Living with gods

Around the Gallo-Roman sanctuary of the Gué-de-Sciaux

The pillar of Yzeures : gods and heroes in the Turons’ territory

The first level of this imposing structure of 29 feet high is ornamented on its faces with representations of four male gods.

Jupiter appears on the first side in a triumphant attitude. He is accompanied by an eagle and is brandishing the thunderbolt in his right hand.

Vulcan is the god of fire, forge and blacksmiths. He is leaning on a pair of pincers and an anvil; he has an axe in the right hand.

Mars, the god of war, is next to him. A sword is hanging on his right side; he is brandishing a lance in his right hand and a shield in the left one.

Apollo, the god of music, poetry, divination and medicine is represented on the fourth face. He is wearing a long dress and is holding a zither in the left hand and a plectrum in the right one. On his left is a griffon.

The second level stages heroes: Hercules delivering Hesione, Perseus delivering Andromeda, and illustrates the fight of Mars and Minerva against the Giants.

On the third level, Leda, the Etolian king Thestios’s daughter, appears in the middle of the composition, associated with the swan, which was no other than Jupiter. They are framed by the Dioscures, the twins Castor and Pollux, Leda’s sons, symbols of eternity.

The Yzeures pillar looks like funeral monuments known in the Occident; however its iconography refers to a monument celebrating the Emperor and the Roman power. On the top, a statue of Jupiter is a hypothetical restitution.

It may have been erected at the end of the 2nd century AC or during the first part of the 3rd one, according to its oriental influences.

An altar and a polygonal temple have been erected around the pillar. It could have been the edifice offered to Minerva by the two Marcus Petronus, in the name of their father, as it is suggested by the inscription discovered in Yzeures-sur-Creuse.