Zeus appear, one on either side of it, in a marble relief from Sparta and on coins of Megara and Cyzicus, while a coin of Patara and a Graeco-Etruscan cist show a single eagle perched on the top of it. This disposition of the birds recalls that of the doves at Dodona, where Zeus still had a living oak-tree, not a petrified stump. The omphalos was decked with prophylactic fillets; and fillets dangle from the apex of Apollo-pillars on coins of Ambracia and Apollonia in lllyria. The agrenon or net-work of wool, in which the omphalos was dressed, was a mere mesh of fillets and is found in combination with them on the xoanon of Zeus at Mylasa. Lastly, the word omphalos (ὀμφαλός) itself has been rightly connected with ompha (ὀμφά) the "oracular voice," and again points to an oak like that of Dodona. I take it, then, that the common art-type of
Journ. of Hell. Stud., viii. 14, fig. 2, after Mittheil. Arch. Inst. Ath., 1887, pl. 12.
P. Gardner Num. Comm. Paus., pi. a, 9.
Journ. of Hell. Stud., viii. 14, fig. 1, after Num. Chron., ser. III., vii., pl. 1, 23.
Overbeck Kunstmyth. Apollo Münztaf. 5, 6, cp. ib. 10.
Daremberg-Saglio Dict. Ant., i., 320 f., fig. 383, cp. Reinach Rép. des vases peints, i., 313, 3.
See the bronze coin of Epirus figured in Class. Rev., xvii., 408, fig. 4. Most authors speak of three doves at Dodona (Jebb on Soph. Trach., p. 204); but Sophocles mentions two (Trach., 172), and Philostratus Major one (imagg., 33. i).
Eur. Ion., 225 στέμμασί γ’ ἐνδυτόν, Strab. 420 τεταινιωμένος, cp., e.g., Baumeister Denkmäler, i., 104, fig. 110, ii., 1009, fig. 1215, 1110, fig. 1307.
Overbeck Kunstmyth. Apollo Münztaf., 8 i, 1-3.
Ib., 1, 7.
M. W. de Visser de Gr. diis non referentibus speciem humanam, p. 64 ff.
Cp. εὐόμφαλος = εὔοσμος from ὀμφά = ὀσμή. There is then no connection between the Delphic omphalos and ὀμφαλός, "navel," except by popular etymology.
Argos too had an oracular ὀμφαλός (Berl. philol. Wochenschr., Nov. 19, 1904, p. 1504). The name Ὄμφαλες occurs in an inscription from Dodona (Collitz, Sammlung der griech. Dialektinschriften, 1347). There was a plain near Cnossus called Ὀμφάλιον (Call. h. lov., 45, alib.); and towns in Epirus (Ptol., 3. 14. 7) and Thessaly (Steph. Byz. s. v. Ὀμφάλιον and Παραύαιοι) bore the same name. In each case the cult of an oak-Zeus existed within easy reach, viz., at Argos, Cnossus, Dodona, and Scotussa respectively.
