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Greek city of Skepsis in Troas
Bronze 12mm (2.17 grams) Struck circa 350-310 B.C.
Reference: cf. Sear 4136; BMC 21 var.
Forepart of Pegasus on rhyton left.
ΣK-H, Fir tree within linear border.
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Pegasus is one of the best known fantastical creatures in Greek mythology. He is a winged divine horse, usually white in color. He was sired by Poseidon, in his role as horse-god, and foaled by the Gorgon Medusa. He was the  brother of Chrysaor, born at a single birthing when his mother was decapitated by Perseus. Greco-Roman poets write about his ascent to heaven after his birth and his obeisance to Zeus, king of the gods, who instructed him to bring lightning and thunder from Olympus. Friend of the Muses, Pegasus is the creator of Hippocrene, the fountain on Mt. Helicon. He was captured by the Greek hero Bellerophon near the fountain Peirene with the help of Athena and Poseidon. Pegasus allows the hero to ride him to defeat a monster, the Chimera, before realizing many other exploits. His rider, however, falls off his back trying to reach Mount Olympus. Zeus transformed him into the constellation Pegasus and placed him in the sky.
Hypotheses have been proposed regarding its relationship with the Muses, the gods Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, Apollo, and the hero Perseus.
The symbolism of Pegasus varies with time. Symbol of wisdom and especially of fame from the Middle Ages until the Renaissance, he became one symbol of the poetry and the creator of sources in which the poets come to draw inspiration, particularly in the 19th century. Pegasus is the subject of a very rich iconography, especially through the ancient Greek pottery and paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance. Personification of the water, solar myth, or shaman mount, Carl Jung and his followers have seen in Pegasus a profound symbolic esoteric in relation to the spiritual energy that allows to access to the realm of the gods on Mount Olympus.
In the 20th and 21st century, he appeared in movies, in fantasy, in video games and in role play, where by extension, the term Pegasus is often used to refer to any winged horse.
_-_Mailice_(1899).jpg) A thyrsus or thyrsos was a wand or staff of giant fennel (Ferula communis) covered with ivy vines and leaves, sometimes wound with taeniae and always topped with a pine cone.
The thyrsus, associated with Dionysus (or Bacchus) and his followers, the Satyrs and Maenads, is a symbol of prosperity, fertility, hedonism, and pleasure/enjoyment in general. It has been suggested that this was specifically a fertility phallus, with the fennel representing the shaft of the penis and the pine cone representing the “seed” issuing forth. The thyrsus was tossed in the Bacchic dance:
 Pentheus: The thyrsus— in my right hand shall I hold it?
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- Or thus am I more like a Bacchanal?
Dionysus: In thy right hand, and with thy right foot raise it”.
Sometimes the thyrsus was displayed in conjunction with a kantharos wine cup, another symbol of Dionysus, forming a male-and-female combination like that of the royal scepter and orb.
In Greek religion, the staff was carried by the votaries of Dionysus. Euripides wrote that honey dripped from the thyrsos staves that the Bacchic maenads carried. The thyrsus was a sacred instrument at religious rituals and fêtes.
The fabulous history of Bacchus relates that he converted the thyrsi carried by himself and his followers into dangerous weapons, by concealing an iron point in the head of leaves. Hence his thyrsus is called “a spear enveloped in vine-leaves”, and its point was thought to incite to madness.
In the Iliad, Diomedes, one of the leading warriors of the Achaeans, mentions the thyrsus while speaking to Glaucus, one of the Lycian commanders in the Trojan army, about Lycurgus, the king of Scyros:
He it was that/drove the nursing women who were in charge/of frenzied Bacchus through the land of Nysa,/and they flung their thyrsi on the ground as/murderous Lycurgus beat them with his ox-/goad. (Iliad, Book VI.132-37)
The thyrsus is explicitly attributed to Dionysus in Euripides’s play The Bacchae as part of the costume of the Dionysian cult.
…To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond/ In fawnskin habits, and put my thyrsus in their hands–/ The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots…” Euripides also writes, “There’s a brute wildness in the fennel-wands—Reverence it well.” (The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. by Philip Vellacott, Penguin, 1954.)
Plato writes in Phaedo:
I conceive that the founders of the mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will live in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For “many,” as they say in the mysteries, “are the thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics,”–meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers.
In Part II of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles tries to catch a Lamia, only to find out that she is an illusion:
Well, then, a tall one I will catch…/And now a thyrsus-pole I snatch!/Only a pine-cone as its head. (7775-7777)
Robert Browning mentions the thyrsus in passing in The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church, as the dying bishop confuses Christian piety with classical extravagance:
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,/Those Pans and nymphs ye wot of, and perchance/Some tripod, thrysus, with a vase or so, (56-58)
Skepsis or Scepsis (Ancient Greek: Σκῆψις) was an ancient settlement in the Troad, Asia Minor that is at the present site of the village of Kurşunlutepe, near the town of Bayramiç in Turkey. The settlement is notable for being the location where the famous library of Aristotle was kept before being moved to Pergamum and Alexandria. It was also home to Metrodorus of Scepsis and Demetrius of Scepsis.
The city of Skepsis was situated in two different, non-contemporary sites on Mount Ida, Palae-Skepsis and the settlement of Skepsis proper.
Palea-Skepsis
Palea-Skepsis (Old Skepsis) is notable for the native tradition that it was once the “capital of Aeneas’s dominions.” It was situated near the source of the Aesepus, high up on Mount Ida. William Vaux was able to note in 1877 that a village in the neighborhood still bore the name of Eski Skisepje, which in Turkish corresponds to “Palea-Skepsis.”
Dr. Andreas David Mordtmann, the discoverer of the settlement, is quoted on his discovery by Dr. Archibald Ross Colquhoun in a reference by Vaux.
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I did discover a most ancient city with its acropolis, towers and walls built of hewn stone, and furnished with four gates. The antiquity of the place was manifested by an oak having fixed its roots in the wall, and by its trunk having grown to a girth of 530 centimeters (about 17 feet). On reference to Strabo, I first became aware that I had discovered, probably, the most ancient ruin in Asia Minor, for I hold this can be no other than Palae-Scepsis. |
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Skepsis
The later Skepsis was about sixty stadia (7.5 miles) lower down Mount Ida from Palae-Skepsis. This later town of Scepsis is memorable for the discovery there, during the time of Sulla, of the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, which had been buried by the illiterate relations of one Neleus (a pupil of Aristotle and friend of Theophrastus), so that they would not be carried off by Attalus I, who was then founding the Library of Pergamum.
Several times in its history, the citizens of Skepsis were forced to move elsewhere. When citizens of surrounding cities were forced to migrate to Troy, citizens of Skepsis were also forced to relocate. The city was again evacuated while the residents of surrounding cities were made to move to Alexandria Troas.
Certain traditions hold that Saint Cornelius the Centurion, the first Gentile convert to Christianity, became the first bishop of Skepsis in the early days of Christianity.
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