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Monumentum

Mithraic brooch of Ostia

In the Mithraic bronze brooch found in Ostia, Cautes and Cautopates have been replaced by a nightingale and a cock.
  • Mithraic bronze brooch of Ostia

    Mithraic bronze brooch of Ostia
    Ostia-antica.org

  • CIMRM 318

    CIMRM 318
    Vermaseren's Corpus

 
The New Mithraeum
28 Aug 2021
Updated on Sep 2023

TNMM 369 ↔ CIMRM 318

Bronze brooch (diam. 0.07), found at Ostia in 1899. It came together with the Sir John Evans Collection to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 1927.

The brooch is a thin disc of bronze slightly convex, and the reverse is plain, except for a high pin and catch-plate. Mithras slaying the bull. The god is in oriental dress and with a nimbus and crown of nine rays. He kneels in the normal manner on the bull, which bears two bands round its body and has a tail ending in a single tuft. Mithras raises the dagger. The wound is clearly visible and the dog stands by with open mouth to lick the blood. The snake crawls along the ground and the scorpion clasps the testicles. The raven, at which Mithras is looking, sits on the god's blowing cloak. Two birds take the place of the two torchbearers; one, a cock, stands facing the bull's mouth, the other perches on the bull's tail.

The brooch is also of some importance from the technical point of view, in that the engraver's work upon it would seem to be unfinished: most of the figure of Mithras and the animals in the field are all properly chased, whereas the bull and Mithras' face, nimbus and dagger are only sketchily incised.

References

Vermaseren in Antiquaries Journal XXVIII, 1948, 177ff and Pl. XXVIIa; Summary Guide to the Department of Antiquities of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1951, 59 and Pl. XLVII B; Becatti, Mitrei Ostia, 129f and Pl. XXXVIII, 1. See fig. 87.

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