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THE TYRANNICIDES: A NEW APPROACH TO TEXT AND IMAGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2021

Thomas H. Carpenter
Thomas H. Carpenter*
Affiliation:
Ohio University, USA
*
carpentt@ohio.edu
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Abstract

The bronze statues of the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, by the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, set up in the Athenian Agora in 477 bc, were well known to Athenians throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods. In Thucydides’ account of the deed of the Tyrannicides, he defines the two as lovers (erastes and eromenos), which has led to the assumption that the depictions are in some way likenesses of the two men. I argue that Thucydides’ account has been the source of a misreading of the sculptures. Rather, the models for the figures are contemporary representations of the Gigantomachy – Aristogeiton being based on Apollo – and thus, through the allusion to myth, the sculptors created multivalent figures that were emblematic of something that transcended their deed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , October 2021 , pp. 208 - 221
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

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Footnotes

Versions of this article were delivered at a meeting of the Pottery Research Network in London on 2 May 2019 and at the ‘Mythical History and Historical Myth’ conference organized by the Department of Philology at the University of Patras on 28 June 2019.

References

1 Ar. Lys. 1149–56 from 411 bc is explicit in describing the role of the Spartans.

2 Fornara, C., ‘The Cult of Harmodius and Aristogeiton’, Philologus 114 (1970), 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Hdt. 5.55–63 and 6.123; Thuc. 1.20 and 6.56–9.

4 Brunnsåker, S., The Tyrant-Slayers of Kritios and Nesiotes (Stockholm, 1971), 99–114Google Scholar.

5 Wycherly, R., Literary and Epigraphical Testimonia, Athenian Agora III (Princeton, NJ, 1957), 93–8Google Scholar.

6 The account by Valerius Maximus (2.10, ext. 1) that the Rhodians put Antenor's statues on sacred couches when they were briefly in Rhodes on their way back to Athens could support Martin Robertson's comment in History of Greek Art (Cambridge, 1975), 187, that they might simply have been a pair of kouroi. For discussions of Antenor's group, see Mattusch, C., Greek Bronze Statuary, From the Beginnings through the Fifth Century bc (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 118, 121, 124–5Google Scholar; see also V. Azoulay, The Tyrant Slayers of Ancient Athens (Oxford, 2018), chap. 2.

7 The bronze original is lost, but numerous Roman copies in marble survive, the most complete in the Naples Museo Archeologico, though the angle of Harmodios’ right arm there has been inaccurately restored. See above, n. 4.

8 IG I3 502; Brunnsåker (n. 4), 84–8.

9 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer who has rightly noted that Athenians could have regarded the pair as adults ‘not unlike a bearded father of the bride and beardless bridegroom in wedding scenes’.

10 Stewart, A., Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1997), 73Google Scholar. See also Wohl, V., ‘The Eros of Alcibiades’, CQ 18 (1999), 355–8Google Scholar.

11 Neer, R., The Emergence of Classical Greek Sculpture (Chicago, IL, 2010), 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Schmidt, S., ‘Images of Statues on Attic Vases: The Case of the Tyrannicides’, in Nørskov, V. et al. (eds.), The World of Greek Vases (Rome, 2009), 228Google Scholar.

13 Plin. NH 34.17. For a review of arguments for a later date for Antenor's group – as late as the 480s bc – see Azoulay (n. 6), 23–34.

14 For the date of the new group, Marmor Parium, see FGrH 239 F 54.

15 R. Parker, Athenian Religion (Oxford, 1996), 136, n. 55. See M. Taylor, The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in Fifth Century Athenian Art and Politics (New York, 1981), 10–33.

16 IG I3 131, AIO 1137.

17 Translation by A. Purvis in R. Strassler (ed.), The Landmark Herodotus (New York, 2007), 479.

18 Thuc. 1.22; Meyer, E., ‘Thucydides on Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Tyranny, and History’, CQ 58 (2008), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Ath. 15.695b. C. Fornara, ‘The Tradition about the Murder of Hipparchus’, Historia 17 (1968), 411.

