Tauroctony
Encyclopedia
The tauroctony scene is the cult relief (i.e. the central icon) of the Mithraic Mysteries. It depicts Mithras killing a bull, hence the name 'tauroctony', given to the scene in modern times possibly after the Greek
ταυροκτόνος (tauroktonos) "slaughtering bulls", which derives from ταῦρος (tauros) "bull" + κτόνος (ktonos) "murder", from κτείνω (kteinō), "I kill, slay".
. At least one depiction would be mounted on the wall at the far end of the space where ritual activity took place, often in a niche dressed to be especially cavelike. Richly furnished mithraea, such as one in Stockstadt, had multiple cult reliefs.
The scenes can be roughly divided into two groups. The "simple" depictions, which include just the main bull-killing scene, and the compound depictions, in which the tauroctony is the central and largest element, but which is framed by panels that portray other scenes.
The oldest known representative of the tauroctony scene is CIMRM 593 from Rome, a dedication of a certain Alcimus, slave steward/bailiff (servus vilicus) of T. Claudius Livianus, who is identified with T. Iulius Aquilinus Castricius Saturninus Claudius Livianus, the praetorian prefect
under Trajan
. Like the other five earliest monuments of the Mithraic mysteries, it dates to around 100.
The tauroctony should not be confused with a "taurobolium
", which was an actual bull killing cult act performed by initiates of the Mysteries of Magna Mater, and has nothing to do with the Mithraic Mysteries. "There is no evidence that [initiates of the Mithraic mysteries] ever performed such a rite [i.e. a real bull killing], and a priori considerations suggest that a mithraeum – any mithraeum – would be a most impractical place to attempt it."
Although there are numerous minor variations, the basic features of the central tauroctony scene is highly uniform: Mithras half-straddles a bull that has been forced to the ground and invariably appears in profile, facing right. Mithras looks back over his right shoulder up to Sol (statuary that shows Mithras looking at the bull or towards the viewer are the result of Renaissance-era
restorations of monuments that were missing a head). The bull is held down by Mithras' left leg, which is bent at an angle and the knee of which presses down on the bull's spine. The bull's rump and right hind leg is restrained by Mithras' right leg, which is almost fully extended.
With his left hand, Mithras pulls back the head of the bull by the nostrils or the muzzle (never by the horns, which – if at all represented – are short). In his right hand, Mithras usually holds a knife or short sword plunged into the neck/shoulder of the bull. Alternatively (V 2196), the knife is sticking into the bull's neck, and Mithras has his arm raised as if in triumph. Mithras is usually dressed in a knee-length long-sleeved tunic (tunica manicata), closed boots and breeches (anaxyrides, bracae). Mithras' cape, if he wears one, is usually spread open, as if flying. Occasionally, Mithras is nude (V 2196, 2327; 201; 1275). On his head, Mithras usually wears a phrygian cap
, like the one worn by Attis
. The tail of the bull occasionally appears to be end in an ear of wheat. The blood from the wound is also sometimes depicted as ears of wheat, or as a cluster of grapes.
Several cult images have the bull adorned with the Roman dorsuale, sometimes decorated with embroidery. This dorsal band or blanket placed on the back of the animal is an adoption from the then-contemporary images of public sacrifice, and identifies the bull as a sacrificial beast.
From traces of pigment found on some reliefs it seems that there was no particular coloring tradition that was followed. In the relief from Jajce (CIMRM 1902), the bull is black, while Mithras' tunic is blue and his cloak red. In the relief from Marino and the wall fresco from Capua Vetere (181), the bull is white. At Marino, Mithras' the tunic is red and the cloak blue. In a stucco group now in Frankfurt but originally from Rome (430), the animal is reddish-brown. In the relief from the Barbarini mithraeum (390), the bull is light brown and Mithras' tunic and trousers are green.
killing the bull, which became a fashionable image once again in the reign of Trajan." The similarity is so great that Cumont mistook CIMRM 25 from Baris to be related to the Mysteries. This was subsequently corrected by Vermaseren and others as being of Nike. Already in 1899, Cumont had identified the tauroctony as "the imitation of the motif of the classical Greek group of Nike sacrificing a bull", but supposed that both tauroctony scenes were attributeable to 2nd century BCE Pergamene
artistic traditions. This notion has been characterized as one of Cumont's "least happy hypotheses".
