EPIGRAPHICA NUMISMATICA*
MONUMENTAL NYMPHAEA ON ANCIENT COINS
Roman fountains, the most ubiquitous monument of the Mediterranean Basin, did not attract much scholarly interest until lately. For many
years, archaeologists reported the discovery of ruined structures to which
they gave the name nymphaeum. This they did in many instances admittedly not having sufficient evidence for the identification. The same kind of
lag and lack of proof occurred in numismatic research. This was no
coincidence: both the archaeologist' and the numismatist were hamstrung
by the same difficulties. A Roman nymphaeum has a peculiar protean
quality: in a ruined state it can easily be mistaken for an entirely different
building, a gate, a triumphal arch, a free-standing exedra, a scene-wall, and
even a harbor building. Roman architecture was a derivative art: it
borrowed from earlier forms and plagiarized itself. It adopted and/or
adapted apses, exedra, arches, niches, pediments, projecting aediculae
made up of columns and broken entablatures-there is no good translation of verkropfte Taburnakelarchitektur-and used these elements to
* Only "Toli" Lewis, who helped me so cheerfully and so often with Architectura
Numismatica, will understand this title. He knows also how much I owe to others, especially
my good friend and collaborator Martin Price (infra, n. 2) and the generous committee
members of the American Council of Learned Societies and of the Graduate Research Fund
of New York University.
1 There are innumerable examples of the archaeologist's dilemma; vide the preliminary reports of the so-called nymphaeum at Aphrodisias where the tentative identification
was said to be "uncertain" (AJA 78 [1974] 127) or characterized as the "once labelled nymphaeum" (AnatSt xxv [1975] 18), and now (1977) my good friend and colleague Kenan Erim
writes me that "upon more extensive excavation [it] is indeed proving to be part of a thermal
establishment, not a nymphaeum..., but we briefly explored a nymphaeum outside the city
wall in 1968.... " Note also the troubled title of a report in the Bulletin archdologique du
Vexinfranqais 7/8 (1971/72) 168-173 by M. Manson and W. Noel "La construction enter6e
de Saclas (Essone), cave, bassin ou sanctuaire?"
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