The repertory of images

Just as in the majority of ancient texts, where elements from the overall vita were extracted and represented on their own, so too in the case of the monuments. Most instances of the myth in the visual arts represent single episodes.13 Sometimes these are characterized by an epigrammatic concision similar to that which marks many literary allusions to the myth.14 Other images, isolated from their narrative context, seem to have been intended to prompt one’s recollection of the myth as a whole.15

Sculpted Roman sarcophagi focus, as is only appropriate, on Adonis’s death, as the corpus of surviving examples that represent the myth reveals.16 Yet other aspects of the tale, also pertinent in a funerary context, found no place in the story told by these monuments. The romance of the youth and the goddess, the goddess’s urgent desire, and the implicit eroticism of the couple’s love—each so eloquently expressed by Ovid—play a minor role on the sarcophagus reliefs. Nor does any reference to Adonis’s incestuous origins have a part. And the theme of metamorphosis, so fundamental to the Ovidian account, makes no appearance either. On the single extant example that includes the Persephone episode, one of the major variants recounted by the Greek sources, this element of the fable is relegated to the ends of the casket where the scene augments but does not alter the significance of the myth as it was employed in the sepulchral context.17 Finally, representations of the Adonaia, described in great detail by Bion and other Greek sources surely known in the Roman world—and with their imagery of rebirth, seemingly so well suited to a funerary setting—these too never appear on the sarcophagi.18

Thus the sarcophagus reliefs’ representation of the myth had a unique character. For this selective rendition the artists excerpted the three scenes that pertained to the death of Adonis—his departure for the hunt despite Aphrodite’s warning; the wounding by the boar; and his death in the goddess’s arms—and presented this portion of the myth in the condensed form of an epitome. The tale’s full complexity, transmitted by the numerous sources, remained part of the literary background and played scarcely any direct role in the form the tale assumed as it was adapted on the sarcophagi. For it was the death of the hero that provided the type: the close of Adonis’s life—not the close of the complete mythological narrative in which that life was embedded—was linked to the death Adonis was enlisted to commemorate.

One of the oldest of the Adonis sarcophagi, a relief that may be dated circa 150–160, is now found at the Casino Rospigliosi in Rome (Fig. 4).19 On its front panel the story is told in the three scenes that comprised the standard repertory, and which follow each other across the sarcophagus’s front from right to left. In the first of these, at the far right, we see Adonis about to depart for the hunt despite Aphrodite’s warning. At the center, conspicuously larger, is the depiction of the boar hunt and the wounding of Adonis. At the left, finally, Adonis languishes at the point of death in the arms of his goddess, in the company of her attendants, who stand by helplessly.

The representation of each of these three events is designed so as to appear separated from the next. The two scenes at either end are designated as interiors by a parapetasma stretched behind the figures that distinguishes them from the landscape setting of the hunt scene between them.20 All three are framed as well by the poses of the figures, who focus their attention, and the beholder’s too, on the individuated incidents of the tale depicted side by side. This effectively provides a transition between scenes, as the shift from one to another is marked by a sudden reversal of the figures’ orientation.

Each of the scenes employed for the visualization of this tale was composed on the basis of established figural motifs.21 This origin of the imagery accounts for both the visual and iconographic differences that separate the three scenes. Thus, in the continuity of the frieze as a whole, each depicted moment of the tale exudes the formal character of an independent tableau. Each of the scenes is treated as if it were a unit self-contained, without a necessary relationship to the others, and this serves to explain the subtle changes in scale between them. And in this fashion each of the three scenes is imbued with a formal clarity that is essential for the evocation of the narrative’s symbolism and the establishment of its funerary significance.

The departure

In the first of the three scenes, the departure, the lovers confront one another face-to-face (Fig. 4). The distinction between the goddess and her mortal lover is inscribed, in both their poses and their statures. Aphrodite appears the taller of the two, and thus able to confront Adonis face-to-face, even though she sits while he stands. This subtle distinction in physical scale suggests the unequal relationship between goddess and man.

