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User / DameBoudicca / The Gorgon head (Explored)
Rebecca Bugge / 5,958 items
ⓒRebecca Bugge, All Rights Reserved
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This was once the pediment over the temple - the temple dedicated to Sulis Minerva. It was discovered when the Pump Room was built in 1790, and an additional piece was found in 1982. It has now been pieced together to give a good idea of how it looked like. It was not made by local artists but craftsmen from Gaul, and it dates to the first century A.D. It is most often identified as a Gorgon's head (the goddess Sulis was identified with the Roman Minerva, who in turn was identified with the Greek Athena, hence the connection), and that it is clearly a male head (where the classical Gorgon was female) has been explained with local Celtic traditions got mixed with the Roman/Greek ones. But it has also been suggested that this is not a Gorgon head at all, but the face of a water god (not an unknown concept in British art, see for example the great plate in the Mildenhall treasure).

The temple housed the cult statue of Sulis Minerva, and is only one of two truly classical temples known in Britian.

The waters at Bath were very popular already in Roman times, and they in their turn took after the Celts who had built a shrine dedicated to the goddess Sulis. The Romans built both temples and baths and called the town Aquae Sulis (the water of Sulis).

According to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle the baths were destroyed in the 6th century. But not totally - the spring continued to draw attention to its healing powers, and it is now housed in a 18th century building, one of the central features of Bath. And extensive archaeological research to the Roman remains has also been made.
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Dates
  • Taken: Jun 6, 2011
  • Uploaded: Sep 1, 2012
  • Updated: Apr 12, 2017