Risum teneatis, amici? The pygmy and the crane on a strigil ring from Roman Dacia

The paper discusses a unique piece of Roman toreutics of great artistic value: a fragmentary strigil ring discovered in 2024 during metal-detecting activities at Ocna Mureș, Alba County, Romania. Although the Roman settlement at Ocna Mureș has hardly been investigated through systematic archaeological excavations, it played an important role in salt extraction and its transportation along the Mureș River, being connected to the auxiliary fort of ala I Batavorum at Războieni-Cetate in the province of Dacia Superior. The figural part depicts the Homeric myth of the battle between the pygmies and the cranes (geranomachy), reinterpreted in a Roman context. The scene has a long tradition of representation, spanning from Archaic Greece to the Late Antique period. The pygmy from Ocna Mureș reflects the broader changes and new artistic developments that occurred during the Hellenistic period. The perception of the image also changed: from the initial portrayal of exotic, short-limbed people, the Romans came to associate pygmies with the grotesque, viewing them as a non-human Other whose purpose was to provoke laughter and, by doing so, to protect against demons. This paper traces the iconographic evolution of pygmy representations in Roman art, their connection with the myth of Hercules, and focuses on the uniqueness of the Ocna Mureș scene, as well as the apotropaic function of such images on bathing instruments. It also discusses relevant analogies: a small group of strigil rings with complex figural depictions, found mostly in graves from the regions of Thrace and Macedonia. Among these finds, the object is unique and has no known parallels within this category. A production date from the second half of the 1 st century to the early or mid-2 nd century AD, possibly in a Campanian or provincial workshop (Thrace, Macedonia), is proposed

Antique · Battle · Mythology · Object (grammar) · Roman art · Settlement (finance) · Ancient and Medieval Archaeology Studies · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies