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Altar from Thera Dedicated to Dionysos for Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II
Unknown · c. 164-162 BC
A round marble altar, waist high, carved with four ox skulls joined by thick garlands, the standard decoration of a Greek altar, where the garland recalls the flowers hung on the beast before sacrifice. Between two of the skulls, above the garland, runs the inscription that gives the altar its interest. It reads: The people of Thera, on behalf of King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra, the Mother-loving Gods, and their children, to Dionysos. The altar was broken into three pieces and mended, and the gaps have been filled.
Thera, today Santorini, was a Ptolemaic naval base in the Aegean, and its citizens dedicated this altar around 164 BC to honour their protectors in Egypt. Ptolemy VI Philometor and his sister and wife Cleopatra II ruled jointly, and the choice of Dionysos was a compliment: the dynasty claimed the god as an ancestor. The stone is a small monument of Hellenistic diplomacy, a Greek island praying for an Egyptian king. It reached the Louvre at a Paris sale in October 1818, when the museum was buying the great collections of eighteenth century diplomats and travellers, and it stands here beside the portraits of the kings it names.
Did You Know? Ptolemy and Cleopatra were brother and sister as well as husband and wife, and the altar calls them the gods who love their mother.
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