With similar gestures they debate the youth’s intentions. Yet the differences to be read in these gestures are additional signs of their impending separation, of the divergent nature of their passions. As Adonis turns back toward Aphrodite, he signals his departure with his outstretched hand; with hers, the goddess reaches out and enjoins him to stay.22

On several of the reliefs (Figs. 5–7) Adonis appears nude before the draped goddess23—a characteristic reserved on the Casino Rospigliosi sarcophagus (Fig. 4) for the two other scenes. For although it is Aphrodite who is so often found nude in ancient works of art, where her physical beauty serves as a fitting attribute for the goddess of love, here nudity characterizes her mortal lover. Here he is the object of desire and the figure of sexual allure, with whom Aphrodite has so hopelessly fallen in love.

Adonis’s nudity is another sign, perhaps the clearest, of the artificial, symbolic character of the scene. In the context of the myth, nudity is his proper costume, and in and around its conspicuous display are condensed the two conflicting aspects of the tale.24 On the one hand, this nudity stands for the erotic nature of their divinely gifted union. It symbolizes—indeed literalizes—the appeal of kalos Adonis, to whom the goddess is so passionately drawn. On the other hand, Adonis’s nudity is a sign of the innately heroic character of the mortal youth. As his nakedness distinguishes him from the other figures more properly attired for the hunt, it recalls Greek heroic forms and the ideals they represent and thus serves as a visual metaphor for his heroization.25

These relations of scale, of pose, and of nudity and dress are all forms of abstraction. They subtly divorce the actions and the motifs with which they are depicted from the specific narrative content of the myth. They are the stuff of art, not life; their usage undermines a response to the image that is confined to the categories of naturalistic representation, which such forms of abstraction so clearly contradict. These abstractions enlarge the image’s frame of reference, for they render the essence of the characters’ natures and interrelationships as general qualities. Such abstractions constitute a distinctive mode of visual representation, one that diminishes the roles of the protagonists as specific individuals and instead emphasizes their roles as types.26 And as the types emerge with greater clarity, the themes they are meant to evoke—heroism, eroticism, and above all, virtus—are manifest with corresponding force.

Thus these abstractions introduce to the images another modality, which itself conveys additional significance. These abstractions are not derived from the myth, in the sense that they serve as aspects of its representation. Rather, they are intended to suggest those fundamental traits and ideas that the tale and its protagonists are held to exemplify. These abstractions evoke—by association and by analogy—the grander scheme of significance in which the representation of the myth is meant to operate. By these means the designers of the reliefs have contrived to establish the visual composition according to the general structure of the plot, as opposed to the details of the story. “What happened” takes precedence over the specificity of “who did what, and to whom”; the general nature of events predominates over the specific actions of individual characters in particular tales.27

The emphasis on plot is confirmed by this formula of contrasting figures—female and male, seated and standing, dressed and nude—which duplicated the one established for the repertory of sarcophagus reliefs representing Hippolytus’s refusal of Phaedra, a scene that focuses on a similar clash of divergent passions. The appearance of Aphrodite, regally enthroned, depended on the role the same motif played in the representation of Phaedra, who sits, with an eros in the pose of Skopas’s famous Pothos at her knee, and declares her love for Hippolytus, who stands before her (Fig. 8).28 Both myths tell of “love-struck” heroines—helpless in the throes of a passion whose fulfillment is denied them—whose pleas to their lovers are ignored. This same theme underlies the use of identical imagery in representations of the two tales.29

Roman aesthetics was marked by an appreciation of such borrowings, and Roman art often exploited such duplications of form for the purpose of display. Characteristic is a conspicuous taste for paired statuary, for example, the paired statues of Mercury and Mars from the canopus of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli.30 There the same constitutive elements of a common pose, derived from a fifth-century prototype—torso, legs, and extended right arm—were exploited equally for images of the two deities.31 The intentio, given the context of their discovery, was clearly to establish a visible correspondence between the two, who are then distinguished by the prominent role given to their individual attributes. But in the case of the Aphrodite and Phaedra sarcophagus reliefs, the independence of the images from a joint context and the absence of individuating attributes suggest that the intentio of their visual similarity was to establish an intellectual correspondence—one of analogy. The basic elements of the two images—that complement of forms that constitute the motifs they share—thus were held to signal, not merely one story or the other, but the fundamental human relations exemplified in each scene and evoked by the figural types.32 This interchangeability intimates the designers’ cognizance of a parallel between both the protagonists and the plots of the two myths. Moreover, the implied analogy suggests that the crucial sense of the scenes transcended the details that distinguished the particular stories.

