Marcellus as Hermes Logios

myminifactory

This sculpture originates from the original marble housed at The Louvre (MR 315). Initially believed to represent Germanicus, it's now widely accepted that the work depicts Marcellus the Younger, a Roman consul and nephew of Augustus. The statue portrays him as an orator in the pose of the Hermes Logios, the god of eloquence. It was executed two years after Marcellus' death, likely on his uncle's personal order as a funerary monument. The Hermes Logios (also formerly known as Mercury the Orator) is a Hellenistic sculpture of the god Hermes in his form of a psychopompus, a conductor or conveyor of souls through the underworld. The tortoise beneath it recalls the invention of the lyre (Hermes made the lyre from a tortoise shell).