From Alexandria to Isurium Brigantum: Tracing a Hellenistic Image of Slavery to Roman Britain

by Mary Harrsch © 2026 

In 2008 I photographed a small copper-alloy oil flask in the British Museum (Registration Number 1824,K/Unknown.0.c), cast in the form of a young child, curled forward asleep over his knees, a box or lantern tucked beneath him. A small lid, now lost, would once have completed the figure's head; the remains of a looped suspension chain are still visible at the shoulder. The object belongs to the Richard Payne Knight bequest of 1824 and was found within the walls of Isurium Brigantum — modern Aldborough, North Yorkshire — the Roman civitas capital of the Brigantes, and it is dated broadly to the 2nd century CE.

Copper alloy oil flask in form of a young sleeping slave, 100–200 CE. British Museum, bequeathed by Richard Payne Knight, Object Number 1824,K/Unknown.0.c. Photograph by the author, 2008.

The subject has a far deeper pedigree than its provincial findspot might suggest. The motif of a servant dozing while he waits — sometimes identified as a lantern-bearer, lanternarius, caught asleep at his post — is a well-documented Hellenistic genre type, with one of its earliest surviving examples in a terracotta vessel from the Fayum in Egypt. 

Ptolemaic terracotta ampulla in the form of a sleeping figure, 2nd century BCE, Fayum, Egypt. British Museum, EA36034. Photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum, (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Roman adaptations proliferated across media: marble versions served as fountain sculpture in villa gardens at Pompeii and in Syria, while bronze and silver variants were worked into luxury household objects, inkwells, pepper-castors, and — as here — oil flasks for the baths. 

Lanternarius addormentato (sleeping lantern-bearer), 1st–2nd century CE. Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano, Rome. Photograph by the author, 2005.

Silver pepper-pot, Roman, 200–270 CE, from Chaourse, Aisne, France. British Museum, 1889,1019.16. © The Trustees of the British Museum. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

A close parallel survives in Hannover's Museum August Kestner, and the type's most securely published cousin is a marble statuette in the Metropolitan Museum, dated like ours to the 1st or 2nd century CE.

Marble statuette of a slave boy with a lantern, Roman, 1st or 2nd century CE. Marble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Object Number 23.160.82, Rogers Fund, 1923. Public Domain.

 The Aldborough flask, then, is not a local invention but a provincial instance of a decorative convention that had already circulated for over three centuries by the time it was cast.

It is tempting to read the material as a marker of elite ownership, but the Roman hierarchy of materials cautions against treating bronze itself as evidence of elite status. Gold and silver carried a particular prestige as precious metals, yet elaborate bronze objects were also possessed and displayed by a much broader range of prosperous Roman households. What does argue for a comfortable owner here is not the base metal but the workmanship: a finely modeled, articulated figural vessel with a cast suspension chain represents considerably more elaborate workmanship than a plain utilitarian bronze container. Isurium itself supports a civic rather than necessarily military reading of that owner. Though the settlement grew up near the short-lived fort at Roecliffe in the conquest period, by the 2nd century it had developed into a planned, self-governing civitas capital — administered by the Romanized Brigantian aristocracy through its own ordo, rather than simply by army officers — with a forum, basilica, and amphitheater, sitting on Dere Street between York and Hadrian's Wall. If the flask belonged to a resident household, a prosperous townsman or decurion would therefore be a plausible owner, even though military traffic continued to pass through the settlement.

Our flask is not an isolated witness to slavery in Roman Yorkshire. A Samian ware bowl (terra sigillata) in the York Museums Trust collection, recently brought to scholarly attention as part of the Trust's "Old Collections, New Questions" project, depicts eleven captives chained at neck and ankle. 

Roman Samian ware bowl depicting eleven chained captives, c. 170–240 CE, York Museums Trust, YORYM:H32. Photograph by Emily Tilley, York Museums Trust. Image cropped and digitally enhanced by the author.

Dated to approximately 170–240 CE, it is one of very few representations of Roman captives or slaves in the Trust's collections. It is worth being precise about what such an image does and does not tell us: it reflects how slavery and Roman conquest were represented by Roman citizens, not how bondage was experienced by the enslaved, whose own perspective the object cannot recover. The bowl presents its captives as defeated outsiders and celebrates Roman conquest; it therefore provides evidence for the normalization of slavery within Roman visual culture rather than a first-person account of enslavement.

