CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

The identity of the individual or deity represented in herms of this class has confounded scholars for nearly two centuries. Known from more than fifty examples, the type shows a youthful figure wearing a scaly aegis, a helmet adorned with ram’s horns, with the check-pieces fastened beneath the chin and a diadem whose ends fall onto the shoulders. While previously thought to depict either Mars or a Hellenistic ruler, the most current scholarship accepts that Alexander the Great is the intended subject. On account of the ram’s horns (here lost; a symbol of Macedonia) and the large extant corpus of herms, thus indicating that the figure depicted must have been important to Roman patrons, A. Peña and D. Ojeda (op. cit.) conclude that Alexander is the only possible subject.