Diomedes of Kresilas

The statue represents Diomedes with a statuette of the Palladium, a representation of the goddess Athena, in his hands. The Palladium kept in Troy were a divine pledge of the city inviolability; Diomedes and Odysseus penetrated the city and returned in the Greek camp with the stolen Palladium, thus propitiating the capture of the city.

After the fall of Troy, Diomedes was a mythical traveler in the lands of the West. Many cities in Italy claimed noble origins connected with the "Trojan Myth" because of the possession of the Palladium that Diomedes had brought with him to the Italian peninsula.

The Cumaean copy, found in the crypt under the Acropolis, bears a Greek inscription under the base mentioning a Gaius Claudius Pollio Frugianus, to whom, perhaps, the statue was the dedicate.

The creation of the original sculpture (around 430 BC) is generally attributed to the sculptor Kresilas.

 

Marble Roman statue

Height 1.77 m

I Cent. AD

From prov. Cumae

Naples, National Archaeological Museum – Inv. no. 144978.

 

 

Done