A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities
Page 18
Having incurred the wrath of Artemis, the goddess of hunting, Actaeon was torn to pieces by his own hounds. Here he seems to be making some headway against these rather runty dogs.
The artistry and cultural significance of 5th-century Athenian painted vases are out of all proportion to their original price, which is often scratched casually on the base. The highest known price for a vase was three drachmas, and one by the Achilles Painter, who ranks among the finest artists, cost a mere three and a half obols. The modest daily rate of pay for service on an Athenian jury was raised from two to three obols in the 420s, and six obols were worth one drachma.
STATUES
When a ghost was running about devastating their territory, the people of Orchomenus consulted the oracle at Delphi, and the god ordered them to find the remains of Actaeon and bury them in the earth. He also ordered them to make a bronze image of the ghost and fasten it to a rock with iron. I have myself seen this image (Pausanias Guide to Greece 9.38).
About seven miles from Marathon … not far from the sea, there is a little shrine of Nemesis, the deity most inexorably opposed to those who are presumptuous. It is thought that her anger fell upon the barbarians who landed at Marathon. They arrogantly supposed that nothing could stop them from taking Athens and, as if it were a fait accompli, they brought a slab of Parian marble on which to sculpt a trophy. Phidias turned it into a statue of Nemesis (Pausanias Description of Greece 1.32). Parts of the statue, which modern scholars attribute to Phidias’s pupil Agoracritus, have been excavated. The Persians suffered again for their presumption ten years later: the silver-footed throne of Xerxes, called the “war captive,” sitting on which he watched the Battle of Salamis, was put on display in Athena’s Parthenon (Harpocration Lexicon to the Ten Attic Orators 56).
Socrates carved the statues of the Graces that stand in front of the entrance to the Acropolis (Pausanias Guide to Greece 9.35.7).
In a high-flown and dramatic passage at the beginning of Euripides’s Ion, Ion grabs his bow and arrows to drive the swans of Parnassus away from Apollo’s temple. It would be beneath the dignity of tragedy to spell out his motive for warding them off, but Ion is seizing his bow and threatening the swan that is letting its droppings fall on the statues (Ps.-Demetrius On Style 195).
An argument against pagan religion: swallows and most other birds fly to the statues of the gods and void their droppings on them, with no respect for Olympian Zeus, or Epidaurian Asclepius, or Athena Polias, or Egyptian Serapis (St. Clement of Alexandria Protrepticus 4.52).
In Aristophanes’s Birds, the chorus of birds threatens the judges of the competing comedies: If you don’t award us the prize, you’d better have little hats made like the ones that statues wear. Any of you that doesn’t have a hat, when you’re wearing your white cloaks, that’s when you’ll pay, being pooped on by all the birds (1114–17). A few lines later, the messenger bird comes on stage uttering perhaps the most exuberantly silly line in Aristophanes: πο πο ’στι, πο πο πο ’στι, πο πο πο ’στι, πο; (poo poo ’sti, poo poo poo ’sti, poo poo poo ’sti, poo?, “Where, where’s he, where, where, where’s he, where, where, where’s he, where?”
Whenever you vote to honor someone with a statue … there he stands in no time at all, or rather, even before you have taken the vote. For the procedure is altogether ridiculous: your chief magistrate simply points to one of the statues conveniently to hand, the original inscription is removed, the new name is added, and the whole procedure for honoring the dedicatee is over (Dio Chrysostom Rhodian Oration 9).
A statue with a meniscus.
Statues here on Rhodes are like actors. Just as actors perform different roles at different times, so your statues change their masks and stand there almost as if they were playing parts in a play. The same statue is sometimes a Greek, sometimes a Roman, or perhaps a Macedonian or a Persian. And sometimes the change is obvious straightaway, with clothing, shoes, and all such things exposing the trickery (Dio Chrysostom Rhodian Oration 155). Putting a new head on a statue was a quick, cheap, and widespread practice.
