Aion (?) from Janiculum Hill

TNMM 1390

Nude male standing wrapped in material as if a cadaver with only face (or mask as in mummies) showing serpent coiled seven times around legs and entire body, head resting on head of personage, serpent head at forehead.

Anderson describes the figure as a male divinity; Bossert as representation of symbolic burial of Syrian sun god; Cumont says that seven eggs are deposited between the seven coils of the serpent representing the hope of resurrection, the seven coils of the serpent representing the seven planetary spheres which bear the ascent of the soul towards immortality.

Roman.

Found in the three cornered altar of the Syrian sanctuary dedicated to Mithras on the Janiculum Hill (Mons Aureus), Rome.

—ARAS

The goddess Atargatis was worshipped at Hierapolis in Syria. She was portrayed in the same stiff attitude as the Time-god and her body was always encircled by a snake. A mummy-like figure found at Rome in a Syrian sanctuary on the Janiculum is also connected with the statues we have been discussing. It is a bronze of a youth, entwined by a serpent whose head rests upon the head of the god. This statue was discovered by Gauckler in an octagonal hall, which must have some symbolic significance, and he identified it as Atargatis. In this context he referred to a text of Macrobius (fifth century A.D.), who described in his Saturnalia (i, 17, § 67) two statues erected on either side of the bearded Sun-god. These statues, two female deities again entwined by snakes, had originally stood at Hierapolis. Macrobius writes that ‘the portrayal of the snake indicates the rounded course of the star’. Evidently this star is none other than the sun. But Gauckler was mistaken in one point for the statue from the Roman sanctuary is male. According to the most recent interpretation it represents the Syrian Dionysus-Adonis who, like his father Hadad, has connections with the sun.

—Vermaseren (1963)