Dying Gaul

Nobody grasped death the way Homer did — the way a human being turns into a corpse, or a thing, as Homer wrote, “dearer to the vultures” than to loved ones, and “dropping to the world of night.”

Homer gives us death replacing life both in an instant and millimeter by millimeter, and in his poetry we glean spears piercing armor, rending fabric, entering flesh, penetrating viscera, severing veins, piercing bone, marrow giving way, swords going all the way through bodies into the earth below.

Homer does this with no romanticizing distance, redemption, thunderbolts, whooshes of resurrection, or even florid poetry.

Nothing, just unalterable descriptive direct detailed death..

Which brings us back to Dying Gaul. 

Some art historians and scholars see in this sculpture the last heroic act of a noble solider gallantly rising to try to fight again, defying fate, staving off death, elevated by this last heroic effort.

Others say,

The statue serves both as a reminder of the Celts’ defeat, thus demonstrating the might of the people who defeated them, and a memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries.

The statue may also provide evidence to corroborate ancient accounts of the fighting style—Diodorus Siculus reported that “Some of them have iron breastplates or chainmail while others fight naked”Polybius wrote an evocative account of Galatian tactics against a Roman army at the Battle of Telamon of 225 BC:

“The Insubres and the Boii wore trousers and light cloaks, but the Gaesatae, in their love of glory and defiant spirit, had thrown off their garments and taken up their position in front of the whole army naked and wearing nothing but their arms… The appearance of these naked warriors was a terrifying spectacle, for they were all men of splendid physique and in the prime of life.”

The Roman historian Livy recorded that the Celts of Asia Minor fought naked and their wounds were plain to see on the whiteness of their bodies.

The Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus regarded this as a foolish tactic: “Our enemies fight naked. What injury could their long hair, their fierce looks, their clashing arms do us?

These are mere symbols of barbarian boastfulness.” , 

Suprising, in college , I heard a Persian music scholar say the same of Jim Morrison, from the Doors.

The depiction of this particular Galatian as naked may also have been intended to lend him the dignity of heroic nudity

It was not infrequent for Greek warriors to be likewise depicted as heroic nudes, as exemplified by the pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Aphaeaat Aegina.

The message conveyed by the sculpture, as H. W. Janson comments, is that “they knew how to die, barbarians that they were.”

Jerry Saltz , was a reporter who didn’t agree. “I don’t see this at all. In fact,

I think that this is what I’d call the Roman interpretation of this sculpture.

Roman aesthetics revel in melodrama, theatrics, power, exaggerated form, outward emotion, even Mannerism.

Bodies are often deformed, poses are flashy, faces sometimes wildly expressive, narratives pronounced.

Which makes sense for an empire like the Roman one, with over  two million soldiers, a Roman population estimated at more than a million with half the inhabitants slaves.

While its forms might have emulated Greek art the power projected was meant to be Egyptian — all-powerful, unassailable, Imperial.

The Romans had beaten back everyone, Egyptians, Asians, North Africa, Iberia, France, England, and even defanged the Greeks even after Alexander the Great took over the known world three centuries before.

That’s absolute power.”

Saltz noting,”But while Dying Gaul is a Roman copy, its real meaning is buried deeper and is deeply Greek. Unlike Rome, Greek art was involved with gravitas, grander, philosophical form, restrained sensuousness.

Theatrics were for the theater. In Dying Gaul I see a soul submitting to the physical and profound mysteries at hand — someone in the act of becoming a thing, “not there,” recognizing this, lost, enveloped by death.

This takes away hope, leaving only the eternal moment.

This is not the grand drama of a man rising mightily to inner crescendos against death; it’s pathos, pain, sadness without sunlight, someone cut off from everything.

Nothing heroic is happening here, no last burst of vengeance or Roman self-sacrifice, nothing amasses here against death.

Instead, in encountering the sculpture, we are wrapped in death.

Absence telescopes into something withdrawn, not available to us. Epigonos has his figure look down, obscuring his features from us, making him less a person, more abstract.

With no drama, no clues, it exists almost in the same other world as its subject. “

Personally, I think Saltz is missing something.

The Dying Galatian is thought to have been rediscovered in the early 17th century during some excavations for the foundations of the Villa Ludovisi, then a suburban villa in Rome.

It was first recorded in a 1623 inventory of the collections of the powerful Ludovisi family.

The villa was built in the area of the ancient Gardens of Sallust where, when the Ludovisi property was built over in the late 19th century, many other antiquities were discovered,most notably the “Ludovisi Throne“.

By 1633 it was in the Ludovisi Palazzo Grande on the Pincio. Pope Clement XII acquired it for the Capitoline collections

. It was then taken by Napoleon’s forces under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino, and displayed with other Italian works of art in the Louvre Museumuntil 1816, when it was returned to Rome.