Rubens's painting of this story depicts Hercules and the dog on the beach, with the dog's mouth stained. (Some ancient sources attribute the myth to Melqart, a Tyrian deity identified with Heracles.)
Seeing this, the nymph demanded a gown of the same color, and the result was the origin of purple dye. The dog bit a sea snail, and the snail's blood dyed the dog's mouth Tyrian purple. In Pollux's story, Hercules and his dog were walking on the beach on their way to court a nymph named Tyro. The painting shows a scene from an origin myth in the Onomasticon (a collection of names, similar to a thesaurus) of Julius Pollux, a 2nd-century Graeco-Roman sophist. A Phoenician coin depicting the legend of the dog biting the sea snail
0 kommentar(er)