Usually a canine (commonly identified as a dog), a serpent and a scorpion also appear in most tauroctony scenes; the dog and serpent are typically set as reaching for the wound, while a scorpion is typically set at the genitals of the dying bull. Many reliefs also include a bird, commonly identified as a raven, somewhere in the scene. Not infrequently, particularly in reliefs from the Rhine and Danube frontiers, the tauroctony scenes include a chalice and a lion.
Seldom absent from the reliefs, and also sometimes included in free-standing tauroctony statuary, are representations of Cautes and Cautopates, the torchbearering twins that appear as miniature versions of Mithras, respectively holding a raised torch and a lowerd torch. Usually, Cautes stands to the right of the scene while Cautopates on the left. In fifty tauroctony scenes, their positions are reversed, and in rare cases (such as the very earliest CIMRM 593), they are both on one side of the scene. The torchbearers commonly appear with crossed legs. On a number of reliefs, greenery or a tree is placed in the vicinity, sometimes on both sides of the bull, and at other times, such as at Nida (Germany) as a wreath around the relief. As Siscia in Pannonia Superior (Sisak, Croatia) a similar wreath is made of ears of wheat (1475).
The signs of the twelve zodiacal constellations (Cancer
, Leo
, Virgo
, Libra
, Scorpius, Sagittarius
, Capricorn, Aquarius
, Pisces
, Aries
, Taurus
, Gemini
) and allusions to seven "planets" (which in Greco-Roman thought include Sun and Moon) are common in the tauroctony reliefs and frescoes. The tauroctony reliefs (but not the statuary) almost always include busts of Sol
and Luna, i.e. respectively the god of the Sun and the goddess of the Moon, which appear in respectively the left and right top corners of the scene. The more ambitious cult images include the Sun's horse-driven quadriga mounting upwards on the left, while Luna's oxen-driven biga
descends on the right. In these, Sol's chariot is preceded by the naked youth Phosphorus, who runs ahead with a raised torch. Luna's chariot is preceded by Hesperus, with lowered torch. The two youths are reminiscent of Cautes and Cautopates.
Luna, Sol and the other five planetary gods (Saturn
, Mars
, Mercury
, Jupiter
, Venus
) are also sometimes represented as stars in Mithras' outspread cloak, or scattered in the background. The seven planetary gods are also fairly commonly represented by the depiction of seven altars (e.g. CIMRM 40, 1275, 1818, 2245) or less commonly in anthropomorphic form, as busts or full-length. Several of the more detailed reliefs even seem to have the planetary gods placed in order of their week-day dedications (from right to left: Monday/day 2:Luna, Tuesday:Mars, Wednesday:Mercury, Thursday:Jupiter, Friday:Venus, Saturday/day 7:Saturn, Sunday/day 1:Sol), but no standard sequence is discernible.
As first identified by Karl Bernhard Stark in 1879 but unexplored until the dismantling of the Cumontian transfer scenario in the 1970s, all the other elements of the tauroctony scene except Mithras himself have obvious astral correlations too. The constellations of Taurus (bull) and Scorpius (scorpion) are on opposite points of the zodiac, and between them lies a narrow band lies a section of the sky in which the constellations of the canine (Canis Major/Minor or Lupus), snake (Hydra, but not Serpens or Draco), the twins (Gemini), raven (Corvus), cup (Crater), lion (Leo), and the star of the 'wheat ear' (Spica, Alpha Virginis) appeared in the summers of the late first century. Simultaneously, as Porphyry's description of the mysteries states, "the Moon is also known as a bull and Taurus is its 'exaltation'" (De antro 18).
Beginning with Cumont, who held the astral symbolism (and all the other Greco-Roman elements in the mysteries) to be merely a late, superficial and adventitious accretion, "most Mithraic scholars" have treated the correspondences between elements of the tauroctony and the constellations as coincidental or trivial. But the chance that these correlations are an accidental unintended coincidence is "improbable in the extreme". The chance that the correlations were intentional, but added incoherently and unsystematically, is also "statistically negligible". At the same time, the elements of the tauroctony scene all belong to the story that the designer of the scene wished to tell, and the bull is present primarily because Mithras kills one, not primarily because the bull is Taurus and/or the moon.