I really love Athens and want to have some memorial in my honor there, but I detest the practice of putting false inscriptions on statues of other people (Cicero Letters to Atticus 6.1).
In Athens, the colossal statues of King Eumenes and King Attalus, on which Antony’s name had been inscribed, were toppled in a storm (Plutarch Life of Antony 60, a bad omen for the Battle of Actium).
At the temple of Hera outside Mycenae, there is a statue of Orestes with an inscription claiming it is the emperor Augustus (Pausanias Guide to Greece 2.17).
Augustus had two paintings by Apelles representing Alexander the Great set up in the busiest parts of the Forum. Claudius had Alexander’s face cut out from them and Augustus’s added instead (Pliny Natural History 35.94).
In the largest synagogue the Romans set up a bronze statue of Caligula riding in a four-horse chariot. They did this in such haste that, since they did not have a new chariot available, they brought a very old one from the gymnasium. It was covered in rust, and the ears and tails of the horses had been damaged, as had the pedestal and other parts of it. Some people say it was actually dedicated in honor of a woman long ago, the great-grandmother of the last Cleopatra (Philo of Alexandria Embassy to Gaius 134).
Finishing a statue.
Caligula planned to bring from Greece various statues of great religious and artistic significance, including that of Jupiter at Olympia, and to have their heads removed and replaced with his own head…. It had been decided to dismantle the statue of Jupiter at Olympia and take it to Rome, but it suddenly burst out with so loud a laugh that the scaffolding collapsed and the workmen fled (Suetonius Life of Caligula 22, 57).
Cleopatra gave herself the title “Queen of Kings,” and her arrogance was so extreme that she tried to buy the statue of Zeus at Olympia by inundating the people of Elis with gold (Aelian On Animals frg. 55).
The route to the stadium at Olympia was lined with statues of Zeus commissioned from the fines imposed on athletes who broke the rules. They were intended to make clear that an Olympic victory is to be won, not through bribery, but through swiftness of foot and strength of body (Pausanias Guide to Greece 5.21).
Two statues of the boxer Euthymus, one in his hometown of Locri in Italy, the other at Olympia, were struck by lightning on the same day (Pliny Natural History 7.152).
The architect Timochares began work on a vaulted roof for the temple of Arsinoe at Alexandria, using the magnetic lodestone in its construction, his purpose being to make an iron statue of the queen seem to hang in midair. The project was halted by the death of the architect and also of King Ptolemy [Philadelphus], who had commissioned the project in his sister’s honor (Pliny Natural History 34.14). There was just such a magnetically floating statue of Serapis in Alexandria (Nicephorus Callistus Church History 15.8). Claudian describes an otherwise unknown temple in which a statue of Venus, made of lodestone, attracts a statue of Mars, made of iron, so that the divine lovers are drawn together into each others’ arms (Minor Poems 29); this statue may also have been in Alexandria, since Claudian was born there.
I hear that there is a law in Thebes that requires artists, whether painters or sculptors, to portray their subjects in a flattering manner. If the painting or statue is less attractive than the original, the law can impose a fine of one thousand drachmas on the artist (Aelian Miscellaneous History 4.4). There was possibly a similar law in Athens: Aristophanes teases Euripides for having warts on his eyelids (Frogs 1,247), but there is no hint of them in surviving sculptures of him. The famously and irredeemably ugly Socrates will have been a special case.
An eagle, the bird of Zeus, on a coin minted at Elis between the 91st and 94th Olympiads (416–404 B.C.).
There used to be on show in Locri [in south Italy] a statue of the lyre-player Eunomus, with a cicada perched on his lyre…. He himself set up the statue after winning at the Pythian Games; while he was compet
ing, one of the strings on his lyre broke, but a cicada settled on it and filled out the required sound (Strabo Geography 6.1.9).
