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Author Topic: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros  (Read 7058 times)

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Offline slokind

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Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« on: February 10, 2009, 05:34:05 pm »
I know that Jochen must have a page on this cult, but while I have a new photo of my favorite die-pair at hand, I want to draw attention to the huge preponderance of this cult at Serdica and there for Caracalla (none earlier and later only two little ones for Gallienus).  As an art-historical student of numismatics I'd like to show how particularized the same cult-meaning can be made.  On this reverse die, the little deity all but tugs at Apollo, as if to say, "I want my staff!".  This is remarkable, because such extreme naturalism is at odds with the reversal of age of the two figures: the traditional image of Asklepios is mature, and that of Apollo is young.  True, the cult of Apollo in at least part of the Greek world was extremely old, some think too old to be truly Olympian, while that of Asklepios, while older than once thought, is less ancient.  That is to say that Asklepios as son of Apollo is a philosophical relationship, not a quasi-fleshly relationship.  Here, as so often in Greek art, a philosophical concept is made radically natural, physical (natura = φυσις). 
• no date Æ29 Serdica 16.64g axis 6h  Caracalla, laureate, draped bust, as from behind, to r.  AVT K M AVRÊ SEVÊ ANTÔN[EINOS].  Rev. Apollo Iatros with child-form Asklepios.
OVLPIAS    SERDIKÊS.  HrJ 12.18.7.14.  All the known Asklepian Apollos are illustrated side by side in HrJ p. 162, nos. 12.18.13–22 and 12.46.1–2.  No other city minted so many and from different dies.
Pat L.
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Offline slokind

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Re: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2009, 11:20:57 pm »
I did not find a page in Jochen's Mythology thread on this Apollo Iatros, but I did, by searching 'iatros' find that both Jochen and I have been repreatedly interested in these figures.  There are some very interesting comparanda drawn into discussion.  Pat L.
P.S. Iatros is just the Greek word for a doctor, a medical doctor.  Apollo himself was inherently medicus.
P.P.S. I still am not sure that the century-old interpretation of these reverse types is quite right.  And the objects that the little figure holds here, which I can't identify, do surely mean something.

Offline Barabus

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Re: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2009, 02:23:04 pm »
 I'm a novice at this,so forgive me if this is stupid. It appears that just to left of the figure I see a dark line that looks almost verticle to the body line.This line seems to complete a shield that he is holding.
Organized religion is the second oldest profession, and nowhere near as honest as the first.

Offline slokind

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Re: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« Reply #3 on: February 20, 2009, 03:17:13 pm »
In Hristova and Jekov's Serdika, the boldface number series are keys: 12 is Serdica 18 is Caracalla 7 is Apollo, and 13 through 19 are the reverses that show the infant beside Apollo's legs.  Mine is 14.  But if you look closely at 13, you see, hanging from the infant's upper arm and parallel to his body a bit of inexplicable drapery.
What if the streak that you notice were the remains of the same on my 14?  You see, you are right, any question prompted by what you see and not by fantasy (wishful thinking) is NOT dumb, not at all.  Because, in the poor published photos 14, there does seem to be a streak in the same place.
So I dug out my own specimen (put away not to get it mixed up with all the Hadrianopolis, etc.).  After all, up in the Provincial category, look at the head of the Nemean Lion that my photography lamps captured: https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=51704.0
Behold! The infant wears a tiny cloak around the back of his shoulders.  The stuff beside his left forearm (at our right of him) is the other end of this cloak, and, holding the coin just right and under 4X magnification under the overhead light, I actually can see that it is a cloak, and, in faint relief, I can see what you saw, but better.  So far as I know, no one has observed it before, and we owe it to you.
Now, I have to run some errands before 4pm Chicago time (ours here), but I'll re-photograph and try to get the little cloak as soon as I return.