Occasionally, the busts of two or four wind gods are found in the corners of the cult reliefs. The figures of other protective gods (Juno-Hera, Oceanus-, Hercules, Vulcan, etc.) also sometimes appear.
Within the framework of the Cumontian supposition that the Mithraic mysteries was the "Roman form of Mazdaism", the (now obsolete) traditional view held that the tauroctony represented Zoroastrianism's cosmological myth of the killing of a primordial bovine
, and into which Cumont had interpolated the unwilling hand of Avestan Mithra on command of the Sun. This Cumontian characterization of Mithras has long been discarded as "not merely unsupported by Iranian texts" but "actually in serious conflict with known Iranian theology". Simply put: unlike Roman Mithras, Iranian Mithra does not do any bull-killing.
In the wake of the 1970s dismantling of the Cumontian transfer scenario, Cumont's trivialization of the astronomical/astrological aspects of the Mysteries as "intellectual diversions designed to amuse the neophytes" has yielded to the general recognition that the astronomical/astrological aspects were part of the fundamental premises of the cult. This recognition is not new; "[s]ince the time of Celsus
(around 178), author of Alēthēs Logos, it has been known [via Origen's Contra Celsum
As noted above, the function and purpose of the tauroctony remains uncertain.
sculpture of The Madness of Orestes by Raymond Barthélemy (1860); the prize-winning plaster model remains in the collection of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
, where it was included in the 2004 travelling exhibition Dieux et Mortels.
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
ταυροκτόνος (tauroktonos) "slaughtering bulls", which derives from ταῦρος (tauros) "bull" + κτόνος (ktonos) "murder", from κτείνω (kteinō), "I kill, slay".
Usage
Whether as a painting or as carved monument, a depiction of the tauroctony scene belonged to the standard furniture of every mithraeumMithraeum
A Mithraeum is a place of worship for the followers of the mystery religion of Mithraism.The Mithraeum was either an adapted natural cave or cavern or an artificial building imitating a cavern. Mithraea were dark and windowless, even if they were not actually in a subterranean space or in a natural...
. At least one depiction would be mounted on the wall at the far end of the space where ritual activity took place, often in a niche dressed to be especially cavelike. Richly furnished mithraea, such as one in Stockstadt, had multiple cult reliefs.
The scenes can be roughly divided into two groups. The "simple" depictions, which include just the main bull-killing scene, and the compound depictions, in which the tauroctony is the central and largest element, but which is framed by panels that portray other scenes.
The oldest known representative of the tauroctony scene is CIMRM 593 from Rome, a dedication of a certain Alcimus, slave steward/bailiff (servus vilicus) of T. Claudius Livianus, who is identified with T. Iulius Aquilinus Castricius Saturninus Claudius Livianus, the praetorian prefect
Praetorian prefect
Praetorian prefect was the title of a high office in the Roman Empire. Originating as the commander of the Praetorian Guard, the office gradually acquired extensive legal and administrative functions, with its holders becoming the Emperor's chief aides...
under Trajan
Trajan
Trajan , was Roman Emperor from 98 to 117 AD. Born into a non-patrician family in the province of Hispania Baetica, in Spain Trajan rose to prominence during the reign of emperor Domitian. Serving as a legatus legionis in Hispania Tarraconensis, in Spain, in 89 Trajan supported the emperor against...
. Like the other five earliest monuments of the Mithraic mysteries, it dates to around 100.
The tauroctony should not be confused with a "taurobolium
Taurobolium
In the Roman empire of the 2nd to 4th centuries, taurobolium referred to practices involving the sacrifice of a bull, which after mid-2nd century became connected with the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods; though not previously limited to her cultus, after 159 CE all private taurobolia...
", which was an actual bull killing cult act performed by initiates of the Mysteries of Magna Mater, and has nothing to do with the Mithraic Mysteries. "There is no evidence that [initiates of the Mithraic mysteries] ever performed such a rite [i.e. a real bull killing], and a priori considerations suggest that a mithraeum – any mithraeum – would be a most impractical place to attempt it."
Mithras with the bull
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
restorations of monuments that were missing a head). The bull is held down by Mithras' left leg, which is bent at an angle and the knee of which presses down on the bull's spine. The bull's rump and right hind leg is restrained by Mithras' right leg, which is almost fully extended.
With his left hand, Mithras pulls back the head of the bull by the nostrils or the muzzle (never by the horns, which – if at all represented – are short). In his right hand, Mithras usually holds a knife or short sword plunged into the neck/shoulder of the bull. Alternatively (V 2196), the knife is sticking into the bull's neck, and Mithras has his arm raised as if in triumph. Mithras is usually dressed in a knee-length long-sleeved tunic (tunica manicata), closed boots and breeches (anaxyrides, bracae). Mithras' cape, if he wears one, is usually spread open, as if flying. Occasionally, Mithras is nude (V 2196, 2327; 201; 1275). On his head, Mithras usually wears a phrygian cap
Phrygian cap
The Phrygian cap is a soft conical cap with the top pulled forward, associated in antiquity with the inhabitants of Phrygia, a region of central Anatolia. In the western provinces of the Roman Empire it came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty, perhaps through a confusion with the pileus,...
, like the one worn by Attis
Attis
Attis was the consort of Cybele in Phrygian and Greek mythology. His priests were eunuchs, as explained by origin myths pertaining to Attis and castration...
. The tail of the bull occasionally appears to be end in an ear of wheat. The blood from the wound is also sometimes depicted as ears of wheat, or as a cluster of grapes.
Several cult images have the bull adorned with the Roman dorsuale, sometimes decorated with embroidery. This dorsal band or blanket placed on the back of the animal is an adoption from the then-contemporary images of public sacrifice, and identifies the bull as a sacrificial beast.
From traces of pigment found on some reliefs it seems that there was no particular coloring tradition that was followed. In the relief from Jajce (CIMRM 1902), the bull is black, while Mithras' tunic is blue and his cloak red. In the relief from Marino and the wall fresco from Capua Vetere (181), the bull is white. At Marino, Mithras' the tunic is red and the cloak blue. In a stucco group now in Frankfurt but originally from Rome (430), the animal is reddish-brown. In the relief from the Barbarini mithraeum (390), the bull is light brown and Mithras' tunic and trousers are green.
Artistic model
"The model for the Mithraic bull-killing scene was probably the type of winged Nike (Victory)Nike (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Nike was a goddess who personified victory, also known as the Winged Goddess of Victory. The Roman equivalent was Victoria. Depending upon the time of various myths, she was described as the daughter of Pallas and Styx and the sister of Kratos , Bia , and Zelus...
killing the bull, which became a fashionable image once again in the reign of Trajan." The similarity is so great that Cumont mistook CIMRM 25 from Baris to be related to the Mysteries. This was subsequently corrected by Vermaseren and others as being of Nike. Already in 1899, Cumont had identified the tauroctony as "the imitation of the motif of the classical Greek group of Nike sacrificing a bull", but supposed that both tauroctony scenes were attributeable to 2nd century BCE Pergamene
Pergamon
Pergamon , or Pergamum, was an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey, in Mysia, today located from the Aegean Sea on a promontory on the north side of the river Caicus , that became the capital of the Kingdom of Pergamon during the Hellenistic period, under the Attalid dynasty, 281–133 BC...
artistic traditions. This notion has been characterized as one of Cumont's "least happy hypotheses".
Ancillary elements
Seldom absent from the reliefs, and also sometimes included in free-standing tauroctony statuary, are representations of Cautes and Cautopates, the torchbearering twins that appear as miniature versions of Mithras, respectively holding a raised torch and a lowerd torch. Usually, Cautes stands to the right of the scene while Cautopates on the left. In fifty tauroctony scenes, their positions are reversed, and in rare cases (such as the very earliest CIMRM 593), they are both on one side of the scene. The torchbearers commonly appear with crossed legs. On a number of reliefs, greenery or a tree is placed in the vicinity, sometimes on both sides of the bull, and at other times, such as at Nida (Germany) as a wreath around the relief. As Siscia in Pannonia Superior (Sisak, Croatia) a similar wreath is made of ears of wheat (1475).
The signs of the twelve zodiacal constellations (Cancer
Cancer (constellation)
Cancer is one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for crab and it is commonly represented as such. Its symbol is . Cancer is small and its stars are faint...
, Leo
Leo (constellation)
Leo is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for lion. Its symbol is . Leo lies between dim Cancer to the west and Virgo to the east.-Stars:...
