File:Engraving of a marble relief of Phanes.jpg

English: This equation is presupposed by a relief (fig. 909), which seems to have come more than a century since from Rome and is now exhibited in the Royal Museum (no. 2676) at Modena. On a thick slab of white marble (0.71m high, 0.49m wide) is an oval band enclosing an egg-shaped recess. The band is decorated with twelve signs of the zodiac, and grouped about it are winged heads representing the four winds of heaven. Within the recess stands a nude youth encumbered with a plethora of attributes. Above his head and beneath his feet are the two halves of an egg, from each of which flames are bursting. A snake coiled round him rears its head on to the upper egg-shell. He has two large wings and a crescent on his back, the head of a lion growing from his front, and the heads of a goat and a ram projecting from his right and left sides. Instead of feet he has cloven hoofs. In his right hand he grasps a thunderbolt, in his left a sceptre. The egg-like recess in which the god is placed, the upper and lower shells from which he has emerged, the strange animal-heads on his flanks, the snake's head appearing above his face, all mark him as Phanes.