Golden Statues in Greek and Latin Literature

Golden statues, either made of gold or gilded—the distinction is not always made clear —were exceptionally popular among many of the peoples of the ancient world and it is not difficult to see why. Easily worked, perennially bright and practically indestructible, gold surely had something of the divine about it. In Egypt for instance gold's qualities made it the flesh of the sungod; just like the sun itself, the hotter the fire, the purer and brighter the metal glowed. In Greece, too, gold had divine associations and by virtue of its indestructibility acquired a symbolical value far beyond its actual worth; practically anything that is worth having and keeping is ‘golden’ as far as Pindar is concerned. Even for such a hard-headed race as the Romans gold seems to have had an aura of magic about it, at least in early times. The clause in the Twelve Tables mentioned by Cicero, prohibiting the burial of any gold with the dead, except for their false teeth, surely springs as much from an instinct for the metal's mysterious properties as from any parsimonious desire to control funerary expenditure.