There is, however, an important distinction to make before treating this evidence as specifically Brigantian. Cartimandua's surrender of Caratacus in 51 CE did not constitute the conquest of the Brigantes themselves, nor is there evidence that large numbers of Brigantians were enslaved as a consequence. Caratacus was a leader of resistance elsewhere in Britain who had sought refuge in Brigantian territory; Cartimandua, then a Roman client-queen, handed him over to Rome while retaining her own political authority. The eventual Roman conquest of Brigantia came roughly two decades later, after the collapse of Cartimandua's position and the revolt of Venutius, when Petillius Cerialis campaigned against the Brigantes in 71–74 CE.

How many Brigantians were enslaved in that conquest is much harder to establish. The literary sources provide no figure, and archaeology rarely allows us to distinguish enslaved people from other members of the Roman population, much less determine their geographic or ethnic origins. What can be established is that slavery was an entrenched institution in Roman Britain and that enslaved people were present in northern Britain, including Yorkshire. Some may have been indigenous Britons; others were likely transported within the wider Roman slave economy. The distinction matters because the Aldborough flask demonstrates the presence of an established Roman visual vocabulary of slavery at Isurium, but it cannot tell us whether the people represented — or the person who owned it — were Brigantian in origin.

Taken together with the documented presence of enslaved labor in the households and farms of wealthy Yorkshire villas, and with the recognition that Roman slave status was not necessarily a lifelong condition — freedmen and their children went on to play genuine commercial and social roles in the province — the Samian bowl and the Aldborough flask place slavery within the established material and social world of Roman Yorkshire. They do not, however, allow us to reconstruct the size or ethnic composition of the enslaved population. That distinction is important: evidence for slavery in Roman Yorkshire is considerably stronger than evidence for the proportion of that population who were themselves indigenous Brigantes.

That raises a question about meaning rather than ownership alone: was this genre popular because it depicted slave loyalty or usefulness? Roman culture certainly possessed an ideological vocabulary surrounding the behavior expected within master-slave relationships, while Seneca's Letter 47 offers an unusually explicit discussion of Roman attitudes toward slaves. Writing in the 1st century CE, Seneca urges his correspondent to treat slaves with familiarity rather than cruelty, while simultaneously describing the elaborate domestic services slaves performed — including serving wine, attending banquets, and remaining awake through the night. His argument is revealing precisely because it takes the institution of slavery for granted even while criticizing the behavior of individual masters.

But recent scholarship on cognate genre statuary—notably current work on the Oplontis-Borghese “boy with duck” type—argues that such figures are better understood in the context of the Roman trade in pueri delicati: child slaves bought, trained, and displayed as ornamental household possessions. 

Child Strangling a Goose, Roman, 1st century CE, marble copy after a Greek original attributed to Boethos of Chalcedon, 3rd–2nd century BCE. Found at the Villa dei Quintili, Via Appia. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Galleria dei Candelabri, Inv. 2655. Photograph by the author, 2005.

Their aesthetic appeal, in this interpretation, was rooted in the commodification of enslaved children rather than necessarily in any celebration of fidelity. Here, by “commodification,” I mean the process by which an enslaved or servile person could be represented and treated as an object of aesthetic value and possession, separating the decorative image from the lived experience of the person it represented. The comparison does not prove that every sleeping-servant image carried the same meaning, but it does provide a useful warning against assuming that the apparent charm of such figures represents sympathy toward the enslaved.

The genre's deepest roots push this reading further back still, into the Hellenistic world. Scholarship on Hellenistic slavery is explicit that the conquests of Alexander did not soften attitudes toward bondage as an institution. What they did change was the scale and geography of the slave trade: conquest generated large numbers of captives and helped spread Greek-style chattel slavery into regions of the former Persian world where other forms of dependence had previously predominated. Kelly Wrenhaven's study of slave representation in Greek art and literature argues that such imagery did not simply document lived reality but participated in the cultural representation and normalization of slavery, reflecting how slaveholders wished to perceive enslaved people rather than how enslaved people experienced bondage.

