APPENDIX, 21 467

the Louvre, both of which are of the Roman period, we see how in these later types the artist multiplied symbols and accessories, ingrafting them on the original simple type of a river-god, as it was conceived by Phidias in the figure of the Ilissus. The Nile is represented as a colossal bearded figure reclining. At his side is a cornucopia, full of the vegetable produce of the Egyptian soil. Round his body are sixteen naked boys, who represent the sixteen cubits, the height to which the river rose in a favourable year. The statue is placed on a basement divided into three compartments, one above another. In the uppermost of these, waves are flowing over in one great sheet from the side of the river-god. In the otehr two compartments are the animals and plants of the river; the bas-reliefs on this basement are, in fact, a kind of abbreviated symbolic panorama of the Nile.

The Tiber is represented in a very similar manner. On the base are, in two compartments, scenes taken from the early Roman myths; flocks, herds, and other objects on the banks of the river. (Visconti, Mus. P. Cl., i., Pl. 39; Millin., Galérie Mythol., i. p. 77, Pl. 74, Nos. 304, 308.)

In the types of the Greek coins of Camarina, we find two interesting representations of lakes. On the obverse of one of these we have, within a circle of the wave pattern, a male head, a full face, with dishevelled hair, and with a dolphin on either side; on the reverse, a female figure sailing on a swan, below which a wave moulding, and above, a dolphin.

On another coin the swan type of the reverse is associated with the youthful head of a river-god, inscribed “Hipparis” on the obverse. On some smaller coins we have the swan flying over the rippling waves, which are represented by the wave moulding. When we examine the chart of Sicily, made by the Admiralty survey, we find marked down at Camarina a lake, through which the river Hipparis flows.

We can hardly doubt that the inhabitants of Camarina represented both their river and their lake on their coins. The swan flying over the waves would represent the lake; the figure associated with it being no doubt the Aphrodite worshipped at the place: the head, in a circle of wave pattern, may express that part of the river which flows through the lake.

Fountains are usually represented by a stream of water issuing from a lion’s head in the rock: see a vase (Gerhard, Auserl. Vasenb., taf. cxxxiv.), where Hercules stands, receiving a shower-bath from a hot spring at Thermć in Sicily.¹ On the coins of Syracuse the fountain Arethusa is represented by a female head seen to the front; the flowing lines of her dishevelled hair suggest, though they do not directly imitate, the bubbling action of the freshwater spring; the sea in which it rises is symbolised by the dolphins round the head.² This type presents a striking analogy with that of the Camarina head in the circle of wave pattern described above.

These are the principal modes of representing water in Greek mythography. In the art of the Roman period, the same kind of figurative and symbolic language is employed, but there is a constant tendency to multiply accessories and details, as we have shown in the later representations of harbours and river-gods cited above. In these crowded compositions the eye

¹ [B 229; in the Second Vase Room.]

² [See III. c. 30 in the British Museum exhibition of electrotypes. In the same collection the other coin-types mentioned above may also be seen.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]