Patricia Rosenmeyer

A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands in Egyptian Thebes. Damaged by an earthquake, and re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to “speak” regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, the colossus had become a popular site for sacred tourism; visitors flocked to hear the miraculous sound, leaving behind over one hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions. These inscriptions are varied and diverse: brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon’s voice; longer lists by Roman administrators including details of personal accomplishments; and elaborate elegiac poems by both amateurs and professionals. The inscribed names reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. This study is the first complete assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned ...

This chapter uses 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 inscribe Homer’s words on his body? This evocation of Homer is not restricted to a narrow class of visitors. Imperial authors such as Lucian and Philostratus engage with Homer but write specifically for an elite audience. The Memnon inscriptions that echo Homer, however, are created by and for a more diverse public. All the inscriptions participate at some level in reactivating the mythical past, as if the trip to Thebes paralleled an epic trip to the Underworld. The chapter argues that visitors who sought out the statue were hoping precisely for such a “close encounter,” an experience that would connect them with the Homeric past, and that this experience transcended differences in social status and educational background.

<p>Chapter 1 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 was both compromised and intensified by his fragmentary state; the marvelous voice emerged from a headless torso. The author argues in this chapter that it was precisely this combination of massiveness and fragmentariness that encouraged tourists and worshippers to engage with the statue. They did so by inscribing its surfaces and inhabiting its sacred space.</p>

Chapter 6 starts with the accidental silencing of the statue in the early third century CE, and jumps ahead to its rediscovery in Europe. In the mid-eighteenth century, travelers reported seeing a huge statue with poems etched on its surface. Later, Napoleon’s surveyors brought back drawings scribbled down in their free time. The nineteenth century saw a craze for all things Egyptian: Hegel mentioned the colossus; Keats and Wordsworth turned Memnon into a Romantic hero. Memnon functioned as an alter ego for the poet himself, broken in body yet still striving to sing in the harsh environment of the real world. Just as he had in the imperial period, Memnon also represented something strange and inexplicable. The striking voice of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is also heard only in the context of fragmentation and decay. The status of these statues as fragments, as colossal wrecks, allows for the magic of the voice.

<p>Chapter 3 explores the personal relationship visitors thought they had with Memnon. In response to Memnon's morning cry, visitors used inscriptions to communicate with the articulate yet inanimate statue. Following two main impulses of animation, inscribers either addressed the god as a listener through the rhetorical figure of apostrophe or imagined him as a speaker, calling out to his mother or to them, through <italic>prosopopeia</italic>. The latter impulse overlaps with the concept of epiphany, where the god makes himself manifest by some sign—usually visual, but in this case aural. This chapter discusses apostrophe, <italic>prosopopeia</italic>, and epiphany as evidence for 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. The inscriptions bear witness to this tension between the communality and the uniqueness of each instance of communication with Memnon.</p>

<p>Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of Egypt as a destination for sacred tourism and as a repository of ancient culture, epitomized by the colossus, which functioned as a place of cultural memory. Imperial authors viewed Egypt as a place where Greek myth came to life. Visitors were inspired either by a kind of spiritual touristic impulse—the desire to witness the sacred (<italic>theoria</italic>)—or by an intellectual tourism and yearning to experience what they had already read or heard about. The inscriptions document these expressions of religious and intellectual wonder, crystallized at the moment of hearing Memnon's voice. Whether visitors came as worshippers or tourists, in their minds the monument functioned as a material link to the past that miraculously came alive every morning at dawn. The colossus could elicit two distinct reactions—spiritual or intellectual—yet both fit within the framework of a fascination with the mythical past.</p>

In Sappho's two-line fragment 115V, an unidentified speaker addresses a lucky bridegroom, wondering how best to describe him; the answer follows immediately:τίῳ σ᾿, ὦ φίλε γάμβρε, καλῶς ἐικάσδω;ὄρπακι βραδίνῳ σε μάλιστ᾿ ἐικάσδω.Dear bridegroom, to what do I best compare you?I compare you most of all to a delicate branch.

Acknowledgments Introduction, Owen Hodkinson and Patricia A. Rosenmeyer I. Epistolary Forms: Letters in Narrative, Letters as Narrative A. Epistolary Writing in Extended Narratives: Letters in Euripides, Herodotus, and Xenophon 1) The Appearance of Letters on Stages and Vases, Patricia A. Rosenmeyer 2) Letters in Herodotus, Angus Bowie 3) Letters in Xenophon, Deborah Gera B. Correspondences of Historical Figures: Authentic and Pseudonymous 4) Narrative and Epistolarity in the 'Platonic' Epistles, Andrew D. Morrison 5) Epistolary Epicureans, Pamela Gordon 6) The Letters of Euripides, Orlando Poltera II. Innovation and Experimentation in Epistolary Narratives A. Epistolarity and Other Narrative Forms: Generic Hybridity 7) Addressing Power: Fictional Letters Between Alexander and Darius, Tim Whitmarsh 8) Alciphron and the Sympotic Letter Tradition, Jason Konig 9) Lucian's Saturnalian Epistolarity, Niall Slater B. Embedded Letters in Longer Fictions 10) Odysseus' Letter to Kalypso in Lucian's Verae Historiae, Silvio F. Bar 11) Yours Truly? Letters in Achilles Tatius, Ian Repath 12) Letters in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Dimitri Kasprzyk C. Short Stories in Epistolary Form 13) The Epistolary Ghost Story in Phlegon of Tralles, John Morgan 14) Epistolarity and Narrative in ps.-Aeschines Epistle 10, Owen Hodkinson III. Jewish and Early Christian Epistolary Narratives 15) Letters in the War between Rome and Judaea, Ryan Olson 16) The Function of the Letter Form in Christian Martyrdom Accounts, Jane Mclarty Bibliography Indices

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