Hercules Saxanus

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Weihaltar Lower Germanic soldiers from the army of Quintus Acutius Nerva to Iuppiter Optimus Maximus and Hercules Saxanus ( CIL XIII, 7716 ), LVR-RömerMuseum Xanten

Hercules Saxanus is a Roman, Gallo-Roman deity , whose cult is passed down especially by Roman soldiers in the northern Germania superior through inscriptions on consecration stones from the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Most of the inscriptions come from the Brohl valley near Burgbrohl . There, legion soldiers assigned to the area broke tufa stones to fortify military facilities on the Lower and Middle Rhine .

"Herculi Sax {s} ano / sacrum Iulius Vi / ctor <pro se et co / m (m) ilitones si / ngulares pedite / s Acili Strabonis / leg (ati) Aug (usti) v (otum) s (olverunt) l (ibentes) m (erito) "

“Consecrated to Hercules Saxanus by the centurion Iulius Victor for himself and his comrades, the selected foot troops [= bodyguards] of the legatus Augusti [literally: imperial envoy] Acilius Strabo . They gladly redeemed the vow and paid a fee. "

- CIL XIII, 7709

Furthermore, Saxanus was revered in the old (Roman) quarry of Spitzelofen, Wolfsberg in a double name as Silvanus Saxanus . Hercules also appears in the area of ​​the Roman Rhine provinces, this time with the nickname Maliator = "stone worker ". The donors come from the same context of Saxanus . He is therefore considered the patron saint of quarry workers. The epithet is derived from the Latin "Saxum" = "rock, stone".

See also

literature

  • Patrizia de Bernardo stamp: Celtic equivalents of classical epithets and other linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena in the context of the so-called 'interpretatio Romana'. In: Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie , Volume 61, Issue 1. Pages 7–48. ( chargeable at de Gruyter Online )
  • Johannes Freudenberg: The monument of Hercules saxanus in Brohlthal. Festive program for Winckelmann's birthdays on December 9th 1862. Published by the board of directors of the Society of Friends of Antiquity in the Rhineland. ( Digisat of the Bavarian State Library digital )
  • Krešimir Matijević : Hercules Saxanus: Germanic, Celtic or Roman? In: Krešimir Matijević (ed.): Celto-Roman deities and their worshipers. Files of the 14th FERCAN. Workshops, Trier, 12. – 14. October 2015. (= Pharos - Studies on Greco-Roman Antiquity, Volume 39). Marie Leidorf, Rahden / Westf 2016, ISBN 978-3-86757-267-5 , pp. 41–73.
  • Rudolf Simek : Lexicon of Germanic Mythology (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 368). 3rd, completely revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-520-36803-X , pp. 184-185.
  • Jan de Vries : Old Germanic history of religion. Volume 2 (= Outline of Germanic Philology Volume 12). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York, [reprint of the unchanged 3rd edition from 1970] 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-085519-7 , pp. 107-108.

Remarks

  1. ↑ CIL 13, 07697 to CIL 13, 07712 . Other consecrations were, among others, the Hercules Invictus
  2. ^ To the inscription Hans Lehner: The ancient stone monuments of the Provincial Museum in Bonn. Buchhandlung F. Cohen, Bonn 1918, p. 63 f., No. 128 (with references to the older literature). Images of the inscription can be found in the Clauss / Slaby epigraphic database .
  3. ↑ CIL 3, 5093 . Further evidence for Saxanus in the database at Ubi-Erat-Lupa.org . As well as the documents from the vicinity of Metz CIL 13, 4623 , Tivoli CIL 14, 3543 and Trento CIL 5, 5013