The boar hunt

The gestures of Aphrodite and Adonis in the first scene on the Casino Rospigliosi sarcophagus (Fig. 4) also suggest the temporal dimensions of the frieze as they quite literally point the way toward the adjacent depiction of Adonis’s subsequent fate. This is the boar hunt, which claims priority amid this representation of the cycle not only for its centrality but for the considerably larger portion of the relief it fills. The image conflates a sequence of moments and actions: the boar is shown attacking suddenly from its lair; Adonis has already fallen wounded, gored in the thigh; and his companions and their dogs attempt—too late—to fight off the beast. The damage has been done, but Adonis has not yet been vanquished. Although mortally wounded, the young hero is depicted rising up on his knees and raising an outstretched arm, as if to ward off the final assault of his foe, like many another ancient warrior summoning his remaining strength to make a “last-ditch stand.”33 Despite his imminent death, to which his passion for the hunt has led him, his virtus shines forth in his refusal to succumb willingly to his fate.34

A group of six sarcophagi presents a variation of the hunt scene. On these reliefs Adonis lies slumped at the center, his apparently lifeless body supported by the arms of his companions, and Aphrodite makes a frantic appearance at the scene (Fig. 5; cf. Fig. 9).35 Her entrance offers the counterpart to the charge of the boar, and together goddess and beast frame the fallen figure of Adonis.

The arrival of Aphrodite at the side of her dying lover expands still further the temporal dimensions of this central scene. For Ovid tells how, having learned of Adonis’s tragedy, she hurried to his side and sprang from her swan-drawn car, in visible agony at the sight of the youth, “his lifeless body lying amid his own blood.”36 Her intrusion on these reliefs reclaims for their visual narratives an aspect of the tale that had been ignored. As the textual sources clearly indicate, Aphrodite’s arrival constitutes the first moment of a subsequent scene whose later moments may be represented on those sarcophagi where Aphrodite leans over the body of Adonis, taking him in her arms for the last time (Fig. 6).

Aphrodite makes no such appearance on sarcophagi of earlier date.37 Rather than allow her inclusion to alter the established scene, the artists have performed an ingenious substitution, one that may have been inspired by the similar appearance of the personified figure of Virtus on the Hippolytus sarcophagi.38 The onrushing figure of Aphrodite has seemingly inherited the position, the pose, and the gestures of one of the hunters who conventionally appear on the reliefs (cf. Fig. 4 with Figs. 5 and 9). The significance of his raised arm, poised to hurl his weapon, undergoes a form of inversion, and the gesture becomes a sign of her horror and an expression of her grief.39 The gesture—the raised arm with open palm—provided a pathosformula that served as the physiognomic signal of her anguished mental state.40

The dramatic figure of Aphrodite increases the pathos of the scene and reinforces the contrast between this immortal and her now-fallen lover. Her presence imbues the scene with the vivid contrast, central to the entire cycle of imagery, between her fate and that of Adonis. The anguish of the goddess at the death of the hero discloses that, despite her passion, her divine powers have failed to save him from the perils of his mortality.

Exemplum virtutis

The focus of the hunt scene is the confrontation between man and beast. The idea of the hunt as a metaphor of battle had a long and venerable history.41 It was thought to provide “an excellent training in the art of war,” as Xenophon had claimed in the fourth century B.C. 42 In the same period that saw the rise of sculpted sarcophagi, the boar hunt became a staple of Imperial iconography, as it entered the Hadrianic triumphal repertory in the early second century.43 Not only did the boar hunt appear in the monumental roundels that now embellish the Arch of Constantine, but Hadrian also issued bronze medallions with very similar iconography.44 That the hunt continued to play this role in sepulchral symbolism is attested by the numerous sarcophagi which give prominence to similar images of the pursuit of other wild beasts, particularly the lion, as well as those representing the tales of boar hunters such as Adonis or Meleager.45 The hunt was not only the focus of the mythological repertories, for its familiar motifs were detached from their narrative contexts and allowed to stand in isolation. In this sense the dead boar could even serve as a punning metaphor of virtus on a private gravestone, to allude to the deceased as alter Meleager (Fig. 10).46

