Garden Hermes

This is the marble Hermes. I'll put up another 'after' picture when I have cleaned the lichen off it.

It is a bearded man whose legs are foreshortened beneath him and out of sight in this pic. The child Dionysus is draped over his right shoulder with one leg on Hermes's upper right thigh. Hermes is holding onto Dionysus's right arm and the child's head (now almost gone) would have been resting against the right cheek of Hermes, who has a thick cape around his shoulders and is carrying something in his left hand - probably a wine flask. The piece is 11 inches long, but about an inch has broken off the bottom, taking one of Hermes's feet with it. It was set in a wall sometime in the 19th or 20th century, and you can see some ordinary cement mortar with which it was fixed.

What I really love about it is that Hermes represented all sorts of things to all sorts of people. Alchemists and heretics used him as a symbol for their secret societies, and he also symbolised Hermits - reclusive Christian monks who devoted their lives to helping travellers by guiding them through remote, hostile and dangerous country. Hermits are often depicted holding lamps as well as Mercurial staffs.

How did it get here? My guess is that is was brought back from Italy by a private collector, or it could have been bought from an Antiquities dealer any time between the 18th and 20th century. I think it is unlikely that he was brought to Bath by the Romans, as only a few such objects would be very weighty to carry.

There are many crude Roman carvings of deities in Britain (especially in Bath) which are associated with pagan temples or roadside shrines and altars put up by the invaders, but they are almost always built in stone local to the area. This is made from Italian marble.

There is a theory that Hermes also represented the spread of Christianity throughout the pagan world, or at least the beginning of monotheism. You can read lots of this stuff on the net. That's what I did.