not observing nature.

That convention—marking a serpent as divine, powerful, or chthonic by giving it a beard or human-like head—originated not in Greece but in Mesopotamia, where the underworld god Ningishzida was depicted as a human-headed serpent or as the horned, bearded Bašmu dragon. The beard on this Hermes staff is a fossil of that forgotten hybrid form, a small but telling clue that the kerykeion's visual language traveled westward across centuries and cultures before a Greek bronze-caster shaped this staff in the early 5th century BCE.

The kerykeion (its Latin equivalent being caduceus) appears in Greek art from the Early Archaic period, carried most often by Hermes, though it is occasionally held by Iris — the messenger of Hera — and by Nike in her role as herald of victory. Its origins remain debated; the staff's source may ultimately lie in the ancient Near East.

The cylinder seal evidence

The most concrete argument comes from material culture. William Hayes Ward (1910) discovered that symbols closely resembling the classical caduceus appear on Mesopotamian cylinder seals, and suggested the symbol originated somewhere in the 3rd millennium BCE, proposing it as a plausible source for the Greek form. These seals predate the earliest Greek representations by millennia, which gives the diffusionist argument its chronological backbone.

Ningishzida and the divine prototype

The more ambitious theoretical claim involves the Sumerian underworld deity Ningishzida. Ningishzida was a messenger god who dwelled in the Underworld for part of the year, and the symbol for this underworld messenger was two entwined serpents on a staff — the same configuration as the kerykeion. Some scholars have proposed that the Greeks adopted this symbol from the Near Eastern context for their own messenger god Hermes, who shares the same chthonic, psychopomp functions.

Ningishzida makes his first appearance in the Fara god list from the Early Dynastic III period, dated to approximately 2600–2350 BCE. This is our earliest documented evidence of the deity by name, though of course the absence of earlier written records doesn't mean the cult didn't predate that.

His origins as a tree god

Although Ningishzida was a power of the netherworld, he appears to have originally been a tree god — his name apparently meaning "Lord Productive Tree," and he was probably the god of winding tree roots, since he was originally represented in serpent form. The snake-and-staff iconography thus likely grew organically out of this root-as-serpent conceptualization of an arboreal deity, rather than being a purely abstract symbol from the outset.

His nature and cult spread

His primary cult center was Gishbanda, a settlement situated between Lagash and Ur in southern Mesopotamia. Ningishzida, like his father Ninazu, is a chthonic deity associated with vegetation, growth and decay, snakes and demons. Associated with his role in agriculture, he was said to travel to the underworld at the time of the death of vegetation — in Mesopotamia, mid-summer to mid-winter.

The Gudea connection and the key visual evidence

A.L. Frothingham extended Ward's argument in 1916, proposing that the Greek god Hermes himself derived from an "Oriental deity of Babylonian extraction"—specifically, the snake god Ningishzida, whose earliest form was as a "messenger" deity.

Ningishzida as "a messenger god" is a slight oversimplification. His primary roles were as a chthonic vegetation deity and "chair-bearer of the underworld." The messenger-god parallel to Hermes is an inference drawn from his appearance as a doorkeeper in the Adapa myth, not a core title.

The long tail of the cult

Ningishzida's worship persisted all the way into the reign of the Persian king Darius I at Uruk, indicating that his cult endured through multiple historical periods.

Walter Burkert, one of the 20th century's leading scholars of Greek religion, characterized the entwined copulating serpents as not just a borrowed symbol but reference to a specific visual concept — paired serpents in a sexual or entwined posture. Burkert privileges cuneiform literature as a source of literary transmission in light of the continuous routes of contact between Mesopotamia and Greek speakers, with these contacts reaching an apogee in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. He tracks the migrant craftsmen who brought the Greeks new techniques and designs, the wandering seers and healers teaching magic and medicine, and the important Greek borrowings from Near Eastern poetry.

So from roughly 2600 BCE to at least the late 6th century BCE, this deity with his entwined-serpent iconography was continuously present in Mesopotamian religious life — a timeframe that comfortably predates and overlaps with the period of intensifying Greek contact with the Near East in the Archaic period.

