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Author Topic: Quiz: Palladium  (Read 4154 times)

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Offline Jochen

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Quiz: Palladium
« on: December 14, 2004, 06:53:16 pm »
Hi!

This should be an historical quiz for our younger members! The idea is from Patricia Lawrence.

Many coins show on its reverse a small figur, called the Palladium. Here are some questions:

1. What figur the Palladium does show?
2. What is the origin of the Palladium or where it comes from?
3. What are the  functions of the Palladium?

Happy puzzling!

Regards,
Jochen

Offline Rhetor

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #1 on: December 15, 2004, 10:28:19 am »
OK, I'll bite.

1. The palladium is a statue of Athena/Minerva.
2. I'm not sure of the statue's origin, but it was set up within the citadel of Troy.  The Greeks stole it (Diomedes, I think).
3. The myth held that as long as the palladium stood within Troy, the city could not be taken--hence Diomedes' raid.

In Aeneid Book 2, the crafty Greek liar Sinon claims that the wooden horse is left on the shores of Troy as an offering to Athena/Minerva for the Greeks' having profaned the palladium by stealing it.

One thing I'd like to know, though, is why Aeneas is shown with the Palladium on some Roman reverse types (e.g., the Julius Caesar denarius with Venus on the obverse).  If the Greeks stole it, how do the Trojans get it back, or do they?  Do the myths differ on the details?  

Ha!  The quizzed becomes the quizzer!

Rhetor

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #2 on: December 15, 2004, 10:54:44 am »
The Greeks stole it (Diomedes, I think).

Diomedes stole it together with Ulysses.

Offline slokind

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #3 on: December 16, 2004, 11:14:09 pm »
One of many at Rome.  Where else?  You all didn't quite finish with the question: answer Rhetor.  P.L.

Offline Jochen

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2004, 02:39:42 pm »
Hi!

Here I will give the information I have. Perhaps Patricia may correct me or can add something I have missed!

The Palladium (greek palladion) is the picture/sculpure of a young wife bearing weapons. Pallas means 'young girl' and was a title of the goddess Athena. So there was a distinct relation to Athena. But the Palladium seems to be older than Athena. Indeed there existed many Palladia. Their function was to protect a city. This was not done by the Palladium as an amulet, but as a city goddess. The Palladium always was small and made of wood.

The most famous Palladium was that from Troy. So many cities claimed the identity of its own P. with that from Troy. The myth says it was fallen down from heaven and the fate of Troy was connected with it. The seer Helenos has, as captive or because he didn't get Helena after the death of Paris, made possible the robbery of the P. by betrayal (a variant named Antenor). So Odysseus and Diomedes could rob the Palladium and Troy was without protection. The end is well-known.

In Athens there are two variants about the way of the P. to Attica. The first tells that Diomedes has given the P. to Demophon to keep it, who has send it to Agamemnon, because he want to have it.
The other variant tells of a war between Argivians and Athenians in the darkness (phonos akoysios), and a court procedure which would be necessary after that.

A Palladium was in Amphissa, Alalkomenai, Pellene in Achaia, Lindos,  Siris near Herakleia, and in Arcadia. Clear, that Rome, by the myth connected with the Troyan tradition, claimed to have the real Palladium. It stood in the round temple of Vesta, which only was allowed to enter by the Vestal Virgins. The only exception was by the Pontifex Maximus if he had to save the Palladium from the burning temple. This was not seldom due to the open fire of the Vestals!

On coins a Palladium appears as an attribute of Aeneas, Nobilitas, Roma, Vesta or Victory. It should not be confused with the Victoriola, the small statue of Victory on a globe.

And now to the last question of Rhetor: The problem with the Roman Palladium is, that at the fall of Troy the Palladium was stolen, and how could Aeneas then take it to Italy? The myth has to explain this alogic! So it was said that Troy not only has had one Palladium but several Palladia, brought to Troy from the surrounding regions. And one of these was stolen by the Achaeans during the Trojan War, and the rest were brought by Aeneas to Italy, being otherwise called PENATES. These became the household gods of the Romans, and were represented as two youths holding spears.

Others have said that the Achaeans stole a copy, made on purpose to delude them, and that Aeneas did bring the real Palladium to Italy, where it was kept from the time of Numa (the second king of Rome) by the Vestal Virgins. (BTW that is a clever story, isn't it?)

But still others have said that only one Palladium ever existed, either found by Ilus at the hill of Ate, or given by Zeus to Dardanus, it being the same Palladium that the Achaeans stole. And they argue that Aeneas could not have occasion to rescue the Palladium when Troy fell, since the Palladium, had it been at Troy, would have prevented anyone from taking the city. In any case, the fame of the Palladium was such that several Palladia were kept in many cities, throughout antiquity.