In all these instances the hunt served as an exemplum—as both a sign of virtus and a model for conduct.47 The consistent and conspicuous public display of these images suggests their function as paradeigmata.48 The power of such exempla lay in the ability of individual instances to demonstrate a general rule, and to accomplish this sufficiently well so that their intended public might be capable of recognizing the similarity.49 The mythological exempla illustrate ancient events, which, as they were continually held up for emulation, were continually appropriated to serve new purposes in ever new contexts. And whatever the context into which they were inserted, they imposed a new, specific, frame of reference=mas it were, from within. Thus these mythological exempla served as paradigms for the essentially mimetic character of human action. Only when envisioned in the light of the legendary exploits of heroes and gods can such human actions disclose their full significance and take their rightful place in the scale of human values vouchsafed by hallowed traditions.50

The use of exempla played a fundamental role in the rhetorical training of antiquity, especially in the “preliminary exercises,” or progymnasmata, which were the standard course studied by Roman youths beginning as early as the second century B.C. and continuing without interruption into late Roman times.51 Among these exercises the exemplary character of myth—and the persuasive power of exempla in general—held an important place, notably in the exercises known as fabella, narratio, chria, and sententia.52 Training in such a curriculum no doubt produced, in addition to a ready familiarity with the standard rhetorical formulae, a predisposition to think in terms of these formulae. One was trained not only to use exempla effectively but to recognize and respond to them when they were employed.53

The transfer of exemplary rhetoric from the verbal to the visual realm played an actual part in the curriculum. Ekphrasis—the rhetorical technique of description that purported to present visual images through the medium of words—appears among the progymnasmata by the first century a.d. 54 But descriptions of images, paintings in particular, had played a crucial role in earlier literary forms. The most notable is perhaps the Hellenistic romance, where the encounter with a painted image establishes the theme, if not the plot, that is about to unfold.55

The visual exempla on the mythological sarcophagi could equally lay claim to the persuasive power that proficiency in these exercises might eventually provide the would-be orators. For beyond a specific skill in ekphrasis and the techniques related to it, the orator’s transformation of the verbal to the visual lay at the heart of his enterprise. Among the greatest of the rhetorician’s skills was his ability to bring the things of which he was speaking seemingly before the eyes of his listeners, so that these images might be imprinted firmly on their memories.56 This was no less the concern of the designers of the sarcophagus images—and will be the subject of a later chapter.

Death in the arms of Aphrodite

The third scene on the Casino Rospigliosi sarcophagus represents Adonis’s death in the arms of Aphrodite (Fig. 4). Here the two protagonists are depicted on the same scale, and signs of affection replace those of separation. The couple sit, embracing, their bodies mirroring one another as they are joined to share a single contour. Here the goddess lovingly lays her hand upon the dying youth’s breast; on other reliefs she cradles his chin and caresses his cheek.57 There are a number of variants of this scene. Three of the reliefs lack the calculated symmetry of the end scenes displayed on the Casino Rospigliosi relief. On these sarcophagi the final moments of the drama appear to take place=mas well they should, according to the sources=moutdoors (cf. Figs. 6 and 11). These scenes, as was pointed out above, conform more closely to the narrative, particularly as it is recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses.58 On several of the sarcophagi there are also indications of an attempt to tend Adonis's wounds, as on the example in Blera (Fig. 5), where a washbasin lies at the couple's feet. On some examples erotes take up the task (Fig. 9).60

All these images recall the plaintive spirit of Bion’s Lament for Adonis, in which the goddess pleads for a final kiss from the expiring youth. In each of these variants of the scene he dies in the arms of his divine paramour, who is helpless to wrest him from his fate.61 Thus the sarcophagus imagery for the myth dramatizes a series of apparent failures: Adonis’s refusal to heed counsel, his failure to kill the boar, and Aphrodite’s inability to save him from death. Yet Adonis remains an exemplum virtutis because he represents a challenge to the awesome powers of ineluctable Fate.62 Even the desires of the gods are subject to it, as the myth so plainly reveals. The valiant deed of the hero—his bold acceptance of the deadly challenge of the hunt—is sundered from its specific role in the mythological narrative, and stands as a sign of character.63 The exemplary nature of the imagery in its sepulchral context transforms this series of apparent failures into a vehicle of heroic symbolism. In offering a heroic image of death, the sarcophagi thus recast the vision of an individual’s life. For even Herakles died; everyone dies. These images acknowledge that in memory it is the quality of life—and death—that survives and is worthy of commemoration and remembrance.64