Offline slokind

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Re: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« Reply #4 on: February 20, 2009, 08:58:25 pm »
All the images below have been dated within a decade or so of AD 200, the Serdica coin being possibly latest at c. 210.
Here are the considerations:
1) The reality of Apollo with a cult as doctor, iatros, is well established, and the tall, young, nude male with his particular hairdo is surely Apollo; he is perfectly entitled to be shown with the mantic-iatric snake staff.
2) Telesphoros is NOT always dressed in the hooded cloak.  On some coins he is shown nude or practically nude (attached) and in a statuette found at Epidauros and dated by the epigraphy of its inscription and by its style and technique to c. AD 200 and inscribed TELESPHOROS is nearly nude; he has a minimal cloak, though it is hanging in front of rather than behind him.
3) The existence of a cult of Asklepios as a boy also is well attested; Pausanias saw a small statue of him in that sanctuary at Megalopolis in Arcadia alongside a large statue of Apollo.  The exact relationship of the two in cult is not stated; indeed, at the time Pausanias visited Megalopolis, most of the buildings were already in ruins and the cult not active.  It is unlikely that this particular cult at Megalopolis was known at Serdica.  Even Epidauros and certainly Pergamon is a likelier association.
4) At any rate, the identification (already discredited a century ago) of the little figure as Eros need not be considered.
5) What I have not yet done is study the relationship of Apollo to Asklepios at Epidauros and at Pergamon, apart from their both being mantic and iatric inherently.
6 The question that has been bothering me for a couple of years is whether the small figure who personifies the efficacy, the fulfillment of either prophecy or cure or both, Telesphoros, might be shown consulting with Apollo occasionally, not only with Asklepios.  It's not that it bothers me that the usually bearded god may be shown as the son of the gloriously youthful, eternally youthful Apollo: that is how it is with gods.  Aeternity is not Time!  It is just that the little figure feels (if you'll pardon my using the 4-letter eff word) like a Telesphoros to me, as if the artist meant us to see him as Telesphoros.
So I show the statuette, about 7 inches tall, beside the figure on the coin (who DOES wear a little mantle) and a practically nude guaranteed Telesphoros (between Hygieia and Asklepios) on two early Septimius coins issued by Pollenius Auspex (see the whole coin on my web site: https://www.forumancientcoins.com/ayiyoryitika/Auspex_Dies.html
Pat L. CLICK THE IMAGES
P. S. What does the little fellow have in his right hand?

Offline slokind

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Re: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« Reply #5 on: February 21, 2009, 11:29:37 pm »
All right, I've read Tominson, who is very good on Epidauros, and yes, the Apollo cult there WAS older than the Asklepios one, and yes, inscriptions there do call Asklepios the son of Apollo, and, of course, Apollo always was both mantic and iatric, but that doesn't help us much with the little figure beside Apollo on the Caracalla (and, I repeat, Caracalla) coins of Serdica.
All right, Warwick Wroth was one of the older editors of the BMC series, and the article I just read, thanks to Gordian_Guy, who found it for me, is about 13 decades old (published 1882), but I am going to go with his argument for the minor (viz. smaller) cult accompanying Asklepios on the Antonine and Severan coins of Pergamon, that they show Apollo Smintheus of Alexandria Troas quasi-identified with Asklepios.  And the small, nude figure is more like that on the Serdica coins than even the nearly nude Epidauros child is.
Now, of course, there is a problem of logic.  At Serdica we have a full-size Apollo Iatros with the small figure subordinate.  What is a small Apollo doing subordinate to a large Apollo?
I don't know, and perhaps we never shall know for the Serdica coins.
But I don't think the little figure is Asklepios; a boy Asklepios would somehow suggest his cultic attitudes and, I think, be clothed.
And, despite the semi-nude Telesphoros figures both at Nicopolis and at Epidauros, these are a generation or so later than the Hadrianic ones that are already in the hooded garment: Telesphoros is something that shows himself not by his Face but by his Presence.  So I was not quite happy yesterday with Telesphoros attendant on Apollo Iatros--not unless he really LOOKED like Telesphoros.
Third, there is no accounting for everything in Caracalla's religion--or even in that of the Antonines.  They all were up to their eyeballs in healing cults.
Therefore, since Wroth had a sturdy (Panofka's fantasies to be rejected) mind as well as an imaginative and refined mind, and he had all his sources lined up and soberly assessed, and he saw the differences between one thing and another (for instance, between Homonoia issues and coins that only looked like them in their design), I regard Wroth's ideas as the most worthy of respect that I have read so far.
Pat L.
The .pdf address is: asklepiosandthecoinsofpergamon.pdf  Conveniently, pls. I–III are put before pp. 1-51.  It is NC II, 1882.
You really need to read the last third or more of the article, but here is pl. II, where figs. 4, 5, and 6 are the most relevant.

