INTRODUCTION

A number of unusual scenes are carved on gemstones worn as personal ornaments or used as seals in the late Republican and Imperial periods, such as an impudic Omphale fighting a donkey or Tithonus carrying a cicada. These pictures seem to allude to new stories involving well-known mythical figures. This chapter addresses the visual strategies used by gem engravers in order to transform traditional stories into new ones, revealing a continuing fabric of myth in the Roman period.

The performative context of ancient glyptic offers several analogies with, and differences from, coinage. As on coins, engravers operated in a miniature space and had to compose condensed and elliptic images. As for coins, they used motifs drawn from a wider repertoire belonging to a shared visual culture and memory. Unlike coins, which were replicated by minting until the die was worn or broken, each gem was hand carved, and hence unique, in a material carefully selected for its color, transparency, and symbolic qualities. The choice of the mineral and of the subject was usually associated with individual concern, but the images could also circulate in wide circles in the form of wax or clay prints on various artifacts, especially letters and official documents. Gemstones thus belong both to the private sphere because of their relation to personal identity and protection, and to the public domain because of their dimension of self-presentation.

This chapter is based on the category of ‘magical’ gems, where standard motifs are diverted in order to ensure magical efficacy, as well as on the larger range of ‘normal’ gems, where similar iconic strategies are at work. Two ways of constructing new visual idioms will be examined, first by using traditional figures, schemes, and stories metaphorically in order to address new, personal issues, and second by elaborating new schemes, often by combining Greco-Roman and Egyptian iconic traditions in order to produce seemingly new stories.

THE FABRIC OF ‘MAGICAL’ GEMS

In ancient glyptic, stones coined as ‘magical’ are characterized by the combination of distinctive features. The materiality of the media is essential; the stone itself was credited with potency due to its color, intensity, opacity, or transparency.