Bonus Eventus - Iconography

Iconography

Coins featuring Bonus Eventus were issued during the turmoil of the Year of Four Emperors (69 AD) and the reigns of Galba, Vespasian, Titus, Antoninus Pius, and Septimius Severus. On these coins and on gems, Bonus Eventus is a standing male nude, usually with one leg bent and his head turned away toward a libation bowl in his outstretched hand. Sometimes he is partially clad in a chlamys that covers his back, or in an over-the-shoulder himation with the ends framing his torso. Poppies and stalks of grain are common attributes.

In his book on sculpture, Pliny describes two statues of "Bonus Eventus" which were in fact renamed images of Greek gods. One was a bronze by Euphranor and the other a marble by Praxiteles. The latter stood in the Capitolium with a statue of Bona Fortuna, and the former somewhere between the repurposed Athena below the Capitol and the Leto in the Temple of Concord. It is unclear from Pliny's description whether both Greek statues had originally represented the same Greek deity. The classical art historian Adolf Furtwängler conjectured that Praxiteles had depicted an Agathos Daimon, since he was accompanied by a "Bona Fortuna," presumably a translation of the Greek Agathē Tychē. Euphranor's bronze is sometimes taken as the type on which the iconography of coins and gems was based, since the figure held poppies and grain. These attributes suggest an Eleusinian deity, and while the Greek original is most often taken as Triptolemus, no extant depictions of Triptolemus show the combination of poppies and grain, which is associated with Demeter (Roman Ceres).