Hercules,

2nd century CE

This tiny statuette was fashioned from blue chalcedony, a hard, semiprecious stone. Hercules strides rapidly forward, his head raised and turned to the left. The skin of the Nemean lion, the subject of one of his twelve labors, is draped over his forearms and clutched by the hero’s hands. The head of the lion hangs from his left forearm, the lower half broken off. The modeling of Hercules’s muscular body is both subtle and emphatic, with rounded masses trailing into faint lines of sinewy tension, deepened and varied by the light passing through the translucent stone. Unlike many Roman chalcedony carvings that functioned as handles or amulets, this statuette may instead have been offered to the gods and placed on display in a domestic shrine.