Roman Lead Sol Invictus "Sun-God" Plaque
circa 270-300 A.D. time of Roman emperors Aurelian and Probus
Measures approximately 9.0 x 7.7 x 0.2 centimeters
Weighs 126.35 grams

This plaque is from circa the time of Aurelian, most likely, having worked with coins from that time period. There are coin designs of emperor Aurelian, whom was emperor 270-275 A.D. that are similar to those depicted on this plaque. At the very top, you have Sol Invictus, the sun-god or Roman religious in a facing quadriga (four horse chariot). Right below Sol Invictus, to right, there is a person on a horse, likely emperor Aurelian on horseback standing left with a figure crowning him with wreath.  Right below the emperor on horseback, it looks like the Dioscuri twins (Gemini) facing, side by side. There is a goddess at the very center, perhaps Cybele or Luna. To left of the goddess is a soldier with a spear and shield who wears a helmet, standing right, with a figure on horse to right o f him. Below that is what looks like a dolphin, or perhaps a fish, most likely a dolphin (as it was sacred to Apollo). At center is a firgure in front of altar, which looks to have 2 fish atop it. To left of that altar is a bust of Harpokrates, the Greek version of Horus, or Anubis. To right of Harpokrates it looks like the Satyr Marsyas being flayed (skineed) while hanging from tree. Vase at center below. An amazing piece that features a great many 

Provenance: From private collection in the United States of America.
Ownership History: From private collection in the United States, bought in private sale in the United States of America.

 You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.  

or

In late Greek mythology as developed in Ptolemaic Alexandria , Harpocrates (Ancient Greek: Ἁρποκράτης) is the god of silence. Harpocrates was adapted by the Greeks from the Egyptian child god Horus . To the ancient Egyptians , Horus represented the newborn Sun, rising each day at dawn. When the Greeks conquered Egypt under Alexander the Great , they transformed the Egyptian Horus into their Hellenistic god known as Harpocrates, a rendering from Egyptian Har-pa-khered or Heru-pa-khered (meaning "Horus the Child").

Anubis (/sˈnuːbəə/ or / sˈnjuːbəə/;^[2] Ancient Greek : Ἄνουβις) is the Greek name of a jackal-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion .

Like many ancient Egyptian deities , Anubis assumed different roles in various contexts. Depicted as a protector of graves as early as the First Dynasty (c. 3100 – c. 2890 BC), Anubis was also an embalmer . By the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055 – 1650 BC), Anubis was replaced by Osiris in his role as Lord of the underworld . One of his prominent roles was as a god who ushered souls into the afterlife . He attended the weighing scale during the "Weighing of the Heart," in which it was determined whether a soul would be allowed to enter the realm of the dead. Despite being one of the most ancient and "one of the most frequently depicted and mentioned gods" in the Egyptian pantheon , however, Anubis played almost no role in Egyptian myths .

Anubis was depicted in black, a color that symbolized both rebirth and the discoloration of the corpse after embalming. Anubis is associated with Wepwawet (also called Upuaut), another Egyptian god portrayed with a dog's head or in canine form, but with grey or white fur. Historians assume that the two figures were eventually combined. Anubis' female counterpart is Anput . His daughter is the serpent goddess Kebechet .

A quadriga (Latin quadri-, four, and iugum, yoke) is a car or chariot drawn by four horses abreast (the Roman Empire 's equivalent of Ancient Greek tethrippon ). It was raced in the Ancient Olympic Games and other contests. It is represented in profile as the chariot of gods and heroes on Greek vases and in bas-relief . The quadriga was adopted in ancient Roman chariot racing . Quadrigas were emblems of triumph; Victory and Fame often are depicted as the triumphant woman driving it. In classical mythology , the quadriga is the chariot of the gods; Apollo was depicted driving his quadriga across the heavens, delivering daylight and dispersing the night. The word quadriga

Sol Invictus ("Unconquered Sun") was the official sun god of the later Roman Empire and a patron of soldiers. In 274 the Roman emperor Aurelian made it an official cult alongside the traditional Roman cults. Scholars disagree whether the new deity was a refoundation of the ancient Latin cult of Sol , a revival of the cult of Elagabalus or completely new.The god was favored by emperors after Aurelian and appeared on their coins until Constantine .The last inscription referring to Sol Invictus dates to 387 AD and there were enough devotees in the 5th century that Augustine found it necessary to preach against them. It is commonly claimed that the date of 25 December for Christmas was selected in order to correspond with the Roman festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun", but this view is challenged

