I found a picture of Mithras killing the bull online today. There’s loads of photos on the web, of various monuments, all slightly different. Identifying them is fun!
Anyway, using the lettering “Alexander”, that I could see on the photo, I did a search in the PDF’s I have of Vermaseren’s CIMRM– collection of all the monuments. I found it fairly easily. It’s CIMRM 603. So I created a page on the new Mithras site for CIMRM 603 and 604. I included the image.
Anyone searching for CIMRM 603 ought to find it, although, as yet, Google doesn’t seem to pick my site up. Wonder why.
Vermaseren’s entry, tho, was interesting. Because he obviously hadn’t seen the monument! All he had was a literature search. He reckoned that it was probably the same as an item published in 1746 in Museum Romanum.
Here’s the good bit: I thought it might be fun to find the 1746 publication. And I did. It took a bit of faffing around, but then it all just worked. And I grabbed that engraving, and included that as well.
You know, we are so blessed to live in an age when books are freely available. Despite the best efforts of German publishers to screw it all up, we can get hold of stuff that previous scholars — like Vermaseren — could only dream of.
The limit is your imagination…
Looked at the picture. The bull has crabs 😉
It’s a standard part of the relief, that there is a scorpion attacking the genitals of the bull. What it means is anyone’s guess. Which hasn’t stopped people writing papers…