Tauroctony from Aelius Hylas from Doştat

TNMM 642 ↔ CIMRM 2006 & 2007

A large tauroctonic marble relief (h. 89 x l. 143 cm.), recorded in Doştat as early as 1723, in the collections of Count Teleki, but which, given the marble used and the compositional technique, must have come from Sarmizegetusa, depicts the sacrifice of the bull (which carries the dorsuale) under the usual stone vault representing the cave.

It has the most common elements of this composition: the busts of Sol and Luna in the upper corners, the raven on Mithra's floating cloak, the three animals (dog, snake and scorpion) and, in the lower corners, the dadophores with their torches (now broken). Cautes, standing frontally on the right, also holds a bull's head in his left arm, while Cautopates, standing frontally on the left, also holds a scorpion in his left arm [TNMM 521].

Two inscriptions have been engraved on the relief: a dedication associating Jupiter with Sol invictus, deus genitor and a rock-born god who can only be Mithras, in the free field to the right of the tauroctone's head; the dedication, strictly speaking, of the relief, on the latter's pedestal.

The generous donor is a vicesimarius known from another inscription, that of Romula, still in Dacia (IDR II, 337), in which he does not yet bear the tria nomina he received on his liberation by Commodus. Nor does he name the emperor in the dedication of the Mithraic relief, suggesting a date after 192 and Commodus' damnatio memoriae. The god invoked here is the genitor of life, which he breathes into the earth and into the animals and men who feed on its fruits.