"Whether it was Diomedes, or the guileful Ulysses, or Aeneas, they same someone carried it off; the culprit is uncertain; the thing is now in Rome: Vesta guards it, because she sees all things by her light that never fails" [Ovid, Fasti 4.433]

Ref.:
For the first part "Der kleine Pauly"
For the second part http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Palladium.html

Regards,
Jochen

Offline slokind

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #5 on: December 17, 2004, 04:02:35 pm »
Yes, that is all the material I was thinking of!  My point in asking (the everlasting pedagogue in me) was that there are many questions to which there are many valid approaches and NO single correct answer.  Compare the very interesting Phoenix thread, which has led several of us to look up things we never thought of before.  Coins lead us to such inquiries.  Notice that Ovid, ever intelligent, has a point of view that we are pleased to call 'modern': it is, simply, intelligent.
I must see if there is an Amazon.de and get myself a Kleine Pauly, because the OCD is not so good on this question; Pauly does not assume that post-moderns are no longer interested in details.

There may be a way to resolve a small point.  It occurred to me, as I read, that if Pallas is a pre-Greek word, calling Athena Pallas may be the same as calling her Parthenos.  In that case, the epithet may be older than the name; though 'Athena', syllabified, occurs in Linear B in the Pylos tablets (I don't know whether or not in the Knossos archive), and Linear B is Greek, the palace goddess may be older than her occurrence in Mycenaean Greece.  Some think that the Cnossian snake-handler is fundamentally the same deity as the Erichthonios-fondler of the Athenian acropolis and its Mycenaean palace.  She may belong to the whole east-Mediterranean rim, Troy and Crete and Helladic (pre-Hellenic) Greece and be older than we can know, since we are unlikely to recover enough Linear A to be able to identify its language, the language of the -nthos and -ssos names...  Liddell-Scott says that 'Pallas' may come from the verb 'pallein', which means 'brandish' as a spear (or was it vice-versa, and the verb came from what a Palladion does?) OR ELSE "but probably it is an old word, pallas = neanis"--and 'neanis' means an adolescent girl, presumptively a parthenos.
That is more than I'd thought of before, so an old dog is never too old to learn!
Patricia Lawrence

Offline Jochen

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #6 on: December 17, 2004, 05:37:03 pm »
Thanks, Patricia!

For your further question to the priority of Pallas or Athena I looked at the related article in Pauly:
In the Knossos archive tablets were found with A-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja, showing that 1500 BC there was the common hellenic idea of a strong mistress. But here probably come together idg. ideas with much older non-idg. ideas. So 'pallas' has etymologic relatives in the non-idg. space like hebr. pilleges or drav. palagu, leading to the assumption that in an 'indoatlantic' language and cultural shift (middle east/mediterranean) an armoured goddess may be the ancestor of the hellenic Pallas. But minoic-mycenic goddesses of the Pallas type are not yet found. But there may be the influence of goddesses like Ma-Enyo-Istar.

Even the name Athena is probably pre-hellenic. There are many different derivations. One nice of them is published by Rademacher, 1922, and Ganszyniec, 1959/60: The element 'ath-' (= 'Anhöhe, Fels')should be non-idg. This matches the advice of Wilamowitz to 'Athos' and his explanation of the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus as  an ascension of the aegaean heigth goddess out of her mountain. This reminds on the minoic mistress of rocks Diktynna-Britomartis and on the pregnancy of anatolian mountain goddesses in hurrit. myths.

But following all these you come deeper and deeper and finely you will move on unsafe ground!

Regards,
Jochen
 

Offline Jochen

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #7 on: December 17, 2004, 05:51:29 pm »
The etymologic origin of 'pallas' is not clear. But it is more to 'pallas = maiden' than to 'pallein'. Because the interpretation of pallas as 'palton pyr' (comp. Etym, M.s.II, where 'pallein' is identified with 'ballein') and so as synonyme of 'kerannos' is not problaby because the relation to lightning is missed, and on the other side the connection to Pallas Athena is proofed (so as 'agalmata tes Athenais', Hdt. 4, 189) theistic ideas may have stood at the beginning of the development of the pallas concept.

