a substitute for the person, virtually embodying the identity of the seal’s owner. Polycrates sought to avert
the ill will of the gods by putting himself, in the form of his seal, out of harm’s way. But the gods’ purpose
cannot be deflected – this is standard Greek thinking and is a recurrent theme of Herodotus’ Histories –
and seal and owner are miraculously reunited before the gods’ punishment of Polycrates for his earlier
misdeeds can be carried out. Herodotus’ story is very detailed, and he tells us nearly everything there is
to know about Polycrates’ seal: It is made of green jasper set in gold. He even tells us the name of the
craftsman who created the seal, where he came from, and what his father’s name was: Theodorus of
Samos, the son of Telecles. The one thing Herodotus does not tell us is the nature of the device on
Polycrates’ seal. It might have been a horse or a ship or a SATYR or any one of the hundreds of other
devices that we find engraved on Archaic gems. But Herodotus does not tell us, either because he does
not know or because it is of no particular importance to the story. That is because there is no necessary
connection, not even a symbolic one, between device and owner. This lack of any explicit connection
between the device and the owner actually enhances the potency of the seal. Just as, today, in order to
thwart identity theft we are urged to devise passwords that contain no personal references, if it were easy
to predict what a person might choose as a seal device, it would also be easy to create successful
forgeries, so that the very arbitrariness of the device makes its ability to stand for the person of the owner
seem almost magical. The fact that the nature of Polycrates’ device was not known to later Greeks made it
possible for further invention to take place: In a newly discovered epigram, first published in 2001, the
third-century poet Posidippus claims that the device on Polycrates’ seal was a poet’s lyre, suggesting that
the emblem of Posidippus’ own craft marked the most highly prized possession of a famous ruler from the
distant past.
SATYR An imaginary creature appearing for the most part like a man but with some animal features
(the tail, ears, or legs of a goat or a horse), who inhabits the wilds and has limitless appetites for
wine and sex (figures 31 and 43).