Read against that argument, the popularity of the sleeping-servant type looks less like evidence of sympathy and more like evidence of a culture deeply accustomed to enslaved labor — a culture in which a child's exhaustion could be transformed into domestic charm and decorative art. A Yorkshire bowl showing captives in chains, found within the same broad provincial world as this flask, suggests that such visual conventions had travelled with remarkable success to Rome's northern frontier.

What makes the Aldborough flask worth pausing over, then, is less its individual craftsmanship than its itinerary: an image that emerged in the Hellenistic world amid the enormous expansion of slave markets associated with conquest travelled, over three centuries and the length of an empire, into the material culture of a Romanized Brigantian town at Isurium. It is evidence of how thoroughly a particular visual vocabulary associated with slavery could become embedded in provincial life — as far from the Nile as Rome's dominion reached.

AI disclosure: This article was prepared with the assistance of ChatGPT and Claude. AI tools were used for research support, source comparison, and editorial assistance; interpretations and final content were independently reviewed and determined by the author.

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The "Little Refugee": A Hooded Boy from Nysa

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

A small marble statuette in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens carries an emotional weight far greater than its modest 63-centimeter height would suggest. Catalogued simply as a boy with a dog, it is known to visitors and staff alike by an unofficial name: the "Little Refugee" (Prosfygaki).

Hooded child holding a puppy from ancient Nysa in Asia Mintor 1st century CE.

The figure shows a chubby, barefoot child wrapped in a hooded traveling cloak, arms wrapped tightly around a puppy held against the chest. The carving is unpretentious; this was never intended to be a great public monument. Yet its appeal is immediate: a barefoot child clutching a puppy for comfort. Most catalogue entries date it to the 1st century BCE, though at least one specialist account describes it as a Roman-period copy of an earlier, 3rd-century BCE Hellenistic type, which would place the invention of the image itself a good deal earlier than the surviving carving.

Its modern nickname, however, comes not from what it depicts but from its own extraordinary journey. It was found at Gerontikon, a locality within the ancient city of Nysa on the Maeander in Asia Minor (near modern Sultanhisar, Turkey), and was brought to Athens by Greek refugees in 1922 — the year of the catastrophic Greek exodus from Anatolia that followed the Greco-Turkish War.

A small carved child, lifted from the earth where it had rested for nearly two millennia and carried across the Aegean by people fleeing their own homes, became itself a quiet refugee.

It has understandably become a quiet emblem of displacement for many who encounter it today.

Telesphorus and the Hooded-Child Type

The hooded-cloak type to which this statuette belongs has a longer and more intriguing history than that of a simple "boy with pet." Related hooded-child figures across the Roman world invite comparison with Telesphorus, the hooded son of the healing god Asclepius, whose cult spread outward from the great Asclepieion at Pergamon during the Roman period—not far, geographically or culturally, from Nysa itself. Whether this particular figure was intended as a devotional image tied to that healing tradition, a garden or funerary ornament in the well-established Hellenistic genre of children with animal companions, or simply a beloved decorative piece with no deeper cultic charge, remains genuinely open. Sometimes, the hooded cloak of a small, chubby-cheeked marble child conceals more than a single tidy label.

The enveloping hood is the defining iconographic feature of Telesphorus

While some representations include secondary attributes, the hood—not any accompanying object—identifies the figure. His origins remain debated: some scholars place them in the Pergamene Asclepieion of the Hellenistic period, from which both his cult and iconography spread through Asia Minor and eventually into the wider Roman world; others argue that the Roman image reflects an older, non-Greek religious tradition that was later incorporated into the Asclepian cult.

The type had real staying power and real geographic reach. In the Celtic provinces of Roman Gaul, Britain, and the Danube lands, hooded child or dwarf figures known to modern scholarship as the Genii Cucullati ("Hooded Spirits") appear from the 1st century CE onward, sometimes singly (as on the Continent) and sometimes in triads (as is characteristic in Britain). 

Bronze sculpture of a child wearing a hooded cloak possibly a furniture terminal, Champagne, circa 1st century CE. - National Archaeological Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Siren-Com.

