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拍品專文
The finely detailed beetle is incised with bands of diagonal cross-hatching on the edges of the plinth. On the underside, the young, well-muscled, nude hero Hercle raises his club in his left hand and kneels on the coils of a crested serpent, gripping its neck in his right hand. The scene is enclosed within a hatched border.
Herakles' most famous encounter with a serpent comes when he kills the multi-headed Lernaean Hydra. Although some scholars have interpreted his fighting a single-headed snake as a depiction of this second Labour, Boardman and Wagner in Masterpieces in Miniature: Engraved Gems from Prehistory to the Present, London, 2018, pp. 98 and 109, note that this is not always the case. The hero encounters snakes in other contexts, including one guarding the tree of the Hesperides, another during his travels in Lydia, and the shape-shifter Periklymenos. The motif appears on Etruscan and Italic gems of the 4th and 3rd century B.C. For a similar carnelian scarab dating to the late 5th-early 4th Century B.C., in the British Museum (inv. BM 722) cf. "Herakles/Hercle,", LIMC, Vol. V, p. 233, no. 343.
Herakles' most famous encounter with a serpent comes when he kills the multi-headed Lernaean Hydra. Although some scholars have interpreted his fighting a single-headed snake as a depiction of this second Labour, Boardman and Wagner in Masterpieces in Miniature: Engraved Gems from Prehistory to the Present, London, 2018, pp. 98 and 109, note that this is not always the case. The hero encounters snakes in other contexts, including one guarding the tree of the Hesperides, another during his travels in Lydia, and the shape-shifter Periklymenos. The motif appears on Etruscan and Italic gems of the 4th and 3rd century B.C. For a similar carnelian scarab dating to the late 5th-early 4th Century B.C., in the British Museum (inv. BM 722) cf. "Herakles/Hercle,", LIMC, Vol. V, p. 233, no. 343.