Signs of Lada – Part II

We wrote about the Polish God (or Goddess?) Lada here, here and here.  We discussed potential appearances of the name here.

There is, of course, more:

A Clay Jug

In 1866, Karl Disch a member of the Friends of Antiquity Society in the Rheinland was said to possess a red jug made of clay, found, we speculate, somewhere in the Rheinland.  The jug was old, decorated with pictures of grape vines and apparently dated to Roman times.  It bore the following inscription:

IMPLEOLADA

This was assumed to be a form of a greeting to the owner – someone named Lada, in the form of:

“Imple, O Lada”

The society’s yearbook in 1866 speculated that the name is similar to the name of the famous Greek runner – Ladas.

But this seems strange.  A statue to Ladas is mentioned by Pausanias in his description of the sanctuary of Apollo Lycius in Argos and again when Pausanias describes  Ladas’ tomb on the road between Sparta and Arcadia.  (Ladas apparently did not make it home and died on his way back.)  There apparently also was a stadium named after Ladas that was located somewhere between Mantinea and Orchomenus where Ladas practiced his running feats (this too from Pausanias).  Further, Pausanias also mentions another Ladas (from Aegium in Achaea) who later won a stade race at an another Olympiad.  Ladas appears too in later literature and a famous statue of him was apparently sculpted by Myron.

All this is well and good but while the fact that there had been a “fleet-footed” Ladas in Greece may serve to establish that such a name did in fact exist in ancient Greece… it seems to have less bearing on the question of names in the much later Roman Rheinland.

And in any event the Greek runner’s name was Ladas – not Lada.

The society’s members thought that perhaps the same name was also displayed in the following inscription found in a Berlin museum: P VAL LADAE, apparently a seal of one P. Valerius Ladas with a banded staff (Thyrsus – typically a staff of Dionysus) and a caduceus (a winged staff with two snakes on it – usually a symbol of Hermes).

They also pointed to an inscription of CVR LADAE a name of Minerva (?) (contesting the reading Curia Lada).  This inscription had been known for a while and, already, in the early 18th century was giving some German researchers headaches.

This comes from the 1730 book “Kleiner Teutscher Schrifften, etc” by Herrmann Ulrich von Lingen who put together no less than three conjectures:

But getting back to our mug.

Why does a mug need to be greeting its owner?  Or is it a warning about too much drinking?  Or, perhaps, as the society’s members speculated, instead a dedication from the one who gave the owner this gift?  As the society’s members noted that would not be unprecedented.

Yet perhaps, instead, the invocation was an appellation?

Probably not to implore.  But it could be Imple o Lada, as in “fill it up Lada!”  Was Lada a serving girl?  Or was this something reminiscent of the Lelum and Polelum cries of the medieval Poles who would beseech the Gods (Lel & Polel) to keep the beer flowing? (from that did Brueckner apparently conclude that these were just drinking shouts – both may be true).

Oh, and did we mention that this jug was apparently found somewhere along the Rhein? (perhaps it was from elsewhere – this is not entirely clear – but since the society dealt with local artifacts it would have made little sense for them to have much of a discussion about a jug coming from, say, Rome).

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