Serpent Column

The Serpent Column , also known as the Serpentine Column, Plataean Tripod or Delphi Tripod, is an ancient bronze column at the Hippodrome of Constantinople in what is now Istanbul, Turkey. It is part of an ancient Greek sacrificial tripod, originally in Delphi and relocated to Constantinople by Constantine the Great in 324. It was built to commemorate the Greeks who fought and defeated the Persian Empire at the Battle of Plataea . The serpent heads of the 8-metre high column remained intact until the end of the 17th century .
The Serpentine Column has one of the longest literary histories of any object surviving from Greek and Roman antiquity – its provenance is not in doubt and it is almost 2,500 years old. Together with its original golden tripod and cauldron , it constituted a trophy, or offering reminding of a military victory, dedicated to Apollo at Delphi. This offering was made in the spring of 478 BC, several months after the defeat of the Persian army in the Battle of Plataea by those Greek city-states in alliance against the Persian invasion of mainland Greece, during the Greco-Persian Wars. Among the writers who allude to the Column in the ancient literature are Herodotus, Thucydides, pseudo-Demosthenes, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias the traveller, Cornelius Nepos and Plutarch. The removal of the column by the Emperor Constantine to his new capital, Constantinople, is described by Edward Gibbon, citing the testimony of the Byzantine historians Zosimus, Eusebius, Socrates, and Sozomenus.

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