The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus

339 Pages·2018·2.178 MB·

by  Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

Title Pages
The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin
Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190626310
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190626310.001.0001
Title Pages
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
(p.i) The Language of Ruins (p.ii)
(p.iii) The Language of Ruins
(p.iv)
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Title Pages
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rosenmeyer, Patricia A., author.
Title: The language of ruins: Greek and Latin inscriptions on the
Memnon colossus /
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer.
Description: New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017049334 (print) | LCCN 2018001036 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190626327 (updf) | ISBN 9780190626334 (online
component) |
ISBN 9780190875282 (epub) | ISBN 9780190626310 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Memnon (Mythological character)—Statues—Egypt
—Thebes (Extinct city) |
Memnon (Mythological character)—Cult—Egypt—Thebes (Extinct
city) |
Inscriptions, Greek—Egypt—Thebes (Extinct city) | Inscriptions,
Latin—Egypt—Thebes (Extinct city) |
Pilgrims and pilgrimages—Egypt—Thebes (Extinct city) | Egypt—
Civilization—332 B.C.-638 A.D.
Classification: LCC DT73.T3 (ebook) | LCC DT73.T3 R67 2017 (print)
| DDC 932/.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049334
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Page 2 of 2
Dedication
The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin
Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190626310
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190626310.001.0001
Dedication
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
(p.v) To Sarah (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Epigraph
The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin
Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190626310
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190626310.001.0001
Epigraph
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
(p.vii) . . . Everything around me speaks of former days.
A wandering stranger in unknown lands,
I am surrounded by the past everywhere I walk.
I question the dust of the decrepit universe:
The cities, the fields, and this silent row
Of massive objects, scattered by the hand of time.
Silent witness to the events of former years,
Their eloquent dust converses with me.
But can it be that the language of ruins is mute to us?
No, no—just learn to understand their silence,
And remembrance will create for you a new world . . .
E.A. Baratynsky (Russian, 1800–1844), from “Remembrance” (tr. D.
Houston)
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt . . .
Rainer Maria Rilke (German, 1875–1926), from “Archaïscher Torso
Apollos” (p.viii)
Page 1 of 1
CON TENTS
List of Plates and Tables xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Reading the Colossus: The Memnon Inscriptions
CHAPTER 1
The Egyptian Colossi i
The Ancient Sources
9
Graffiti, Inscriptions, Proskynemata
21
Prosopographia rj
2
The Mnema Function
33
Worshipping the Colossus: Sacred Tourism
CHAPTER 2
at Thebes
39
Itineraries and Investigations
39
Sacred Tourism: Theoria
49
Holy Memnon: Thauma
53
Intellectual Enlightenment
66
A Discourse of Monumentality
74
Talking with the Colossus: The Rhetoric
CHAPTER 3
of Address
7 7
How to Converse with a Statue
77
Apostrophe
80
Prosopopeia
88
Epiphany
102
Reanimating the Past
109
Homeric Memnon
CHAPTER 4 111
Colossal Homer
111
Crumbs from Homer
119
Standing on Homer’s Shoulders
124
Becoming Homer
134
CHAPTER 5 Sapphic Memnon 141
Julia Balbilla
141
Balbilla s Inscriptions
145
Archaizing and Aeolicizing
135
A Sapphic Voice
139
Imperial Receptions of Sappho
162
Claudia Damo
164
Claims to Fame
166
c h a pter 6 Modern Memnon 16 9
The Silencing of Memnon
170
Callistratus’s “On the Statue of Memnon”
172
Memnon "Rediscovered”
177
Monumental Memnon
183
Romantic Memnon
186
The Ozymandias Factor
198
Conclusion
203
Appendix . Map of the Inscriptions
1 205
Appendix . Texts and Translations of the Inscriptions
2 211
Appendix . Index of Personal Names: Inscribers, Family
3
Members, Consuls, Emperors
241
Bibliography
245
Index
261
Plates and Tables
The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin
Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190626310
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190626310.001.0001
(p.xi) Plates and Tables
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
Plates (between pp. 140 and 141)
1 The two colossi in Egyptian Thebes
2 The Memnon colossus, side view
3 The Memnon colossus, front view
