Kriophoros
At the Boeotian city of Tanagra, Pausanias [2nd C. AD a Greek traveller and geographer*] relates a local myth that credited the god with saving the city in a time of plague, by carrying a ram on his shoulders as he made the circuit of the city's walls:
- There are sanctuaries of Hermes Kriophoros and of Hermes called Promachos.[1] They account for the former surname by a story that Hermes averted a pestilence from the city by carrying a ram round the walls; to commemorate this Calamis made an image of Hermes carrying a ram upon his shoulders. Whichever of the youths is judged to be the most handsome goes round the walls at the feast of Hermes, carrying a lamb on his shoulders.[2]
[
Pausanias, c. AD 110 – c. 180, is] famous for his
Description of Greece (Ἑλλάδος περιήγησις Hellados Periegesis),
[2] a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his first-hand observations. This work provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology. Andrew Stewart assesses him as:
- A careful, pedestrian writer...interested not only in the grandiose or the exquisite but in unusual sights and obscure ritual. He is occasionally careless or makes unwarranted inferences, and his guides or even his own notes sometimes mislead him, yet his honesty is unquestionable, and his value without par.[3]
... he was certainly familiar with the western coast of Asia Minor, but his travels extended far beyond the limits of Ionia. Before visiting Greece, he had been to Antioch, Joppa and Jerusalem, and to the banks of the River Jordan...
Pausanias is most at home in describing the religious art and architecture of Olympia and of Delphi. Yet, even in the most secluded regions of Greece, he is fascinated by all kinds of depictions of gods, holy relics, and many other sacred and mysterious objects.
... While he never doubts the existence of the gods and heroes, he sometimes criticizes the myths and legends relating to them ...
Kriophoros [continued] -
Not all ancient Greek sculptures of sacrifiants with an offering on their shoulders bear young rams. The nearly lifesize marble
Calfbearer (
moschophoros), of ca 570 BCE, found on the Athenian Acropolis in 1864 is inscribed "Rhombos", apparently the donor, who commemorated his sacrifice in this manner.
[5] The sacrificial animal in the case is a young bull, but the iconic pose, with the young animal across the sacrifiant's shoulders, secured by forelegs and rear legs firmly in the sacrifiant's grip, is the same as many
kriophoroi. This is the most famous of the Kriophoros sculptures and is exhibited at the Acropolis Museum
Lewis R. Farnell
[6] placed this Hermes Kriophoros foremost in Arcadia:
- "As Arcadia has been from time immemorial the great pasture-ground of Greece, so probably the most primitive character in which Hermes appeared, and which he never abandoned, was pastoral. He is the Lord of the herds, epimélios[7] and kriophoros, who leads them to the sweet waters, and bears the tired ram or lamb on his shoulders, and assists them with the shepherd's crook, the kerykeion."
The
Kriophoros figure of a shepherd carrying a lamb, simply as a pastoral vignette, became a common figure in series denoting the months or seasons, characteristically March or April.
[8]
Kriophoroi and "The Good Shepherd"
Not every Kriophoros, even in Christian times, is Christ, the Good Shepherd: a Kriophoros shepherd, fleeing with his flock from the attack of a wolf, was interpreted as a purely pastoral figure rather than as Christ, the Good Shepherd, when it appeared in the refined late fourth-early fifth century floor mosaics of a colonnade round a courtyard in the Great Palace at Constantinople.
[10] Nonetheless, "the shepherd must have been the picture most frequently found in [Christian] places of worship before Constantine,"
[11] as the most common of the symbolic depictions of Jesus used during the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, when Early Christian art was necessarily furtive and ambiguous. By the fifth-century, the relatively few depictions leave no doubt as to the identity of the shepherd, as at Ravenna.