Invictus as epithet

Invictus ("Unconquered, Invincible") was an epithet for several deities of classical Roman religion , including the supreme deity Jupiter , the war god Mars , Hercules , Apollo and Silvanus .^[8] Invictus was in use from the 3rd century BC, and was well-established as a cult title when applied to Mithras from the 2nd century onwards. It has a clear association^[vague] with solar deities and solar monism; as such, it became the preferred epithet of Rome's traditional Sol and the novel, short-lived Roman state cult to Elagabalus , an Emesan solar deity who headed Rome's official pantheon under his namesake emperor .

The earliest dated use of Sol invictus is in a dedication from Rome, AD 158. Another, stylistically dated to the 2nd century AD, is inscribed on a Roman phalera : "inventori lucis soli invicto augusto" (to the contriver of light, sol invictus augustus ). Here "augustus" is most likely a further epithet of Sol as "august" (an elevated being, divine or close to divinity), though the association of Sol with the Imperial house would have been unmistakable and was already established in iconography and stoic monism. These are the earliest attested examples of Sol as invictus, but in AD 102 a certain Anicetus restored a shrine of Sol; Hijmans (2009, 486, n. 22) is tempted "to link Anicetus' predilection for Sol with his name, the Latinized form of the Greek word ἀνίκητος, which means invictus".

Cybele  (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubeleyan Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; Greek : Kybele,) was an originally Anatolian mother goddess . Little is known of her oldest Anatolian cults, other than her association with mountains, hawks and lions. She may have been Phrygia 's state deity; her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from around the 6th century BCE.

In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia , her Minoan equivalent Rhea , and the Corn-Mother goddess Demeter . Some city-states, notably Athens , evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a transgender or eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis , who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains , town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.

In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman State adopted and developed a particular form of her cult, and claimed her conscription as a key religious component in their success against Carthage during the Punic Wars . Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas . With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanised forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship.

In Greek and Roman mythology , Castor and Pollux or Polydeuces  were twin brothers, together known as the Dioscuri. Their mother was Leda , but Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus , the king of Sparta, and Pollux the divine son of Zeus , who seduced or raped Leda in the guise of a swan (Greek myths concerning divine sex are often vague on the issue of female consent). Though accounts of their birth are varied, they are sometimes said to have been born from an egg, along with their twin sisters Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra .

In Latin the twins are also known as the Gemini or Castores. When Castor was killed, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin to keep them together, and they were transformed into the constellation Gemini . The pair was regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St. Elmo's fire , and were also associated with horsemanship.

They are sometimes called the Tyndaridae or Tyndarids, later seen as a reference to their father and stepfather Tyndareus .

Read more about the Dioscuri here

In Greek mythology , the satyr Marsyas (gr. Μαρσύας) is a central figure in two stories involving music: in one, he picked up the double flute (aulos) that had been abandoned by Athena and played it; in the other, he challenged Apollo to a contest of music and lost his hide and life. In Antiquity , literary sources often emphasise the hubris of Marsyas and the justice of his punishment.

In one strand of modern comparative mythography , the domination of Marsyas by Apollo is regarded as an example of myth that recapitulates a supposed supplanting by the Olympian pantheon of an earlier "Pelasgian" religion of chthonic heroic ancestors and nature spirits . Marsyas was a devoté of the ancient Mother Goddess Rhea /Cybele, and his episodes are situated by the mythographers in Celaenae (or Kelainai) in Phrygia (today, the town of Dinar in Turkey ), at the main source of the Meander (the river Menderes ).

When a genealogy was applied to him, Marsyas was the son of Olympus (son of Heracles and Euboea , daughter of Thespius ), or of Oeagrus , or of Hyagnis. Olympus was, alternatively, said to be Marsyas' son or pupil.

