The Victim Group
The "Pausias motif" was the name ascribed to this particular victim group scheme (pls. 8–9) by O. Brendel in 1930, when he collected examples and pointed to its ultimate dependence on a prototype in (Greek) painting. Brendel suggested a bull sacrifice by the artist of the fourth century B.C. Pausias, which ended up in the porticoes of Pompey's theater. The example on the BR cup is the first known representation of the group, and it is also the best. Up until the Trajanic period, this victim-slaying composition was the only one used in official relief in the capital to document the moment in a sacrifice when a bull or ox was about to be killed; although alternative renderings were introduced into the Trajanic repertoire
(none of the many slayings on Trajan's Column use the motif), the "Pausias motif" continued to be employed through the Severan period.
The scheme is native to large-scale imperial commemorative relief: from the Valle Medici reliefs through the Severan arches in Rome and Leptis Magna, it appears in the relief friezes of state monuments either erected in the capital or put up elsewhere in the Empire by state commission and manifestly executed by, or under the direction of, artists from the court ateliers in Rome. The extant examples are a version in a newly reconstructed relief from Augusta Emerita/Merida,[47] which is probably Augustan;[48] an early Julio-Claudian relief fragment in Padua;[49] the early Julio-Claudian Temple of Mars Ultor relief (fig. 9a);[50] a Julio-Claudian relief at Rome (Antiquarium Forense);[51] a passage relief on the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (fig. 92);[52] the Hadrianic Vota Publica relief in the Uffizi (fig. 94);[53] a late Antonine or early Severan panel in the Louvre, which is generally miscalled a triumph;[54] a relief of Antoninus Pius known from a 1644 drawing;[55] an attic relief (triumph) of the Arch of Septimius Severus at Leptis Magna;[56] the two mirror-image predellae of the passage reliefs of the Arch of the Argentarii erected for Septimius Severus in Rome;[57] a third-century Roman relief in the Villa Medici.[58] (A relief fragment from Antium is too battered to date; the sacrifice takes place before a temple facade.)[59] As one would expect, the motif eventually is used in the state coinage; appearing first in Domitian's ludi saeculares series of A.D. 88 (fig. 90),[60] it is consistently employed for vota publica emissions from Hadrian to Caracalla, making some last sporadic appearances under Gordian and Gallienus.[61]
Like other topoi of state art this victim group turns up on humbler monuments commissioned by local magistrates, indeed already on the Augustan "Altar of Manlius,"[62] dedicated by his clients to the deceased C. Manlius, censor perpetuus of Caere; at the same level of patronage is a Julio-Claudian limestone relief in the Palazzo Venezia.[63] Compare the version in a set of limestone documentary reliefs at Narbo made for local notables (sacrifices and civic audiences),[64] and an Algerian triumphal relief of the late third century A.D. from the Forum at Philippeville.[65] It is garbled on a Trajanic altar to Neptune in Turin[66] and on a marble relief in Padua.[67] Last, in accord with its prominence on imperial monuments and coins it enters the vocabulary of stock scenes that decorate the so-called imperator, or generals', sarcophagi of the late second and early third centuries (fig. 93), where it is employed in the nuncupatio votorum scene that is the central motif in this group of sarcophagi (see below).
In its appearances in the state arts (relief and coinage), and in private
monuments like the sarcophagi, the "Pausias motif" is associated with vows and/or triumph. The use of this motif on the BR cup is one of the surest indicators that this cup panel (and by implication the other cup panels) depends directly on monumental relief prototypes, for the cup gives the fullest and best rendering of this victim group incorporated into a scene of sacrifice. Since, obviously, none of the later state monuments were inspired by a silver skyphos, they and the cup share separate and parallel descent from an Augustan prototype. And this prototypical Angustan relief must have adorned a monument of considerable esthetic impact commemorative significance, and public prominence for it to have exerted such a strong influence on imperial monumental art for at least two centuries.