, Virgo
Virgo (constellation)
Virgo is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for virgin, and its symbol is . Lying between Leo to the west and Libra to the east, it is the second largest constellation in the sky...
, Libra
Libra (constellation)
Libra is a constellation of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for weighing scales, and its symbol is . It is fairly faint, with no first magnitude stars, and lies between Virgo to the west and Scorpius to the east.-Notable features:]...
, Scorpius, Sagittarius
Sagittarius (constellation)
Sagittarius is a constellation of the zodiac, the one containing the galactic center. Its name is Latin for the archer, and its symbol is , a stylized arrow. Sagittarius is commonly represented as a centaur drawing a bow...
, Capricorn, Aquarius
Aquarius (constellation)
Aquarius is a constellation of the zodiac, situated between Capricornus and Pisces. Its name is Latin for "water-bearer" or "cup-bearer", and its symbol is , a representation of water....
, Pisces
Pisces (constellation)
Pisces is a constellation of the zodiac. Its name is the Latin plural for fish, and its symbol is . It lies between Aquarius to the west and Aries to the east...
, Aries
Aries (constellation)
Aries is one of the constellations of the zodiac, located between Pisces to the west and Taurus to the east. Its name is Latin for ram, and its symbol is , representing a ram's horns...
, Taurus
Taurus (constellation)
Taurus is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Its name is a Latin word meaning 'bull', and its astrological symbol is a stylized bull's head:...
, Gemini
Gemini (constellation)
Gemini is one of the constellations of the zodiac. It was one of the 48 constellations described by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations today. Its name is Latin for "twins", and it is associated with the twins Castor and Pollux in Greek mythology...
) and allusions to seven "planets" (which in Greco-Roman thought include Sun and Moon) are common in the tauroctony reliefs and frescoes. The tauroctony reliefs (but not the statuary) almost always include busts of Sol
Sol (mythology)
Sol was the solar deity in Ancient Roman religion. It was long thought that Rome actually had two different, consecutive sun gods. The first, Sol Indiges, was thought to have been unimportant, disappearing altogether at an early period. Only in the late Roman Empire, scholars argued, did solar cult...
and Luna, i.e. respectively the god of the Sun and the goddess of the Moon, which appear in respectively the left and right top corners of the scene. The more ambitious cult images include the Sun's horse-driven quadriga mounting upwards on the left, while Luna's oxen-driven biga
Biga (chariot)
The biga is the two-horse chariot as used in ancient Rome for sport, transportation, and ceremonies. Other animals may replace horses in art and occasionally for actual ceremonies. The term biga is also used by modern scholars for the similar chariots of other Indo-European cultures, particularly...
descends on the right. In these, Sol's chariot is preceded by the naked youth Phosphorus, who runs ahead with a raised torch. Luna's chariot is preceded by Hesperus, with lowered torch. The two youths are reminiscent of Cautes and Cautopates.
Luna, Sol and the other five planetary gods (Saturn
Saturn (mythology)
In ancient Roman religion and myth, Saturn was a major god presiding over agriculture and the harvest time. His reign was depicted as a Golden Age of abundance and peace by many Roman authors. In medieval times he was known as the Roman god of agriculture, justice and strength. He held a sickle in...
, Mars
Mars (mythology)
Mars was the Roman god of war and also an agricultural guardian, a combination characteristic of early Rome. He was second in importance only to Jupiter, and he was the most prominent of the military gods worshipped by the Roman legions...
, Mercury
Mercury (mythology)
Mercury was a messenger who wore winged sandals, and a god of trade, the son of Maia Maiestas and Jupiter in Roman mythology. His name is related to the Latin word merx , mercari , and merces...
, Jupiter
Jupiter (mythology)
In ancient Roman religion and myth, Jupiter or Jove is the king of the gods, and the god of the sky and thunder. He is the equivalent of Zeus in the Greek pantheon....
, Venus
Venus (mythology)
Venus is a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty, sex,sexual seduction and fertility, who played a key role in many Roman religious festivals and myths...
) are also sometimes represented as stars in Mithras' outspread cloak, or scattered in the background. The seven planetary gods are also fairly commonly represented by the depiction of seven altars (e.g. CIMRM 40, 1275, 1818, 2245) or less commonly in anthropomorphic form, as busts or full-length. Several of the more detailed reliefs even seem to have the planetary gods placed in order of their week-day dedications (from right to left: Monday/day 2:Luna, Tuesday:Mars, Wednesday:Mercury, Thursday:Jupiter, Friday:Venus, Saturday/day 7:Saturn, Sunday/day 1:Sol), but no standard sequence is discernible.