Among the Romans, Marsyas was cast as the inventor of augury and a proponent of free speech (the philosophical concept παρρησία, "parrhesia") and "speaking truth to power." The earliest known representation of Marsyas at Rome stood for at least 300 years in the Roman Forum near or in the comitium , the space for political activity. He was depicted as a silen , carrying a wineskin on his left shoulder and raising his right arm. The statue was regarded as an indicium libertatis, a symbol of liberty, and was associated with demonstrations of the plebs , or common people. It often served as a sort of kiosk

Marsyas served as a minister for Dionysus or Bacchus, who was identified by the Romans with their Father Liber , one of three deities in the Aventine Triad , along with Ceres and Libera (identified with Persephone ). These gods were regarded as concerning themselves specially with the welfare of the plebs. The freedom that the ecstasies of Dionysian worship represented took on a political meaning in Rome as the libertas that distinguished the free from the enslaved. The Liberalia , celebrated March 17 in honor of Liber, was a time of speaking freely, as the poet and playwright Gnaeus Naevius declared: "At the Liberalia games we enjoy free speech." Naevius, however, was arrested for his invectivess

Marsyas was sometimes considered a king and contemporary of Faunus , portrayed by Vergil as a native Italian ruler at the time of Aeneas . Servius , in his commentary on the Aeneid , says that Marsyas sent Faunus envoys who showed techniques of augury to the Italians. The plebeian gens of the Marcii claimed that they were descended from Marsyas. Gaius Marcius Rutilus , who rose to power from the plebs , is credited with having dedicated the statue that stood in the Roman forum, most likely in 294 BC, when he became the first plebeian censor and added the cognomen Censorinus to the family name . Marcius Rutilus was also among the first plebeian augurs, co-optedd into their college in 300, and so the mythical teacher of augury was an apt figure to represent him.

In 213 BC, two years after suffering one of the worst military defeats in its history at the Battle of Cannae , Rome was in the grip of a reactionary fear that led to excessive religiosity . The games in the Greek manner for Apollo senate , which the senate and elected officials would control. The prophecy was attributed to Gnaeus Marcius, reputed to be a descendant of Marsyas. The games were duly carried out, but the Romans failed to bring the continuing wars with the Carthaginians to a victorious conclusion until they heeded a second prophecy and imported the worship of the Phrygian Great Mother , whose song Marsyas was said to have composed; the song had further relevance in that it was also credited by the Phrygians with protecting them from invaders. The power relations between Marsyas and Apollo reflected the continuing Struggle of the Orders between the elite and the common people, expressed in political terms by optimates and populares . The arrest of Naevius for exercising free speech also took place during this period.

Another descendant of Marcius Rutilus, L. Marcius Censorinus , issued coins depicting the statue of Marsyas, at a time when the augural college was the subject of political controversy during the Sullan civil wars of the 80s BC ^[32] On the coin, Marsyas wears a Phrygian cap or pilleus, an emblem of liberty. This Marcius Censorinus was killed by Sulla and his head displayed outside Praeneste . Sulla's legislative program attempted to curtail power invested in the people, particularly restricting the powers of the plebeian tribunes , and to restore the dominance of the senate and the privileges of patricians .

Marsyas was also claimed as the eponym of the Marsi , one of the ancient peoples of Italy. The Social War of 91–88 BC , in which the Italian peoples fought to advance their status as citizens under Roman rule, is sometimes called the Marsic War from the leadership of the Marsi. The Roman coloniae Paestum and Alba Fucens , along with other Italian cities, set up their own statues of Marsyas as assertions of their political status.

During the Principate , Marsyas became a subversive symbol in opposition to Augustus , whose propaganda systematically associated him with the silens’ torturer Apollo. Augustus's daughter Julia held nocturnal assemblies at the statue, and crowned it to defy her father. The poet Ovid, who was ultimately exiled by Augustus, twice tells the story of Marsyas's flaying by Apollo, in his epic Metamorphoses and in the Fasti , the calendrical poem left unfinished at his death. Although the immediate cause of Ovid's exile remains one of literary history's great mysteries, Ovid himself says that a "poem and transgression" were contributing factors; his poetry tests the boundaries of permissible free speech during Rome's transition from republic to imperial monarchy .

Pliny indicates that in the 1st century AD, the painting Marsyas religatus ("Marsyas Bound"), by Zeuxis of Heraclea , could be viewed at the Temple of Concordia in Rome. The goddess Concordia , like the Greek Harmonia , was a personification of both musical harmony as it was understood in antiquity , and of social order , as expressed by Cicero 's phrase concordia ordinum. The apparent incongruity of exhibiting the tortured silen in a temple devoted to harmony has been interpreted in modern scholarship as a warning against criticizing authority.