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The Nile
Unknown · Roman, late 2nd to early 3rd century AD (c. 193-222, or Hadrianic)
A river reclines on a sphinx. The god is half lying, naked but for a cloak over his legs, one foot resting on a crocodile, the remains of a horn of plenty in his hand. Around and over him swarm about fifteen small naked boys, wingless cupids, who wrestle with crocodiles and clamber over a hippopotamus. On the sides of the base a Nile landscape unrolls in low relief: a crocodile, a hippo, an ibis, a mongoose, papyrus thickets and a cow on the shore. This is the Nile itself, in the form Roman collectors loved.
The sculpture is a reduced version of a famous type, best known from the colossal Nile in the Vatican, where sixteen children stand for the sixteen cubits of a perfect flood. Here the composition is squeezed into half a metre of marble, probably for a garden around the year 200. Much has been restored: the head and shoulders, several limbs and most of the children's heads are modern marble, and the piece was reassembled again in 2014. It was seized in Italy for the Musée Napoléon in 1803, and sits here as a Roman tribute to the river that made Egypt.
Did You Know? The little boys climbing over the river god stand for the cubits of the flood; the famous Vatican Nile has sixteen of them, one for each cubit of a perfect year.
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