Two gigantic seated statues of Amenophis III of the 18th dynasty (ruled ca. 1387–1350 B.C.) are located on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes. After suffering earthquake damage in the early 20s B.C., one began to emit a “song” at dawn. Known as the “Colossi of Memnon,” they became a tourist attraction. Strabo thought the “song” might be a hoax:
I was there with Aelius Gallus and his entourage of friends and soldiers [in 26–25 B.C.] and heard the sound at the first hour. I cannot state with certainty whether it came from the base or from the colossus or was made deliberately by one of the people standing round about the base. (Geography 17.1.46)
Eight Roman prefects of Egypt, and one prefect’s wife, commemorated their visits to Memnon with graffiti. A centurion, Lucius Tanicius, recorded the date and time of day when he heard the song on each of thirteen visits between November A.D. 80 and June 82. The last datable graffito is from A.D. 205. Septimius Severus (ruled A.D. 193–211), the last of several emperors to visit it, may have restored the statue and thus stopped the “song.”
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TOURISTS AND TOURIST ATTRACTIONS
Of the many artifacts purported to have been made by Hephaestus, the only genuine one is the scepter that he fashioned for Zeus, and that was passed down to Agamemnon, and is now venerated in Chaeronea, where daily sacrifices are offered to it. There is a bronze bowl in the temple of Apollo at Patara, which the Lycians say was made by Hephaestus and dedicated by Telephus (who lived at the time of the Trojan War), but it was constructed with a bronze casting technique invented later. The Achaeans who live in Patras claim to have a chest made by Hephaestus and brought from Troy by Eurypylus but, rather suspiciously, they do not actually put it on display (Pausanias Guide to Greece 9.40).
At Delphi there is a moderate sized stone over which they pour olive oil every day and on which they place unworked wool during every festival. Some people believe that this is the stone that Cronus was given instead of his child, and that he vomited it up again (Pausanias Guide to Greece 10.24.6). Cronus ate his children at birth, for fear that one of them would overthrow him, until Rhea saved Zeus with this trick.
In Athens there is an opening in the ground about a foot and a half wide. This is said to be where the water drained away after Deucalion’s flood, and people throw a mixture of wheat flour and honey into it every year (Pausanias Guide to Greece 1.18.7).
In the marketplace at Corinth there are two statues of Dionysus, gilded all over, except for their faces, which are painted red…. They say that the Corinthians, advised by the Pythian oracle, looked for the tree on Mt. Cithaeron from which Pentheus had spied on the Bacchantes and made these statues from its wood (Pausanias Guide to Greece 2.2.6).
At Joppa there are huge rocks jutting out to sea, on which the indentations left by the chains that bound Andromeda are still pointed out (Josephus The Jewish War 3.420). Andromeda was rescued from a sea monster by Perseus.
At Natural History 16.238, Pliny reports that many trees still survive from legendary times. For example, it is possible to see
Pentheus being torn apart by his mother and his aunt.
• at Tibur [mod. Tivoli] three oak trees even older than its founder Tiburnus, who is said to have been the son of Amphiaraus, who died at Thebes a generation before the Trojan War;
• at Delphi, and also at Caphya in Arcadia, plane trees planted by Agamemnon;
• at the Hellespont, facing Troy, trees growing on the tomb of Protesilaus [whose death on the shore fulfilled the oracle that the first Greek to land at Troy would die immediately]. When they grow tall enough to see Troy, they wither, and then they grow again;
• at Argos the olive tree to which Argus tethered Io after she had been turned into a cow;
• on the road to Phrygia the plane tree from which Marsyas’s skin was hung, [that being the penalty he suffered] after he lost his singing-contest with Apollo. Aelian records that if anyone plays a Phrygian tune to it, the skin moves, but if anyone plays in honor of Apollo, it stays still as if it were deaf (Miscellaneous Histories 13.21);
• on the coast of the Black Sea the laurel planted beside the tomb of King Bebryx, who was killed by Pollux in a boxing-match when the Argonauts landed there (it is known as the Laurel of Madness, because quarrels always break out on a ship if a sprig of it is brought on board.);
• at Athens the olive tree that Athena offered to the Athenians when she competed with Poseidon for patronage of the city.