Regards,
Jochen

Offline slokind

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #8 on: December 17, 2004, 08:47:26 pm »
Yes, this is intoxicating.  We approach the notions of some philologists who place the birth of IE (indo-european) in Anatolia or maybe up towards Chechnya and much earlier than the introduction of horses into these lands.  Of course, Latvian scholars think otherwise.  But just thinking about homo-sapiens making full-fledged speech and all communicating theirs to their neighbors is intoxicating.
Yes, what I was suspecting is that A-ta-na and Pallas are practically the same.  I knew that Athena has no Greek etymology.  This might even tie in with the 'megaron'-like character of the buildings at Troy II, which are, of course, Early Bronze and pre-horse but of such a curious shape for acropolis buildings--and so like Mycenaean ones--that one can only wonder.
Of course, we usually think of Artemis (also a pre-Greek name) as the Potnia.  Apollo who at Didyma has that stag is a potnis deity, too.  Apollo is a pre-Greek name.  An old, and VERY incautious author, A. B. Cook, wrote a lot about Urgötter of Anatolia.  I was surprised to find some of them alive and well on coins.  The romantic notion of a primitive Maiden goddess and a primitive Adolescent Male God may not have been quite wrong, though ill grounded.  Some of us gasped when Çatal Hüyük turned up with the familiar Bull, Stag, Cat (of the mature goddess), in Level VI, ca. 6,000 BCE.
Only, let me repeat, we can only WONDER.  And I did not choose the word 'intoxicating' by accident.

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #9 on: January 03, 2005, 07:15:30 am »
pathenogenisis - means, in my dictionary...development of an egg, without fertilization...which roughly translates intlo Virgin Birth...which any Catholic can tel you about..     Diana was the virgian Huntress...)(Artemis) So the question remains...What came first the chicken or the egg?

Billy

Offline Robert_Brenchley

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #10 on: January 03, 2005, 03:38:27 pm »
Parthenogenesis is well known to any beekeeper; it's how drones are produced. Parthenos originally seems to have had a broader meaning though. In Classical Greek, it's apparently (I haven't checked myself) used of young women who are not virgins, and in the Septuagint (The Greek version of the Old Testament) its ambiguous. In church Greek it means virgin. It looks as though the church actually narrowed the meaning to make it fit better with their doctrine of the Virgin Birth.
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Offline Heliodromus

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #11 on: January 03, 2005, 04:38:40 pm »
My understanding is that in the Septaguint it is definitely taken to mean virgin, but that this is really a mistranslation from the original... In the Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea scroll collection (i.e. a copy of the source from which the Septaguint translation was made), the Hebrew word translated as "virgin" is almah, which is everywhere else in the old testament translated as "young woman", and further in places where a virgin was obviously meant the original Hebrew word was b'tulah (not almah). One can't use context as an excuse for this inconsistent translation since  it makes perfect sense translated as "young woman" in Isaiah 7:14 .. just that it's a rather more mundane and immediate prophecy.

Now, once the virgin prophecy was created by mistranslation in the Septaguint, it was propagated into the New Testament by it's authors who had apparently read the Septaguint rather than original Hebrew...

Ben

Offline Robert_Brenchley

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Re:Quiz: Palladium
« Reply #12 on: January 03, 2005, 08:23:23 pm »
They undoubtedly used the Septuagint, but I've been told on good authority that it isn't as clear as that.

The relationship between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text (Hebrew OT) isn't that simple. Oringinally, there was a diversity of texts, with no single fixed, canonical, text as we know it today. Ezra and the returnees from Babylon probably began the process of creating one with a text of the Torah (five Books of Moses, making up the Jewish Books of the Law) they brought with them; they also introduced the ancestor of the square 'Aramaic' form of Hebrew lettering which is familiar today, which replaced the palaeohebrew text found on coins and in a few other specialised uses. Other versions of the Torah - the Samaritan version and the Septuagint - contain material lacking in the modern Hebrew OT. A lot of this material found its way into the Temple Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls whicxh seems to have been used by some group as a sixth book of the Torah. Ezra and his lot didn't have it all their own way!

By the time we get to the Dead Sea Scrolls, some texts look like the Masoretic Text, others more like the Septuagint, others more like the Targums, which are Aramaic versions known from the 2hd Century and later. In the New Testament, the Septuagint or something very like it is used most of the time. There seems to be a process of textual evolution going on, with different communities developing their own 'canonical' texts as barriers develop between them, and to a greater or lesser extent they go their own ways. Then once the church adopts the Septuagint as its Old Testament, the Jews drop it and develop the Masoretic Text we know today.

I think the almah/parthenos thing is just a matter of slightly diverging traditions, with probably very little difference in meaning originally. Once the church develops the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, and starts giving it an importance which I find difficult to understand, except perhaps on a purely intellectual level (I understand the theology, I just can't identify with it), then major differences are imposed on the texts.
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