A new discovery of a statue of Hercules near the Appian Way, apparently dates back to the Roman Imperial period. It’s a significant find.

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The face looks to be a portrait of an actual person rather than the immortal flawless (demi-)god, so maybe it belongs to a funerary monument with a statue of the deceased depicted as Hercules, not unlike Commodus had himself depicted as this greatest of Greek heroes.

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Roman statues differ from greek examples precisely because they tended to depict subjects in a more naturalistic, and imperfect form.

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They should just dig up all of Rome, get the artifacts, then put it back again.

/s

That's what I tell my 2nd dates when we get to third base.

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I know this was a joke but it reminded me of something the Director of the site of Knossos on Crete (the location of the legendary labyrinth and Minotaur) told my class about 35 years ago. He said that it took Arthur Evans a decade to excavate Knossos (ca.1900), but if they were starting today it would take over a hundred years. That’s how much stuff there was and how quickly they plowed through it.

Wow, your dates are patient longrunners type!

It's a mutual understanding of Roman statues.

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Now who would throw away a statue in the sewer? I mean even in ancient times, statues are quite expensive

Why? Weren’t statues of Hercules everywhere?

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I feel like Rome is one of the few places in the world where you can be working a regular trade job and not be surprised when you accidentally unearth an ancient puzzle box or secret tunnel.

"Oh, another Pandora's box thing? Good, good. I'll put this next to the others in the office."

In honor of the literal shit he endured with the Augean Stables.

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Sure, but they seem to have had a crapton of them just everywhere if archaeology is an indication

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If I'm a rich Roman citizen, maybe I'm putting a statue in my sewer just because I can.

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And Bob, please don’t open this one. We are still finding gargoyles in the closets from the last time.

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The 13th labor of Heracles: "Heracles who crawled through a river of skata and came out clean on the other side." Tiresias

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Isn't Hercules the Roman name and Heracles the Greek name?

Edit: Hercules is Roman - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules

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I think it was Athens that tried to build a subway system but it ended up taking twice as long as planned because they stumbled into historic archeological sites every two kilometers

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Who knew he was dwelling in the sewer these days

Not surprising considering its age and that cities were built on cities

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Hercules didn't have to deal with any shit first hand, although the point of the labour was to attack his dignity. Instead of mucking out the stable he rerouted a river through it to flush it out.

Christians. They were all viewed as Pagan artifacts. From another discovery at an ancient hot springs: "Tabolli told Ansa that the hot springs, rich in minerals including calcium and magnesium, remained active until the fifth century, before being closed down, but not destroyed, during Christian times. The pools were sealed with heavy stone pillars while the divine statues were left in the sacred water." source

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Overthrow your rival? Deface his monuments and throw his statue in the sewer, make them forget his name. Only to end up preserving something of it.

Yeah ditto in Istanbul. Old cities are old. https://www.tunnels-infrastructures.com/metro-excavations-istanbul-history/

Ancient artifacts covered by dirt over thousands of years, then someone builds a sewer on top of it, which leads to its discovery during maintenance?

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Isn't determining it was Heracles based on a club and a lions pelt a little presumptuous?

I’ve heard it was built in a day so how long could that take?

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To be fair, it was a nasty fucking stable. Heracles was just pioneering this revolutionary idea called "pressure washing".

So that’s where Kratos put his brother’s statue

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Everybody gets to the point where they have too much stuff eventually, I guess

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This happens in Spain a lot too. It took them forever to try to get the subway through Triana for this very reason. (Maybe a tram. I forget)

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So you mostly keep it to yourself?

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That's sad to think how much they must have destroyed :(

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Or Alcubierre in Pompeii just smashing stuff he didn't think would sell

> Now who would throw away a statue in the sewer?

Pagan (demi) gods are no longer fashionable, look a convenient sewer hole to dump the statue in....

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Do we know it's meant to be Hercules and not one one of Commodus?

I was disappointed when I visited Knossos because it turns out, all of that art (wall murals, bright red pillars) are artistic creations by Arthur Evans. That dude destroyed so much by covering it in cement.

Mexico City is another good example.

How can they say 'It's Heracles because he had a club and a pelt'. I mean I don't know that much about greek myths but off the bat Orion also had a club and is depicted with a pelt. Is there something else or...

Seeing as I was downvoted for pointing this out elsewhere would like to know how it apparently evident.

It's actually Herculad, a clone of Hercules.

I'm betting that it is the real Hercules and he saw Medusa down there....

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Meanwhile in Finland rock was too hard and planners didn't know how to plan. If only we could have unearthed historical treasures, that would have been actually interesting.

The fact that this stuff happens is mind boggling.

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He was left behind, like Kevin Sorbo

When the Visigoths invade your city to plunder your gold and take your family into slavery, a 400 kilogram marble statue may not be on your list of priorities.

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Just don't solve the puzzle, or you might hear "we are the cinobites"

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Same thing is happening with the subway in Thessaloniki (second biggest city in Greece)

I mean a sewer would be the correct place to put Confederate statues, so they can receive the correct amount of honor. The Bible mentions using a statue as a latrine too. But this statue was found on an ancient road. Not in the sewer but while they were repairing the sewer.

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Why were so many sites found underground? Just structures buried with the passage of time and dirt? Stupid question but yea

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Hermes managed to overcome the walls of Shawshank in a single leap. I mean seriously - how often do you look at a man’s shoes?

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Any chance it's Commodus? Because he also had his image made in that way. Just trying to understand how it ended up in the sewer. I can certainly imagine Commodus' statue being "disposed of".

Some day future city planners are going to find themselves breaking into entire unknown tunnel networks.

4000 or so years of city being continually build on city will do it.