Offline slokind

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Re: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« Reply #6 on: February 22, 2009, 10:08:49 pm »
Once again, as so often, it was Gordian_Guy who found the labeled Apollo Iatros, which I remembered existed but could not remember where.  He even found it on the plate (in Pick's Thraksiche Münzbilder, JdI 1898, Taf. 10) that I had myself sent to him.  I attach the lower part of the plate which shows two coins of Apollonia Pontica, figs. 29 and 30, which show an archaic-looking cult statue (and here, given the antiquity of the place, it might be really archaic) clearly labeled  :Greek_Alpha: :Greek_Pi: :Greek_Omicron: :Greek_Lambda: :Greek_Lambda: :Greek_Omega: :Greek_Nu:  :Greek_Omicron: :GreeK_Sigma:   :Greek_Iota: :Greek_Alpha: :Greek_Tau: :Greek_Rho:  :Greek_Omicron: :Greek_Upsilon_2:.  (But Head, HN 278, referring to Peparethos (p. 313) notes that Svoronos reassigned Pick's Taf. 10, 29 to that mint).  In either case, we see an archaic statue of Apollo labeled 'of Apollo Iatros'.

But what is more, showing the familial relationship in cult of Apollo and the Pergamene triad, he found the Bizya medal in Jurukova's monograph, one of a set of real medals, all well over 30mm and up to 42mm in diameter, issued for Philip at Bizya.  The most relevant one is her no. 129, where Apollo holding a laurel twig in his r. hand stands, cross-legged, by an omphalos with a snake winding around it.  Left of this center group is Asklepios, with Telesphoros hooded but in short clothes and, holding something rectangular, standing right under Apollo's laurel between Asklepios and Apollo; at right is Hygieia; in the field above, represented like statues on bases, are a seated Tyche and a Zeus hurling a thunderbolt.
I still need to learn what the object is that Telesphoros holds, in case it might correspond to what he holds on the coin heading this thread.
There are other medals of this character, with meaningful groups of significant deities on the reverse, in what is obviously, I think, the same set.  For all of them, beginning with Jurukova's no. 129, which is Varbanov II (Engl.) no. 1507, see ibid., nos. 1508, 1511, 1513, 1546, to cite only those which seem quite strictly to belong with no. 1507.  I assume that Jurukova has studied and explained these as a group, but it will take me some time to get a copy of her work, Die Münzprägung von Bizye, 1981.  I can't ask anyone else to translate that much continuous German for me, and I ought to have obtained this work long before now.
Somewhere in my notes I may have a reference to something, maybe by Alföldi,** that was a rather thorough discussion of the Pergamene cult (but I haven't seen it for at least five years, so...).  I need to find out what Telesphoros might hold, and why.
** No, but in the same notebook.  I was reading Erwin Ohlemutz, Die Kulte und Heiligtümer der Götter in Pergamon.  1940, rpt. 1968.  This, too, will have to be sought through Interlibrary Loan.
Pat L.

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Re: Cult OTD: Apollo Iatros
« Reply #7 on: February 24, 2009, 08:35:47 am »
To complete the series here is my Apollon Iatros:

Thracia, Serdika, Caracalla, AD 198-217
AE 31, 15.27g
obv. AVT KM [AVR CEV] - ANTWNEINOC
Bust, laureate, l., with ornated aegis on l. shoulder and sword-belt
rev. OVLPIAC - CERDIKHC
Apollo Iatros, nude, stg. facing, resting with r. hand on snake-entwined staff,
holding l. hand on hip; r. beside him infant Asklepios stg. frontal, raising r.
hand, and looking up to him.
Ruzicka 173 (rev.), Ruzicka - (obv.); Hristova/Jekov No. 12.18.7.17 (this coin!); not in Varbanov (engl.)
VF, green-brown patina, slightly smoothed in fields
Pedigree:
ex Numismatik Lanz auction 120, May 2004, lot 419
ex coll. Peter Burbules

In contrast to Pat's coin the boy here wears no chlamys but is nude. And obviously he doesn't hold any object. Indeed, a big riddle.
 
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