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A New Join in the Amazon Frieze of the Mausoleum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

B. Ashmole
B. Ashmole
Affiliation:
Oxford.
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Extract

The join is between the right end of 1008 and the left end of 1010, (plate Ia, b). The reason why it has escaped notice is that the Knights of St John, when building the reliefs into the walls of the Castle of St Peter at Bodrum, hacked the slab in two clumsily, destroying several inches of the front surface in doing so. Once the two pieces had been set up in the British Museum, with slab 1009 interposed, and catalogued in that order, the join was unlikely to be recognised, for the subjects do not at first sight appear to connect, and the join even now is not obvious from the front, because of the rough way in which the block was split in two; but when the fractured surfaces further back in the slab are brought together, the correspondence of the contours leaves no doubt whatever that they fit, and thus produce a single, very large, slab, nearly nine and a half feet long, as against the seven feet odd of the next longest survivor, 1022.

The new join is of interest partly because it prolongs a continuous run of the frieze (1007 plus 1008) by several feet (plate Ib), giving a sequence of eleven figures, if we include the two legs at the right edge; but chiefly because the composition thus produced regains a significance which the separation of its parts had obscured. The figure on 1008 who wields a club and wears a lion's skin must surely be Herakles: the addition of 1010 on the right shows that this important figure is balanced by another Greek who ought to be equally important, and who is engaged with an Amazon on horseback. Would this not be Theseus? On Athenian vases of a century earlier, a composition not unlike this, of the duel between Theseus and an Amazon, each using a spear, was already established (plate Ic): its prototype may have been in some famous wall-painting, and the designer of the Mausoleum frieze may have drawn his inspiration directly from that or from some version of it in another work of art now also lost to us. The identity of the two Amazons is a separate problem.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 89 , November 1969 , pp. 22 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1969

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References

1 Smith, A. H., B.M. Cat. Sculpt. ii 101, 103.Google Scholar I made the join when working with Dr Donald Strong on our book, now nearing completion, on the relief-sculptures of the Mausoleum. Thanks are due to Mr Denys Haynes for the photographs of the rearrangement, reproduced in plate I by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

2 Dr Dietrich von Bothmer, who has kindly lent the block for plate Ic, assembled this group of vases in his Amazons in Greek Art 179 ff.; he remarks there: ‘On one vase the Greek is inscribed. The name, as we should have expected, is Theseus.’ On the wall paintings of Amazonomachies, id., 163.

Richard Dalton, who visited the castle at Bodrum in 1749, made drawings (acquired by the Greek and Roman Department of the British Museum in 1955) of the eleven slabs built into its walls. In 1752 a letter was published, either by Dalton or by a friend (Remarks on twelve historical designs of Raphael and the Musaeum Graecum et Aegyptiacum or Antiquities of Greece and Egypt illustrated by prints intended to be published from Mr Dalton's drawings), very briefly describing engravings from these drawings, and saying that in the reliefs ‘Hercules and Theseus are both distinguished’. The engravings do not seem to have been published until 1791 (Antiquities and Views in Greece and Egypt): 1008 and 1010 appear together, though not joined, on the first plate. It is possible therefore that Dalton identified the Greek on 1010 as Theseus.

3 The axe taken from Hippolyte by Herakles was preserved in the temple of Zeus Stratios at Labraunda, and on a building so near to Labraunda as the Mausoleum one would expect an Amazon being attacked by Heracles to be Hippolyte. Who, then, is the opponent of Theseus?

4 No. 541: Dinsmoor, , AJA lx (1956) 402, 444, pl. 141Google Scholar: the subject again Herakles (or Theseus) in combat with an Amazon; the composition unrelated to ours. See also Bothmer, von, Amazons 215Google Scholar; Yalouris, , Eph. Arch. 1967, 193Google Scholar no. 12, pl. 41.