It was used as a well-head after antiquity, either by a 19th-century Turkish owner or possibly earlier. This Turk displayed it the right way up, endangering the remains of the figures through friction of the well-rope against the marble. Its next owner was Notara, a cultured Greek official with a fine library who was a member of a distinguished family who could trace their descent back to the Byzantine Palaeologi; Notara also used it in his garden as a wellhead but inverted it in an attempt to save it from further damage. By the time it passed to him its upper moulding, much of the bead-and-reel decoration of its lower moulding, and (most likely from an act of vandalism of unknown date, perhaps related to iconoclasm) the heads of the figures moving in two processions around the drum had all already been lost.