4 The Memnon colossus, view from knees to base
5 The Memnon colossus, view of legs and feet
6 Pococke’s 1743 drawing of the Memnon colossus, front view
7 Pococke’s 1743 transcription of the inscriptions, right leg
8 Roberts & Haghe, “Statues of Memnon at Thebes, during the
Inundation”
9 Aeolic inscriptions, left foot of the Memnon colossus
10 Nineteenth-century tourists’ graffiti on the Memnon colossus
Tables
5.1 Notable Aeolicisms in Julia Balbilla, poem 28 156
5.2 Notable Archaisms in Julia Balbilla, poem 28 157
5.3 Notable Aeolicisms in Julia Balbilla, poem 30 161
(p.xii)
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Preface
The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin
Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190626310
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190626310.001.0001
(p.xiii) Preface
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
In November 130 CE, the Roman emperor Hadrian and his wife, Sabina, sailed
up the Nile as part of their grand tour of the eastern provinces; their destination
that month was Egyptian Thebes, where two massive monolithic statues had
been carved in 1400 BCE to honor Amenhotep III. About a century before the
royal visit, one of the statues—the northern colossus—was badly damaged by a
strong earthquake; its head fell off entirely, and the base began to emit a curious
high-pitched noise at dawn. Scholars now think that the sound originated from
the stone base expanding in the warmth of the rising sun.1 But by the late first
century BCE, the statue had been re-identified as Memnon, the Ethiopian king
killed at Troy, and the sound was interpreted as Memnon’s complaint to his
mother, the goddess Eos. Hearing Memnon’s voice was understood to be a sign
of divine favor, and visitors flocked to witness the miracle, leaving behind
inscriptions on the colossus, which are still visible today (Plates 1–5).
These inscriptions are the focus of my book. While scholars have worked on
repositories of graffiti elsewhere (e.g., in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings),
the Memnon inscriptions have been somewhat neglected by both classicists and
epigraphers. As I argue, however, these inscriptions are valuable documents for
our understanding of the interaction between Greek and Roman culture in the
imperial period, as well as important evidence for Greco-Roman sacred tourism
in Egypt. In addition, the Memnon colossus had a rich afterlife among poets and
intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The colossus, whether
actually viewed or only imagined, offered a powerful connection to the distant
past.
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Preface
By the time of Hadrian (second century CE), the Memnon colossus had become a
hugely popular cultural attraction. Those who left behind inscriptions wished to
immortalize themselves, pay homage to a divinity, assert their (p.xiv) command
of elite culture, or flatter their emperor Hadrian. On the broken statue’s base,
we can recognize many different commemorative impulses: official notifications
of royal visits, lists of positions held and honors received by Roman officers,
minimalist references to a name and a date, the “postcard” sentimentality of one
Caecilia Trebulla, a Greek-speaking tourist with a Roman name who wishes her
mother could share her experience. The colossus itself is the site of many
juxtapositions: the sacred and the touristic; elite and non-elite; Egyptian, Greek,
and Roman; literary and monumental discourse. Many of the inscribers enter
into dialogue with archaic Greek models such as Homer and Sappho, while
simultaneously negotiating their place within the cultural and political spheres
of Hadrian’s empire.
A total of 107 inscriptions survive, edited by the brothers André and Étienne
Bernand in Les inscriptions grecques et latines du colosse de Memnon (Paris,
1960).2 Sixty-one of the inscriptions are written in Greek, forty-five are written
in Latin, and one is bilingual; thirty-nine are in verse, of which thirty-five are
Greek and four are Latin; and eleven of the inscriptions are written by women.
The evidence spans almost two centuries. According to the editors, the earliest
inscription is dated to 20 CE, the latest to 205 CE. Taken together, they provide
a fascinating glimpse into the life of a statue that functioned as a canvas for the
crowds of visitors who passed by and left their mark. And the inscriptions
themselves are distinctive for several reasons: the materials are unfamiliar to
most scholars, yet of clear documentary and literary value; they offer insights
into Greco-Roman antiquity that no other single unified corpus of texts does; and
their socio-historical context is easily as interesting as their literary content.