As first identified by Karl Bernhard Stark in 1879 but unexplored until the dismantling of the Cumontian transfer scenario in the 1970s, all the other elements of the tauroctony scene except Mithras himself have obvious astral correlations too. The constellations of Taurus (bull) and Scorpius (scorpion) are on opposite points of the zodiac, and between them lies a narrow band lies a section of the sky in which the constellations of the canine (Canis Major/Minor or Lupus), snake (Hydra, but not Serpens or Draco), the twins (Gemini), raven (Corvus), cup (Crater), lion (Leo), and the star of the 'wheat ear' (Spica, Alpha Virginis) appeared in the summers of the late first century. Simultaneously, as Porphyry's description of the mysteries states, "the Moon is also known as a bull and Taurus is its 'exaltation'" (De antro 18).
Beginning with Cumont, who held the astral symbolism (and all the other Greco-Roman elements in the mysteries) to be merely a late, superficial and adventitious accretion, "most Mithraic scholars" have treated the correspondences between elements of the tauroctony and the constellations as coincidental or trivial. But the chance that these correlations are an accidental unintended coincidence is "improbable in the extreme". The chance that the correlations were intentional, but added incoherently and unsystematically, is also "statistically negligible". At the same time, the elements of the tauroctony scene all belong to the story that the designer of the scene wished to tell, and the bull is present primarily because Mithras kills one, not primarily because the bull is Taurus and/or the moon.
Occasionally, the busts of two or four wind gods are found in the corners of the cult reliefs. The figures of other protective gods (Juno-Hera, Oceanus-, Hercules, Vulcan, etc.) also sometimes appear.
Interpretation
Other than that the killing of the bull is a sacrificial act – as identifiable from reliefs where the bull is adorned with a dorsuale –, the function and purpose of the tauroctony is uncertain. Since the tauroctony scenes are complemented by the cult meal scenes (sometimes even represented on two sides of the same monument), it may be that the killing is a salvific act; i.e. "[s]laughter and feast together effect the salvation of the faithful."Within the framework of the Cumontian supposition that the Mithraic mysteries was the "Roman form of Mazdaism", the (now obsolete) traditional view held that the tauroctony represented Zoroastrianism's cosmological myth of the killing of a primordial bovine
Gavaevodata
Gavaevodata is the Avestan language name of the primordial bovine of Zoroastrian cosmogony and cosmology, one of Ahura Mazda's six primordial material creations and the mythological progenitor of all beneficent animal life....
, and into which Cumont had interpolated the unwilling hand of Avestan Mithra on command of the Sun. This Cumontian characterization of Mithras has long been discarded as "not merely unsupported by Iranian texts" but "actually in serious conflict with known Iranian theology". Simply put: unlike Roman Mithras, Iranian Mithra does not do any bull-killing.
In the wake of the 1970s dismantling of the Cumontian transfer scenario, Cumont's trivialization of the astronomical/astrological aspects of the Mysteries as "intellectual diversions designed to amuse the neophytes" has yielded to the general recognition that the astronomical/astrological aspects were part of the fundamental premises of the cult. This recognition is not new; "[s]ince the time of Celsus
Celsus
Celsus was a 2nd century Greek philosopher and opponent of Early Christianity. He is known for his literary work, The True Word , written about by Origen. This work, c. 177 is the earliest known comprehensive attack on Christianity.According to Origen, Celsus was the author of an...
(around 178), author of Alēthēs Logos, it has been known [via Origen's Contra Celsum
As noted above, the function and purpose of the tauroctony remains uncertain.
Legacy
The image was adapted for a Prix de RomePrix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
sculpture of The Madness of Orestes by Raymond Barthélemy (1860); the prize-winning plaster model remains in the collection of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts is the distinguished National School of Fine Arts in Paris, France.The École des Beaux-arts is made up of a vast complex of buildings located at 14 rue Bonaparte, between the quai Malaquais and the rue Bonaparte, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Près,...
, where it was included in the 2004 travelling exhibition Dieux et Mortels.