This statue of Thalia is located in the British Museum which does not charge an admission fee and does permit non-flash photography.
The Museum's website for this 1st century marble sculpture (
visit link) informs us:
"Marble statue of a woman wearing a chiton and himation. She holds a pedum, a stick associated with the god Pan. Her body is clearly seen through the thin garments that she wears. The separately carved head is ancient but does not belong. The hair is encircled with a vine wreath, although most of the leaves are restored. Part of the nose, arms and drapery are restored. The carving of the back is less detailed than at the front which is meticulously modelled. The statue may have originally represented a young goddess or heroine. The head was perhaps from a statue of a Maenad. The figure is now identified as the Muse of Comedy Thalia, although the original identifications are elusive.
Dimensions
Height: 6 feet
Curator's comments
The head is ancient, but does not belong with the torso. Part of the surface of the drapery was reworked in the 18th century when the arm was restored."
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"... her name means "flourishing", because the praises in her songs flourish through time.[1] She was the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the eighth-born of the nine Muses.
According to pseudo-Apollodorus, she and Apollo were the parents of the Corybantes.[2] Other ancient sources, however, gave the Corybantes different parents.[3]
She was portrayed as a young woman with a joyous air, crowned with ivy, wearing boots and holding a comic mask in her hand. Many of her statues also hold a bugle and a trumpet (both used to support the actors' voices in ancient comedy), or occasionally a shepherd’s staff or a wreath of ivy."
As for the asteroid, Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"23 Thalia (Greek: T??e?a) is a large main-belt asteroid. It was discovered by J. R. Hind on December 15, 1852, at the private observatory of W. Bishop, located in Hyde Park, London, England.[3] Bishop named it after Thalia, the Muse of comedy and pastoral poetry in Greek mythology.[4]
It is categorized as an S-type asteroid consisting of mainly of iron- and magnesium-silicates. This the second most common type of asteroid in the main belt. Based on analysis of the light curve, the object has a sidereal rotation period of 0.513202 ± 0.000002 days. An ellipsoidal model of the light curve gives an a/b ratio of 1.28 ± 0.05.[5]
With a semimajor axis of 2.628, the asteroid is orbiting between the 3:1 and 5:2 Kirkwood gaps in the main belt.[6] Its orbital eccentricity is larger than the median value of 0.07 for the main belt, and the inclination is larger than the median of below 4°. But most of the main-belt asteroids have an eccentricity of no more than 0.4 and an inclination of up to 30°, so the orbit of 23 Thalia is not unusual for a main-belt asteroid.[7]
Thalia has been studied by radar."