Il donario con Cerbero ed elefanti e gli altri materiali dalla cisterna «Santangelo» nel santuario del Portonaccio a Veio

During Veii's excavations in 1945-46, M. Santangelo found, in the area of Portonaccio's shrine, two little elephants and an animal, all in clay, located in an archaic cistern. With these figures and some others fragments, we can reconstruct a little donarium. The elephants are in association with Cerbero's figure, with a probable connection with chthonian cults. It is also possible, however, to suppose that this object, whose subject is so unusual, would refer to an historical event: in fact we know that, during the battle of Benevento against Pirro and his elephants, a little elephant was wounded, and, moreover, four captured elephants were parading in Rome in 275 BC. So, we could imagine that a soldier serving in M. Curio Dentato army, maybe from Veii, would have offered this peculiar object (an unicum with no comparisons) as a souvenir of that war, when Roman people saw elephants for the first time.