The ground major modern European cities is built on is largely the ruins of old versions of the city.

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I'm more inclined to believe it's a Funerary statue of the deceased in Hercules cosplay, than it is actually Hercules haha. Roman art does go through periods of naturalism ofc, but don't statues of deities/mythological figures usually stick to their Greek-idealist origins?

Orion was rarely, if ever, made a statue because he offended Artemis.

I suspect it's a general or emperor presenting himself as Hercules. Not unusual. The face is too old for a younger Hercules, and when he's older, he usually has a beard. It's giving me a Tiberius or Claudius vibe, but I'm no specialist on this stuff.

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This is true. Of human beings. Not of gods. The combination of the naturalistic appearance and the provenance along side the Appian way, famous for it's many funerary monuments led me to my suggestion. That's all

It didn't end up in the sewer. Not in an ancient sewer anyway. It just got discovered when a modern day sewer needed repairs. No mention of ancient sewers in the article. Wouldn't make sense either, since where it was found would have been outside of the ancient city of Rome. No sewers there.

The iconography of Heracles in ancient times was as famous then as let's say a person holding/being affixed to a cross would be now. Not to be a smart ass, just to provide some sort of modern day simile

Before it’s revival as the capital of the Roman Catholic Church, Rome was at one point, no man’s land, where settlers lived on the crumbling structures around them and lived whatever life they could scrounge up, not unlike a sci-fi dystopia. Those people were multiple generations removed from the age of Tiberius and Augustus and have little context to what Rome meant historically. Literacy was a luxury only afforded by Roman nobles, who lived in secluded castles clinging to whatever wealth they could cling to. The common folk used the stone and marble around them to build new buildings and houses. To them these were just resources to use.

We wanted to dig but earth was in the way I guess!?

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Same, at first I thought it was all the original painting before I realized that the only thing that was original was the throne itself.

I’m sure you are absolutely statuesque with your… where is it?

https://youtu.be/vBJPlhnF3ao

Wait wrong culture but still

They say Hercules was off cycle during the making of that statue....

Meanwhile in Ottawa we forgot that we're built on a rat warren of tunnels and sewers, so we caused a sinkhole and now one of our stations always smells like poo.

I was in Rome last year and they were building a new subway station, they have to get archeologists in to sift through all the piles of ancient stuff they find before they could actually start building anything.

The cinobites are my favorite item at cinobun though.

Fun fact: if you take the names Tiberius and Claudius and combine them into one name, you end up with Tiberius or Claudius.

Not really. Those are both significant items in the mythology of Hercules. They were pretty much his trademark props. If the ancient world had action figures, the Hercules figure would have come with a lion pelt and a club.

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Honestly this is the most realistic, though. The son of Zeus wouldn't need to look roided out to be strong (and most artists at the time probably had no idea what muscles so large would actually look like, since it's very difficult to get size like that naturally). It's always just been modern artistic license that depicts him that way.

It's like Superman having giant muscles, it creates this larger than life appearance but really there's no good reason for it.

He must have fallen down there while sluicing out the Stygian Stables.

Yeah im mot going so deep as to suggest they all are that way, nor do i want to make any suggestions as to this specific nature of this particular statue. You seem to have some better understanding of its context, so i don’t refute that.

Ditto for Kyoto. It even happened when they were building directly underneath an existing line, which you would think had already disturbed whatever might have been there.

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Commodus?

Having run through most of the History of Rome podcast, after an emperor went king Joffrey, after his assassination it was common to destroy works associated with him. Crushing, burning etc but the sewer was a popular place as well, especially for the corpses.

If I remember correctly, Commodus was a particularily despicable emperor who was obsessed with the idea of him being a reincarnation of Hercules. He started wearing garb like in the statue depicted as well as walking around with Hercules’ club.

The reason why he thought he was Hercules was because his handlers gave him disabled people to fight to the death so he could pretend to be a great gladiator.

Tibdius and Clauberius

Anyone else listen to the art forgery segment on science Friday on NPR? Estimated 40% of art in museums are forgeries. The easiest to fake? Stone sculptures. Not saying this is fake but it could be..

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I think it happens throughout the Roman Empire. I was in Germany last fall along the Rhine and their are towns there built over ancient Roman outposts where city utilities crews and new construction sites routinely uncover evidence of Roman villas, roads, city walls and fortifications. (It’s like uncovering ancient treasures because preservation of these sites bring in an influx of tourist dollars.)

Meanwhile in Boston we filled in a shallow bay with garbage until it was just barely solid enough to build high rises on, and then decided to tunnel underneath the whole thing like a hundred years later. Actually it went pretty well all things considered.

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This is such a fascinating period of history. I remember reading an article about the Roman colosseum during this period and it blew my mind.

And those planners will be from a different planet, and we will have been extinct.

I always have trouble wrapping my brain around building cities on top of cities.

When we visited Seattle and took a tour, we went underground and saw all the structures that used to be above ground and were even still used when they rebuilt on top of it all. They even installed lights and glass in the walkways above so daylight would shine through.

It still trips me out to think about how people decide to just build on top of everything.

Iusius and Tiberclaud.

Here are more detailed photos from the Facebook page of the archeological site https://www.facebook.com/100080444869192/posts/pfbid07fUcA5siZsxreas6E51yeZYYx1i8SoFVijz3Sf6V9WQ8HspUfciavbfKCmkGMFbbl/

What is reddits obsession with doomerism

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Insecure politicians didn’t always love statues that looked too much like political enemies.

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During the Christian period, pagan statues intentionally had heads/arms/legs removed, and thrown in the sewers. Sometimes it was while statues.

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You are close, but this is actually a statue of Gumbercules - a much more flexible version of the original.

How do you know he smashed stuff?