The appearance of the embracing couple constitutes the only reference on the sarcophagi to that great eros that bound together goddess and mortal. The image of the intertwined pair—despite differences in its setting, in its pose, and above all in its obvious role in the narrative—endows this particular scene with an emotional tenor not unlike that of Ovid’s description. The poet tells how Aphrodite entreated Adonis to lie with her, and how, “pillowing her head against his breast and mingling kisses with her words,” she tells him the tale of Hippomenes that concludes with her warning about the dangers of the hunt.65 The motif regularly employed by the sarcophagus designers for the final scene of his death in the goddess’s arms is strikingly reminiscent of scenes depicting the love of Aphrodite and Adonis in other works of ancient art. In the images displayed on vases, in frescoes, and in sculpture, the two lovers are often found wrapped in similar embraces, known as symplegmata.66 It was the formulaic quality of the motif that allowed Theocritus to assume his readers would recognize the scene, in Idyll XV, where he speaks of a tapestry depicting Aphrodite and Adonis as they recline together in luxuriant repose.67 A very similar scene could be employed for the depiction of Adonis’s final moments, as in a fresco from Pompeii (Fig. 13). Not only is Aphrodite discovered coupled with Adonis in such a pose, but this same generic type of intertwined figures was also the standard formula for the representation of all of her love affairs, and those of other goddesses as well.68 Thus as the final embrace of the two lovers depicts Adonis’s death and Aphrodite’s grief, it recalls—if only subtly—the imagery of the great love they once shared and have lost.

The sarcophagus designers clearly related this third and final scene of the cycle to the first of the sequence. On a number of the surviving Adonis sarcophagi, the first and third scenes are presented as pendants that frame the scene of the young hero’s demise.69 Both represent interior actions, indicated by the parapetasma stretched across the back of the relief ground (Fig. 4); each depicts one or both of the protagonists seated and on a larger scale than in the scene of the boar hunt. This “invention” of a new setting for the final scene may be regarded as one more example of the Roman taste for the display of pendants since, as has already been observed, the literary sources for the final scene of Adonis’s death call for it to occur in the grove where he was wounded by the boar. The formal role of the parapetasma is revealed most clearly on a fragment, now in the Vatican, where it appears stretched behind not only the figures but the tree that specifies their outdoor setting (Fig. 11).70

This visual complementarity of first and final scenes evoked a corresponding complementarity of sense and served to reiterate the significance of the departure scene. Each of these scenes suggests the inescapability of Adonis’s fate. Just as Aphrodite was unable to prevent Adonis’s departure for the hunt, so too she was helpless to prevent his “departure” from life. Only with the second of these scenes is the significance of the first fulfilled, as the expectations evoked by its imagery are realized. The artists’ “invented” composition for the final scene imposed certain details on the story and sacrificed others to signal the analogy, which reveals the correspondence of both scenes as types of departure.71 As in the case of the departure scene, here too the imagery evokes the tragic reality that even heroes die: to be loved by the gods is not enough to save them.

Beginning at the end

The recognized correspondence between the two scenes that open and close the tale—correspondence in sense as well as in form—explains the use of one or the other on the three surviving reliefs that depict only two of the three scenes of the cycle.72 The visual repertory for the myth could be reduced yet remain effective because, despite depicting different narrative moments, these two scenes display the same typological character, share the same symbolic function, and represent the same idea—and therefore proved interchangeable.

Yet the elimination from the cycle of one scene or the other had a marked effect on the myth’s representation and on that representation’s significance. The final scene might be omitted, as on the sarcophagus at the Villa Giustiniani, for example (Fig. 14), with a resulting emphasis on the two remaining images of Adonis’s failures: to heed the goddess’s warning and to kill the wild boar.73 The departure scene is given new prominence by the intrusion of foreign elements: Adonis is shown dressed and about to leave, leading a horse. The scene is nearly identical to those representing Hippolytus’s departure from Phaedra (Fig. 8), which the Aphrodite and Adonis designers borrowed from the Phaedra repertory—just as they borrowed the enthronement motif with which this one was originally conjoined. Yet while Hippolytus hunted on horseback, Adonis—like Meleager—hunted the boar on foot and thus exemplified the brave hunter who stands alone in the face of danger.