While discussing the poems on the Memnon colossus, I also address issues of
Roman imperialism, sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman
imagination, and the reception of archaic texts by imperial authors. These
inscriptions poeticize Greece by recalling classical literature at the same time as
they reflect their own historical horizon. Their importation of the past into their
own contemporary reality imparts depth to their self-presentation, and it is this
depth that I strive to reveal in my book.
The book consists of six chapters. Each contributes to the overarching argument
that the colossus functions as a powerful site for engagement with the Greek
past by a broad segment of society. Chapter 1 (“Reading the Colossus: The
Memnon Inscriptions”) presents the colossus itself: an overview of the
inscriptions and the ancient testimonials to the miracle of Memnon’s voice.
While the transformation into a Trojan hero was mostly complete by the time
Pliny visited in the latter part of the first century CE, the statue continued to be
defined by a set of oppositions: Memnon was both dead and alive, mortal and
divine, Egyptian and Greco-Roman, silent and speaking. Similarly, his colossality
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Preface
was both compromised and intensified by his fragmentary state; the marvelous
voice emerged from a headless torso. In the first chapter I argue (p.xv) that it
was precisely this combination of massiveness and fragmentariness that
encouraged tourists and worshippers to engage with the statue by inscribing its
surfaces and inhabiting its sacred space.
Chapter 2 (“Worshipping the Colossus: Sacred Tourism at Thebes”) begins with a
discussion of Egypt as a destination for sacred tourism and as an important
repository of ancient culture, epitomized by the Memnon colossus, which
functioned as a lieu de mémoire, a key place of cultural memory. Imperial
authors viewed Egypt as a place where Greek myth came to life. Visitors such as
Nearchus (first century CE), who recorded his experience in a letter (P. Lond. III
854), were inspired either by a kind of spiritual touristic impulse—the desire to
witness the sacred (theoria)—or by an intellectual tourism and yearning to
experience for themselves what they had already read or heard about back
home. The inscriptions document these expressions of religious and intellectual
wonder, crystallized at the moment of hearing Memnon’s voice. Whether visitors
come as worshippers or tourists—and the terms themselves will be scrutinized—
in their minds the monument functioned as a material link to the past, a past
that miraculously came alive every morning at dawn. Chapter 2 thus argues that
the colossus could elicit two distinct reactions from its visitors—spiritual or
intellectual—yet both reactions fit within the framework of a fascination with the
mythical past.
In Chapter 3 (“Talking with the Colossus: The Rhetoric of Address”) I explore the
personal relationship visitors thought that they had with Memnon. In response
to Memnon’s morning cry, visitors turned to inscription as a way to communicate
with the articulate yet inanimate statue. Following two main impulses of
animation, the inscribers either address the god as a listener through the
rhetorical figure of apostrophe or imagine the god as a speaker, calling out to his
mother or to them, through prosopopeia. The latter impulse overlaps with the
concept of epiphany, where the god makes himself manifest by some sign—
usually visual, but in the case of Memnon, aural. This chapter discusses these
three categories—apostrophe, prosopopeia, and epiphany—as evidence for the
visitors’ yearning to commemorate their interactions with Memnon. Inserting
themselves into the collective practice of sacred tourism, they nevertheless seek
to make the verbal exchange meaningful on a personal level. Chapter 3 shows
how the inscriptions bear witness to this tension between the communality and
the uniqueness of each instance of communication with Memnon.
In Chapter 4 (“Homeric Memnon”) I use Homer to triangulate the relationship
between inscriber and statue. Memnon is a ghost from the epic past anchored in
the Egyptian present; what better way to honor him than to borrow the words of
Homer and inscribe them on his body? This evocation of Homer is not restricted
to a narrow class of visitors. Imperial authors such as Lucian and Philostratus,
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