The upshot for the kerykeion question: the deity and his snake-staff symbolism were circulating in Mesopotamia for well over a millennium before the Greek kerykeion crystallizes in the Archaic period, which is why the iconographic parallel carries real weight.

The pre-anthropomorphic argument

There is also a more structural argument about how divine symbolism evolves. It has been argued that the staff or wand entwined by two snakes was itself representing a god in the pre-anthropomorphic era — meaning the staff was Hermes, before the Greeks developed a fully human-figured deity. Like the herm or Priapus, it would thus be a precursor to the anthropomorphic Hermes of the classical period.

The dissenting view

It's worth noting this isn't a closed question. Lewis Richard Farnell (1909) argued that the two snakes simply developed out of ribbon ornaments on a herald's shepherd's crook, with no need for Near Eastern derivation at all. This purely Hellenic-origin view has fallen out of favor, but it reminds us that the Near Eastern connection, while widely accepted, rests largely on iconographic analogy and functional parallel rather than a documented transmission route.

The case rests on the very early Mesopotamian parallels, the striking similarities to Ningishzida's symbolism and role, the serpent's deep roots in Near Eastern religious iconography more broadly, and the prestige of Burkert's endorsement — but it remains an inference rather than a proven chain of transmission.

The development of this object reflects close trading relationships between Greece and the ancient Near East.

The Orientalizing Period

The critical window is what art historians call the Orientalizing Period, roughly 750–580 BCE. This is the period when art of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East heavily influenced nearby Mediterranean cultures, most notably Archaic Greece. The main sources of influence were Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, and Assyria. The DMA kerykeion, dated to the early 5th century BCE, sits at the tail end of this intensive exchange period, which gives the transmission hypothesis real chronological plausibility.

Al Mina as a key conduit

One of the most important physical nodes in this network was the trading settlement of Al Mina on the Syrian coast. Modern research has shown that Al Mina was a significant eastern trading settlement with strong Greek connections dating back to around 825 BCE, and later work has considered it key to understanding the role of early Greeks in the east at the outset of the Orientalizing period. This gave Greeks direct, sustained access to a Levantine milieu that was itself deeply embedded in Mesopotamian cultural traditions.

The Phoenician intermediary problem

One important nuance is that the transmission was rarely direct. The Phoenicians were the great middlemen of the ancient Mediterranean, and much of what the Greeks received as "Near Eastern" came filtered through Phoenician commercial and cultural networks. This means the kerykeion iconography need not have traveled directly from a Sumerian temple context to a Greek bronze-caster — it could have passed through several layers of transmission, accumulating new associations along the way, which also makes it harder to prove a clean line of descent.

The mercenary connection

There's also a less discussed but significant human channel: during this period, the Assyrians advanced along the Mediterranean coast accompanied by Greek and Carian mercenaries, who were also active in the armies of Psamtik I in Egypt. Greek soldiers serving in Near Eastern armies would have had direct exposure to Mesopotamian religious iconography in ways that pure trade alone couldn't replicate.

So, the development of the kerykeion fits neatly within a much broader pattern of sustained, multi-channel contact between the Greek world and Mesopotamia across the 9th through 6th centuries BCE. The staff was made right at the moment when that exchange was at its most intensive.

However, amicable trade relations did not prevent political conflict. Prior to the 5th century, Greek elites spent money imitating eastern / Lydian dress and buying Persian art and goods. That commercial relationship didn't dissolve — it coexisted with, and was eventually overshadowed by, political confrontation driven by entirely different forces.

The structural trigger: Cyrus and the Ionian Greeks

The animosity didn't arise from trade grievances. It arose from imperial expansion colliding with Greek political autonomy. When Cyrus overthrew the Lydian kingdom of Croesus in 546 BCE, the Greek cities of Asia Minor found themselves under the rule of the Great King — a monarch absolute in religion, politics, and war, and the antithesis of city-state liberalism. This is the key structural fault line: Persian imperial governance was fundamentally incompatible with the Greek polis model of civic self-rule.

After the resulting Ionian Revolt and Persian Wars, Greek writers like Aeschylus and Herodotus actively forged a civilizational contrast between Greek freedom and Persian despotism that served Athenian political purposes. Unfortunately, this schism between East and West has continued into modern times.

If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!