Having sketched the history of the motif, it is time to turn to the group itself. In its fullest form, that on the BR cup, the group consists of a steer, two victimarii at its head, and a popa swinging a mallet down on its brow. One victimarius kneels in front of the bull, facing left, and twists its head down, grasping its left horn in his right hand and catching at its muzzle with his left; the other victimarius kneels on the far side of the bull, facing the first attendant, with a triangular knife in his right hand ready to stick the animal in the throat as soon as it has been stunned by the popa's axe or mallet. On the cup, this is a group full of emotional and visual tension. The bull wrestles back on its hind legs, its forelegs splayed and braced against the forces pulling its head forward and down; the popa is at the height of his swing, just about to bring his malleolus crashing down; the two victimarii, crouched and coiled in tense expectation, look up for and shy away from the path of the impending stroke. The composition is characterized by dynamic tension in three dimensions: the bull projects diagonally out into the foreground, the arc of its muscular neck framed by the triangle of human figures, while to the plunging arc and bowed masses of the bull and victimarii is opposed the swinging countercurve of the upraised mallet and its implied downward rush.
Structurally, the group of figures can be mapped onto a tilted set of axes intersecting at right angles. This is a typical structure in Hellenistic painting, mosaic, and narrative relief, as is the expenditure of formal concern on a group of servants or assistants busying themselves in the vicinity of more important persons. Compare, for instance, the foreground group of boat builders in the tableau of the sorrowing Auge on the Telephos frieze, another artful arrangement of servitors around a large, cleverly foreshortened object.[68] (The fourth servant bending vaguely behind the BR bull belongs to such a Hellenistic group composition and was quickly
dropped as otiose in the Roman relief tradition.) Brendel was struck by the group's correspondence to Pliny's description of a fourth-century painting of an immolatio boum (bull sacrifice) in the Portico of Pompey, which had been transferred to Rome from Sicyon in 56 B.C. by M. Scaurus. Pliny (HN 35.126) focused his admiration on the way in which the artist, Pausias, had demonstrated his mastery of diagonal foreshortening in painting a very large bull that truly seemed enormous, plunging toward the spectator ("cum longitudinem bovis ostendi adversum eum pinxit, non traversum, et abunde intellegitur amplitudo"). Among contemporary wall paintings after Hellenistic compositions, compare the bull depicted in the version of the Punishment of Dirce from Pompeii VII 4,56[69] with the transversum beast looming over the Paris census panel. The manipulation of relief planes in order to convey mass and motion in depth that we see in the best renderings of the BR victim group does look very painterly; Pliny's admiration was undoubtedly founded on that of many others ("Eam primis invenit [sc. Pausias] picturam, quem postea imitati sunt multi, aequavit nemo"); the painting itself hung in a prominent and well-frequented spot; and it came to Rome at about the right time (56 B.C.) to be picked up in relief by an Augustan artist employing a bit of erudite quotation and showing off his own skill at equaling the potential of painting working in a different medium. A firm connection between Pausias' immolatio boum and the BR victim group is unprovable, but one can correlate the late Republican and early imperial taste that admired compositions like Pausias' (and the work of other Greek painters in a similar vein) with contemporary relief sculpture like the BR cup.[70]
As soon as, created, the BR group began to be quoted as the formula for victim sacrifice, and in the process of transmission it was often stylized, that is, radically flattened and abbreviated. The group may be switched from right to left; the knife bearer may be dropped; sometimes even the other victimarius is omitted, so that the bull seems to bow and stretch its neck of its own accord (auspicious, this); a figure may be interposed between the bull and the spectator (by moving the popa or inserting an onlooker), thus breaking up the line of the bull's back; and, as the scene gets pushed into massed crowd compositions, often only the very forepart of the animal is depicted, projecting from the crowd.[71] In other words, the tension and visual qualities that recommended the original relief composition tend increasingly to be ignored in later and mechanical reuse of the scene. It is ironic that if indeed the BR group depends on Pausias' painting as described by Pliny, images of Pliny's own day would have shown the group in a form that would have made Pausias shudder.
