Plates 2.21-2.22: Antique Bronze Figure (Original Explanatory Account)

In honor of the gods and goddesses, Gaius Julius Africanus, son of Gaius, of the Arnian tribe, from Brixellum, Lieutenant of the Cavalry of the ninth Praetorian Cohort of the Century of Julius, gave a bronze statue of all the gods [pantheum], happy in his vow, willingly, as deserved, dedicated on the tenth day of the Kalends of August, during the consulships of Barbarus and Regulus [23 July 157 CE]^a.

Those images used to be called Pantheae, moreover, because they comprised both figures and symbols of numerous gods in one sculpture. Just as the ancients considered gods to be temple-sharing, sometimes even altar-sharing, their belief is held to have regarded them as form-sharing too (thus it becomes fit to use that term).

No one will doubt that this statue pertains to the worship of Bacchus who knows the rites, symbols, or, lastly, the attendants by whom, as we read everywhere, he was accompanied:

Bacchus I saw in mountain glades
Retired (believe it, after years!)
Teaching his strains to Dryad maids,
While goat-hoof'd satyrs prick'd their ears^b.

The head is of the same sort that the Fauns or Satyrs in antique paintings are perpetually shown as having. A wanton face, lips opened in laughter, a forehead bearing horns, and pointed, goat-like ears, plainly show that this is the rustic divinity in whose companionship Bacchus is said to delight.

It must be added that the artist wanted to represent a nymph by means of a female torso with bared breasts and wanted to assign the rest [of the figure] to the god himself.

^aReines. Inscript. I. 3. Fabrett. Col. Traj. Cap. VII. [CIL (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum) 006 . 00100. For a de-abbreviated text of the inscription, see the entry in the Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigraphy.]

^bHorat. II. Carm. 19. [Horace, Odes 2.19, trans. Conington, Perseus Project]

That part, moreover, in a way, sustains the function of a herm—the part, that is, on which the top part rests, and which is well integrated with its form.

Let it even be permitted to add this: that the maker, whoever he ultimately was, could have had in mind the following lines of Virgil^c; and that he wanted, also, to preserve the memory of this story shadowed forth in his sculpture:

These groves, erewhile
Their native nymphs and fauns enjoyed, with men
From trees engendered and stout heart of oak

The reader must be informed that the base is neither of the same age nor in the same style as the figure. The opinion established over time is that it [the base] was sculpted by the most famous Michelangelo and was decorated on each side [by him] just as shown here.

^cÆn.VIII.314. [Virgil, Aeneid 8.316-18, trans. Williams, Perseus Project]