Heracles became nine-fingered when the Nemean lion bit off the other one. There is a tomb for the finger that was bitten off. Some people said that he lost the finger to the sting of a stingray, but there is a stone lion on view in Sparta, standing over the finger’s tomb (Ptolemy the Quail in Photius The Library 190.147a). Bringing the Nemean lion to King Eurystheus was Heracles’s first labor. His fingers were remarkably powerful: Heracles struck Oeneus’s cup-bearer dead with a single blow to the head from one finger because he did not like the drink he had served him (Pausanias Guide to Greece 2.13.8).
Near the sanctuary of the Kindly Goddesses on the road from Megalopolis to Messene there is a small mound of earth surmounted by a finger made of stone. It is in fact known as the Memorial to the Finger, for it is said that when Orestes was out of his mind, he bit off one of his fingers at this spot (Pausanias Guide to Greece 8.34).
In the marketplace at Elis I saw a rather squat building, like a temple, with no walls, but with a roof supported by oak columns. The local people all say that it is a memorial, but they do not remember who is being commemorated (Pausanias Guide to Greece 6.24).
Near the marketplace in Argos there is a mound of earth that is said to cover the head of Medusa, the Gorgon (Pausanias Guide to Greece 2.21.5). Pausanias later notes that some of Medusa’s (snaky) hair was kept in the temple of Athena at Tegea, as a guarantee that the city would never be conquered (8.47.5).
Pausanias also notes that, in a different temple of Athena at Tegea, the hide of the Calydonian boar is on display. It had rotted with age and was entirely without bristles, and its tusks had been taken to Rome by Octavian, because the Tegeans had sided with Antony in the Actium campaign (8.46).
Medusa’s head, on an early 5th-century B.C. jar.
The following items are dedicated in the temple of Apollo at Sicyon:
• Agamemnon’s shield and sword
• Odysseus’s cloak and breastplate
• Teucer’s bow and arrows
• A box belonging to Adrastus (contents unknown)
• A bronze pot, dedicated by Medea, in which she cooked Pelias
• Palamedes’s letters
• Marsyas’s pipe and his skin
• Oars and rudders from the Argo
• The pebble with which Athena voted in the trial of Orestes
• Penelope’s web
(Ampelius Book of Remarkable Things 8)
Near the running track in Sparta there is a house that once belonged to Menelaus, but is now in private ownership (Pausanias Guide to Greece 3.14.6).
At Sparta there is an egg hung by ribbons from the ceiling of the temple of Hilaira and Phoebe, the daughters of Apollo; it is said to be the egg that, according to legend, Leda laid (Pausanias Guide to Greece 3.16.1). When Zeus, in the guise of a swan, raped Leda, in some versions of the myth she produced Polydeuces and Helen from an egg, but Castor and Clytemnestra by the normal mammalian birth process.
In the temple of Minerva at Lindos on the island of Rhodes there is a chalice dedicated by Helen. It is made of electrum [a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver] and is said to be the same size as her breasts (Pliny Natural History 33.81).
There are two cities very close to each other in Cappadocia. They both have the same name, Comana, and they both make the same claims to fame. They share the same legends, and the artifacts they display are the same, most notably the sword of I
phigenia—both of them have it (Cassius Dio History 36.11).
Aeneas and his comrades consulted the oracle at Dodona about founding a colony. They dedicated to Zeus various objects from Troy, including bronze mixing bowls, some of which still survive, and the very ancient inscriptions on them prove who dedicated them (Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.51).
The tourist guides at Argos know perfectly well that some of what they say is not entirely accurate, but they say it anyway, for it is not easy to get people to change their views (Pausanias Guide to Greece 2.23).
If Greece were deprived of its myths, there would be nothing to stop tourist guides from starving to death, for visitors don’t want to be told facts, not even if they got them without paying (Lucian Lover of Lies 4).