Busacca Gallery

LYCURGUS AND AMBROSIA: A FINE ROMAN MOSAIC, c. 2nd century AD. The mosaic depicting the myth of Lycurgus and Ambrosia within a running wave border. Lycurgus depicted in the act of killing Ambrosia with an axe as she is being transformed into a grape vine. 165 x 198 cm. From the eastern Mediterranean region. Complete and all original. Provenance: Good and legal provenance with import documents provided to buyer. Old American collection, New York, acquired 1988. French private collection,Lycurgus of Thrace, an antagonist of Dionysus, forbade the cult of Dionysus, whom he drove from Thrace, and in revenge was driven mad by the god. In his fit of insanity he killed his son, whom he mistook for a stock of mature ivy, and the nymph Ambrosia, who was transformed into the grapevine. There is a similar mosaic from Herculanium depicting the same myth now in the Staatliche Museum in Munich. Staatliche Lycurgus and Ambrosia.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia

In ancient Greek mythology, ambrosia is sometimes the food or drink of the Greek gods (or demigods), often depicted as conferring ageless immortality upon whoever consumed it. It was brought to the gods in Olympus by doves, so it may have been thought of in the Homeric tradition as a kind of divine exhalation of the Earth.

Ambrosia is sometimes depicted in ancient art as distributed by a nymph labeled with that name. In the myth of Lycurgus, an opponent to the wine god Dionysus, violence committed against Ambrosia turns her into a grapevine.



Ambrosia is very closely related to the gods' other form of sustenance, nectar. The two terms may not have originally been distinguished; though in Homer's poems nectar is usually the drink and ambrosia the food of the gods; it was with ambrosia Hera "cleansed all defilement from her lovely flesh", and with ambrosia Athena prepared Penelope in her sleep, so that when she appeared for the final time before her suitors, the effects of years had been stripped away, and they were inflamed with passion at the sight of her. On the other hand, in Alcman, nectar is the food, and in Sappho and Anaxandrides, ambrosia is the drink. When a character in Aristophanes' Knights says, "I dreamed the goddess poured ambrosia over your head—out of a ladle," the homely and realistic ladle brings the ineffable moment to ground with a thump.

The consumption of ambrosia was typically reserved for divine beings. Upon his assumption into immortality on Olympus, Heracles is given ambrosia by Athena, while the hero Tydeus is denied the same thing when the goddess discovers him eating human brains. In one version of the myth of Tantalus, part of Tantalus' crime is that after tasting ambrosia himself, he attempts to steal some away to give to other mortals. Those who consume ambrosia typically had not blood in their veins, but ichor.

Both nectar and ambrosia are fragrant, and may be used as perfume: in the Odyssey Menelaus and his men are disguised as seals in untanned seal skins, "and the deadly smell of the seal skins vexed us sore; but the goddess saved us; she brought ambrosia and put it under our nostrils." Homer speaks of ambrosial raiment, ambrosial locks of hair, even the gods' ambrosial sandals.



Among later writers, ambrosia has been so often used with generic meanings of "delightful liquid" that such late writers as Athenaeus, Paulus and Dioscurides employ it as a technical terms in contexts of cookery, medicine, and botany. Pliny used the term in connection with different plants, as did early herbalists.

Additionally, some modern ethnomycologists, such as Danny Staples, identify ambrosia with the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria: "it was the food of the gods, their ambrosia, and nectar was the pressed sap of its juices", Staples asserts.

W. H. Roscher thinks that both nectar and ambrosia were kinds of honey, in which case their power of conferring immortality would be due to the supposed healing and cleansing powers of honey, which is in fact anti-septic, and because fermented honey (mead) preceded wine as an entheogen in the Aegean world; on some Minoan seals, goddesses were represented with bee faces (compare Merope and Melissa).

Propolis, a hive product also known for its sweet fruity taste, is used as a remedy for sore throats, and there are many modern proprietary medicines which use honey as an ingredient.





The concept of an immortality drink is attested in at least two Indo-European areas: Greek and Sanskrit. The Greek ἀμβροσία (ambrosia) is semantically linked to the Sanskrit (amṛta) as both words denote a drink or food that gods use to achieve immortality. The two words appear to be derived from the same Indo-European form *ṇ-mṛ-to- : immortal (n- : negative prefix from which the prefix a- in both Greek and Sanskrit are derived; mṛ : zero grade of *mer- : to die; and -to- : adjectival suffix). A semantically similar etymology exists for nectar, the beverage of the gods presumed to be a compound of the PIE roots *nek-, "death", and -*tar, "overcoming".

However, the connection that has derived ambrosia from the Greek prefix a- ("not") and the word brotos ("mortal"), hence the food or drink of the immortals, has been questioned as coincidental by some modern linguists.