Genii Cuculatti and Goddess, Roman relief sculpture, Corinium Museum, Cirencester courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Tony Grist.

Their exact relationship to Telesphorus is unresolved — some scholars treat the Genii Cucullati as a localized, Celtic-inflected descendant or parallel development of the Pergamene type, associated broadly with fertility, healing, and protection; others argue for an independent native origin onto which the hood motif was later mapped. No ancient text names or explains either figure directly, so both identifications rest on the images themselves and a small body of votive inscriptions.

Date												Example																						Attribute
Hellenistic												Nysa																						Hood and Puppy
1st century CE                     2nd century												Gallic bronze terminal Pautalia coins																						Hood with No Additional object Hood with Variable object or none
2nd–3rd century												Aquae Iasae																						Hood with No Additional Attribute
Roman Britain												Genii Cucullati																						Triplicate with Hood and variable Eggs, fruit, etc.
Early 5th century												Liverpool ivory diptych																						Hood with Scroll

For the Nysa statuette specifically, the case for a Telesphorus connection is suggestive rather than demonstrated. The dog is an unusual attribute not generally associated with the canonical Telesphorus type. Dogs carry their own healing associations in Asclepian cult practice (temple dogs at Asclepieion were credited with therapeutic licking of wounds, and dogs appear elsewhere in Asclepian iconography and votive relief). A hooded child with a dog, from a region within the broader cultural orbit of the Pergamene healing cult, is plausible as a loosely Telesphorus-adjacent image — but the museum's own cataloguing treats it primarily as a genre statuette of a boy with a pet, and that more cautious reading deserves equal weight until better evidence is revealed.

From Hellenistic Nysa to Late Antiquity: The Transformation of a Type

The Nysa statuette is unusual in pairing the hooded child with a puppy. Later representations of Telesphorus from Asia Minor, the Danube provinces, and beyond increasingly emphasize the hooded figure itself while secondary attributes become optional or disappear altogether. A second-century relief from the thermal sanctuary at Iasae, for example, depicts the familiar healing triad of Asclepius, Hygeia, and Telesphorus without any accompanying animal. 

Telesphorus with Asclepius and Hygeia from Aquae Iasae courtesy of Archaeo Press.

Provincial coinage likewise often reduces Telesphorus to his characteristic hooded silhouette, although occasional issues depict him carrying other objects. The evidence therefore suggests that the hood—not the dog, scroll, or any other accessory—served as the essential identifier of the deity.

Coin issued by Commodus with Telesphorus clutching a votive object on the reverse dated to the 2nd century CE courtesy of Roman Provincial Coinage Online.

By the early fifth century CE, however, one remarkable ivory diptych from Liverpool depicts Telesphorus carrying a scroll while accompanying Asclepius. Produced within the Neoplatonic intellectual milieu of Late Antiquity, this image may represent a new interpretation of the deity rather than the preservation of an earlier canonical attribute.

Fifth century CE (400-430 CE) ivory diptych showing Telesphorus holding a scroll courtesy of National Museums Liverpool.

Conclusion

The evolution of the hooded figure's attributes reveals how flexible ancient religious imagery could be. The hood remained the essential marker of identity, while accompanying elements—puppy, objects, offerings, or scroll—shifted according to region, period, and context. The Nysa statuette therefore occupies an intriguing place within this long tradition: it preserves an unusually intimate image of a hooded child with an animal companion at a moment before the type became more standardized.

Perhaps that is why the "Little Refugee" continues to resonate. It is not only a survivor of antiquity or a witness to twentieth-century displacement; it is also a reminder that objects, like people, can carry histories far beyond the circumstances of their creation.

 

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From Four Jars to One Shrine: The Last Chapter in the History of Canopic Equipment

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

Most of us picture canopic equipment as four jars, each crowned with the head of one of the Four Sons of Horus, standing guard over the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines of the deceased. That image is essentially a New Kingdom snapshot. By the time we reach the Ptolemaic Period, canopic equipment had quietly become something else entirely — and this small painted wood box, excavated by George Reisner's expedition at Naga ed-Deir and now in the collections of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, is a good specimen for showing exactly how.