This process of stylization has already set in on the Temple of Mars Ultor relief (fig. 9a), where the composition has already been abridged to be slotted into a more crowded scene. The hind part of the bull is hidden by a togate flute player; other togate figures behind fill the relief ground over its back; the two crouching victimarii are in strict profile to either side of the bull's head. The whole group has been stilled and flattened. If Brendel had known only this version, I doubt that he would have jumped to the analogy with Pausias, yet this is one of the fuller and esthetically more satisfying of the later renderings. In the group's next official appearance, Domitian's ludi saeculares type (fig. 90), showing the sacrifice of 1 June at the Capitolium (BMCRE II, 393, no. 438), it has been further reduced to a single victimarius grabbing at the bull's head, the popa swinging his axe, and the bull's head and forelegs. Moreover, the group has been shifted over to the far right of the scene and has been miniaturized in scale, in order to accommodate the rendering of the emperor and his entourage taking up the center and right of the field. The victim group is on the same reduced scale in relation to more "important" figures the next time it is used; on a passage relief on the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (fig. 92) it is set at the far right of a long, crowded composition focused on the emperor sacrificing at center left. The original full version must still have been visible to be copied directly, however, because after a century or so of "pictographic" versions, a fuller rendering resurfaced in the Severan Arch of the Argentarii passage reliefs. Here the victim-slaying group was relegated to a separate, tiny predella -like panel under each of the two main passage reliefs, repeated in mirror image under much larger panels showing an imperial family altar group.
The BR victim group, then, stands at the head of a long sequence of monumental commemorative relief images. The conditions of its reuse prove that a common prototype included the whole of the BR panel composition. That is, the "Pausias motif" has not been borrowed on its own from the monumental corpus for use on the cup, but rather the whole sacrifice scene, here a unified composition, was copied from a similarly unified composition. The readiest corroboration for this supposition is supplied by a series of late imperial sarcophagi.
The six sarcophagi extant in this series span the Antonine age.[72] They are now called Feldherr -, generals', or imperator sarcophagi (fig. 93). The front panel celebrates the life of the deceased in a strictly ordered triad of exemplary scenes, from left to right: the deceased as general receives the submission of beaten barbarians and makes a nuncupatio votorum before the Capitolium, and the deceased and his wife join hands in marriage (or per-
form a sacrifice together). As has long been recognized, the unvarying sequence of episodes does not describe an ideal life in strict chronological sequence, for to put marriage at the end of such a hypothetical cursus would be ridiculous. Instead, the scenes seem to be exemplary of cardinal virtues manifest in the subject's character and actions: clementia, pietas, and concordia, with military virtus evoked in the rendering of the first two.[73]
All five fully preserved sarcophagi of this group employ for the central scene both "halves" of the BR panel: in the central scene, at left a paludatus imperator sacrifices at an altar, at right is the BR victim-slaying group, and the Capitolium up on its rock is fitted in as well, behind and above the victim-slaying group and the altar of sacrifice. Gabelmann has shown how the submission scenes in these and other sarcophagi depend on monumental state relief, just as P. G. Hamberg proved the dependence of the battle scenes that characterize another group of "biographical" sarcophagi on monumental prototypes;[74] clearly, the nuncupatio composition entered the sarcophagus repertoire by the same route. What this motif depends on is the prototype of the BR cup panel, probably by way of a Trajanic or Antonine reuse of the whole scene in which the imperator was put into a typical late imperial version of field dress without cuirass and in which the Capitolium facade was slightly enlarged and its identifying pedimental decoration made into a corona triumphalis . These two details appear on all five of the sarcophagi of the group, even when they vary points such as the rendering of the central altar (solid vs. tripod).[75]