monument is unfortunately in a bad state of preservation; but the head and shoulders are on such a large scale as compared with the other figures on the same block, that the god cannot have been represented as standing or even as sitting on a raised seat: in fact there is no alternative but to suppose, with M. Mowat,[1] that the god was seated cross-legged on the ground, like Buddha. Granted that posture, we are at once led to connect the whole figure with certain well-known sculptures representing a horned, squatting divinity, such as those found at Rheims, at Saintes,[2] the chief town of Charente-Inférieure, and at Vendœuvres-en-Brenne. The last, which is preserved at Châteauroux, in the department of the Indre, represents the god holding a follis or sack in his lap, and on either side there stand two figures of a diminutive Genius, with their feet planted on the coils of a serpent, while each grasps with one hand either horn of the central personage: the other hand of the one Genius holds a torque, and that of his fellow a purse. A contiguous face of the block shows an Apollo Citharoedus sitting in the posture illustrated by a colossal statue of him at Entrain,[3] in the Nièvre. The Rheims monument[4]
- ↑ Bull. Épigr. i. 111-2.
- ↑ L'Autel de Saintes et les Triades gauloises is the title of an able and copiously illustrated account of the most important monuments representing the Gaulish Pluto, by the well-known keeper of the museum at Saint-Germain, M. Alex. Bertrand, in the Revue Archéologique for 1880: I refer here more especially to the offprint, published in Paris in 1880: see pp. 1, 7, 38; also the Rev. Arch, for 1882, xliij, p. 322, and plate ix.
- ↑ Bull. Épigr. ibid.; also Les Antiquités d'Entrain, by M. de Villefosse, which I have not been able to consult.
- ↑ Bull. Épigr. ibid.; Bertrand, pp. 7, 8.
