Blog post by Margaret Thorpe volunteer at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Shrewsbury Museum and Art gallery has one of only two known Jupiter columns in the UK. It is not complete, but the two surviving columns – the other is in the Corinium museum in Cirencester – complement each other. Jupiter was the chief god of the Romans. He held supreme power and was associated with the sky, storms and lightning.
Copyright Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Copyright Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
Copyright Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery
The column, found at Wroxeter in Shropshire in the mid-19th century, consists of three cylindrical blocks of stone, totalling about six metres in height. The top one bears the relief of a Maenad, a female worshipper of the god Bacchus, holding a musical instrument in each hand and dancing. The central drum bears the relief of Bacchus himself, the god of wine, holding a staff and with his leopard at his side. All three drums are covered with scales, which may represent the bark of a tree. It has been suggested but not proven that this design may mark the survival of a totem pole from the Celtic Iron Age.
The column may have included a further one or more blocks of stone, as surviving examples in Europe often reached ten metres in height. The column would also have had a Corinthian capital made of stone with a statue of Jupiter on the top, as well as either an octagonal or four sided base.
The Corinium museum possesses a Corinthian capital from a Jupiter column with decoration carved on all four sides, depicting Bacchus, Silenus with a drinking horn, Lycurgus king of Thrace and Ambrosia playing a drum. On top of the capital would have been a statue of Jupiter, which would have taken one of three forms; either Jupiter would have been shown standing with a wheel, as the sky god, or on horseback wielding a thunderbolt and trampling a snake-tailed human underfoot or finally sitting on a throne. In Shrewsbury museum an artist’s reconstruction shows the version of Jupiter on horseback. Neither of the two columns has a base which survives.
Nearly all Roman towns had a temple in the forum dedicated to Jupiter or to his triad of deities, which included Juno, his consort, and Minerva. So did this column stand in the forum at Wroxeter? Roger White in his guidebook to Wroxeter suggests that the temple was elsewhere and places it possibly beneath the Victorian farm buildings adjoining the forum.
Link to the collections database column page:
https://www.shropshiremuseums.org.uk/collections/getrecord/CCM_SHYMS__A_1994_001_20
Margaret Thorpe 2023