A Ptolemaic Canopic Box from Naga ed-Deir (Hearst Museum of Anthropology, 6-17149ab) photographed by Mary Harrsch

Naga ed-Deir sits on the east bank of the Nile, roughly 160 km north of Luxor, opposite Girga. What makes it valuable to Egyptology is less any single spectacular find than its extraordinary continuity: the necropolis was used almost without interruption from the Predynastic period through the Coptic era, a span of some four thousand years. Phoebe Hearst sponsored George Reisner's excavations there across several seasons between 1901 and 1904, with fieldwork directed on the ground by Arthur C. Mace. The resulting material — divided between Berkeley and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — has become one of the more heavily used comparative datasets for Egyptian mortuary archaeology.

From jars to shrine-box: a millennium of symbolic drift

The object in question is not, strictly speaking, a canopic chest in the Old or New Kingdom sense — a container built to hold four functioning jars. It belongs to a much later, terminal stage in the evolution of canopic equipment.

Through the New Kingdom, canopic jars were genuinely hollowed vessels, each assigned to a specific organ and protected by one of the Four Sons of Horus, whose differentiated heads (human, baboon, jackal, falcon) appear on the lids from the 19th Dynasty on. The first real break comes in the Third Intermediate Period (21st–25th Dynasties), when embalmers began returning the mummified viscera to the body cavity itself. Canopic jars didn't disappear — they became dummies: solid, uninscribed-cavity vessels retained purely as ritual markers.

The 26th Dynasty saw a brief functional revival, with genuine (if empty) jars reappearing, sometimes divided between two half-size chests flanking the mummy — a practice that faded again by the end of the Late Period.

By the Ptolemaic Period, the whole apparatus had condensed into a single object type: a small, tall, naos-form wooden chest built to resemble a shrine or sanctuary entrance, standing in for what had once required four separate containers and four attendant deities. This form disappears entirely by the early Roman period, when canopic equipment of any kind drops out of Egyptian burial practice altogether.

Our box is a clear example of that final consolidation. Rather than crowning four jars with four gods, the entire program is compressed onto one small structure: a false-door/shrine facade on the principal face carries the words of Anubis himself — split across the two long sides, with the god addressed by different embalming epithets on each ("lord of the sacred land" on one, "who is before the divine booth" on the other) — while a recumbent Sokar-falcon perches on the lid, echoing both the old falcon-headed Qebehsenuef convention and the broader Sokar-Osiris funerary complex.

The side registers carry rows of standing genii and blue-wigged, human-headed figures who likely stand in for the Sons of Horus and their four protective goddesses (Isis, Nephthys, Neith, Serqet) — the whole cast of characters that once occupied four independent vessels, now gathered onto a single reliquary through decoration rather than through physically separate containers.

By the Ptolemaic Period, canopic equipment had been evolving away from its original practical role for centuries. Although burial practices varied, the organs were increasingly returned to the mummy after embalming. The canopic assemblage therefore functioned primarily as a symbolic invocation of traditional divine protection.

The transformation reflects more than changing burial customs. By the Late and Ptolemaic Periods, Egyptian funerary religion increasingly emphasized symbolic representation over functional duplication. Once the embalmed organs were normally returned to the mummy, there was little practical reason to maintain four separate vessels. Rather than abandoning the ancient tradition, priests condensed it into a single shrine-like object whose painted decoration invoked the Four Sons of Horus, their protective goddesses, and the safeguarding powers once embodied in individual jars. The box became not a cheaper replacement for canopic equipment but its accepted symbolic equivalent.

What we're looking at, then, is not a container that once held something and now doesn't; it's the very last iteration of an object category whose entire late history is one of increasing abstraction — from four working vessels, to four empty ones, to a single miniature building evoking the whole apparatus in paint and relief.

Seen in isolation, this painted wooden box might appear to be a simplified substitute for the more familiar canopic jars. In reality, it records a profound shift in Egyptian religious practice. Rather than abandoning ancient traditions, Egyptian priests preserved their meaning while adapting their form to changing beliefs about mummification and the afterlife. The result is an object that stands at the end of a tradition stretching back nearly two millennia—still invoking the protection of the Four Sons of Horus, but doing so through symbolism rather than physical vessels.

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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.

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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.

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