20 Brunnsåker (n. 4), 7.

21 Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 18.

22 D. M. Lewis, CAH 42 287.

23 Ar, Lys. 630 ff., where an old man adopts the pose of Harmodios. See also Eccl. 681–83 from the 390s bc, a reference to the statue of Harmodios in the Agora.

24 See Azoulay (n. 6), 36–7.

25 J. Davidson, ‘Revolutions in Human Time: Age-Class in Athens and the Greekness of Greek Revolutions’, in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds.), Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2006), 55.

26 Azoulay (n. 6), 42, raises this point. See also J. Traill, Persons of Ancient Athens (Toronto, 1994), no. 203425, and J. Kirchner, Prosopographia Attica (Berlin, 1901), no. 2232. J. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families (Oxford, 1971), 477, wrestles ineffectively with this problem. Ath. 13.596 f. refers to a courtesan Leana, a lover of the tyrannicide Harmodios, who was killed by Hippias’ men.

27 F. Vian provides an authoritative survey of the Gigantomachy in LIMC IV, ‘Gigantes’ 191–270, with bibliography.

28 Athens, Acr 211, ARV 29.20; Louvre C 10748, ARV 187.55; London E 443, ARV 292.29; Cab Méd 573, ARV 417.1; Ferrara 3095, ARV 490.125; London E 469, ARV 589.1; Berlin F 2531, ARV 1318.1; Munich 2689, ARV 879.2 (Tityos). The krater fragments Basel, Cahn, HC 585 Kunst der Antike (1977) no. 269, and once Populona, NSc 1908, 222, should probably be understood as Apollo in the Gigantomachy rather than pursuing Tityos.

29 Athens, Acr 211, ARV 29.20; LIMC IV, Gigantes 299.

30 London E 443, ARV 292.29, a stamnos by the Tyszkiewicz Painter; Louvre C 10748, LIMC IV, Gigantes 324, a stamnos by the Kleophrades Painter.

31 E. Berger, Der Parthenon in Basel. Dokumentation zu den Metopen (Mainz, 1986), 57, 65, pls. 37, 58–60. C. Praschniker, Parthenonstudien (Vienna, 1928), 168, 210 fig. 126.

32 Berlin 2431, ARV 1318.1, LIMC IV, Gigantes 318.

33 Würzburg 515, ARV 256.5. E. Simon, ‘Early Classic Vase-Painting’, in C. Boulter (ed.) Greek Art. Archaic into Classical (Leiden, 1985), 72, notes that, in the preparatory sketch still visible on the Würzburg vase, Harmodios was naked.

34 T. H. Carpenter, ‘Harmodios and Apollo in Fifth-Century Athens: What's in a Pose?’, in J. Oakley (ed.), Athenian Potters and Painters (Oxford, 1997), 175.

35 Pl. Euthphr. 6b.

36 Bonn 71, ARV 258.25.

37 In Ar. Eq. 565–8, Aristophanes implies through a reference to the peplos that the victory of the Athenians over the Persians was in some way equivalent to the victory of the gods over the giants; a scholiast writing on the passage makes the connections between the battles clear: Scholia in Aristophanem I2 142.

38 M. Oswald, CAH 4 341.

39 Aesch. Pers. 58; Hdt. 7.77, 89, 91; Xen. An 1.8.4.

40 Shapiro, H. A., ‘Religion and Politics in Democratic Athens’, in Coulson, W. et al. (eds.), The Archaeology of Athens and Attica under the Democracy (Oxford, 1994), 124Google Scholar, following Holscher, T., ‘The City of Athens: Space, Symbol, Structure’, in Molho, A. et al. (eds.), City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy (Stuttgart, 1991), 371Google Scholar, and B. Fehr, Die Tyrannentöter (Frankfurt, 1984).

41 Athens, NM inv. 3851. N. Kaltsas, Sculpture in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, trans. D. Hardy (Malibu, CA, 2002), 67, no. 69.