Unlike the reuse of the enthronement motif, in which the specifics of the mythological narrative were abandoned in favor of the larger general significance of the image, in this instance the exchange of motifs gave prominence to details that undermined the grander sense of the scene. Once clothed (Fig. 14), the figure of Adonis forfeits the heroic connotations of nudity, as well as its erotic appeal. Deprived of this form of idealization and the schematic series of contrasts it established on other reliefs (cf. Figs. 5–7), this representation of the Adonis myth verges on the anecdotal. This “borrowing” should be regarded, not as another exercise in typology, marked by its characteristic quality of synthesis, but as an instance of contamination—one bred by a failure to comprehend the more profound connections between the two myths that had been established on other sarcophagi.74

The omission of the departure scene had a rather different effect, as can be seen on the sarcophagus in Mantua (Fig. 9). The two remaining scenes are divided by a pilaster, which marks the temporal shift and the change in setting from one to the next. The boar hunt here takes precedence, as it is expanded to fill almost two-thirds of the frieze.

The nearly centralized figure of Aphrodite, who rushes frantically to the side of her fallen lover, is the most prominent of many that crowd the relief. Amid the welter of forms she is distinguished by her naked torso and by her expansive gesture, which, as it crosses in front of the pilaster, seems to thrust itself beyond the boundaries of relief and enter real space. She is set apart by the reflective quality of her torso’s smooth, polished surface, which contrasts decidedly with the busy interplay of light and shadow that characterizes the relief as a whole. The monumental quality of her upright form, which fills the relief from top to bottom, is further emphasized by its contrast with the pilaster, dwarfed alongside her. She visually dominates the frieze, and it is to her form that the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn and his attention directed.

Thus the figure of Aphrodite, as it engages the beholder, effects an “entrance” to the story at its very center—with respect to the temporality of the narrative as well as the composition of the frieze. The goddess arrives dramatically, but too late to save Adonis—as the earlier moment of the disastrous hunt, with which her approach is coupled, makes clear. As the viewer scans across the frieze toward the right end, his eye led by the depicted movement of the central group of figures, he follows the story’s unfolding, yet he seems to move backward in narrative time.

The retrospective character of the right-hand portion of the relief is recapitulated by the frieze as a whole. With this sarcophagus as with others the viewer’s initial grasp of the relief as an integral form is supplanted by the perception of the multi-scened frieze’s distinct elements. Perception oscillates between the poles of whole and part: the synoptic view of the whole, dominated by its compositional pattern of forms, dissipates with the recognition of the subjects represented and the individuation of distinct scenes. As the narrative movement of each scene’s figures merges into the overall compositional pattern, focus on the segments gives way to the perception of a single totality.75

Cognizance of this phenomenon of perception in antiquity is implicit in a celebrated passage of Flavius Josephus. In his account of the triumphal procession upon the return to Rome, Josephus describes the huge painted banners, called pegmata, that depicted scenes of the war and “portrayed the incidents to those who had not witnessed them as though they were happening before their eyes.”76 Yet the description of the depicted subjects that follows offers merely a sequence of topoi, recounted without any sense of chronology. The integrity of the individual pegmata vanishes as Josephus recites their contents, displayed in a series of thematically related fragments, which the reader—like the beholder of the triumph—must reassemble into a coherent vision of the war.77

The artists responsible for the Mantua sarcophagus clearly exploited this interplay between synoptic vision and discriminating focus. The initial view of the whole is disrupted by the prominence of Aphrodite, whose figure commands attention. Nevertheless, the general movement of the figures in the frieze draws one’s vision away toward the right end. This movement underscores the natural impulse to read the linear progression of the entire narrative, following the model of writing, from left to right. As the beholder begins to scrutinize the imagery and ponder its significance, his scansion of the entire panel begins invariably at the left end, and therefore the first scene confronted as he surveys the frieze represents the end of the story. The contemplation of the imagery thus expands, with respect to form and to content, simultaneously forward and backward, as well as spatially and temporally. For on the Mantua sarcophagus—just as on the majority of the early Adonis reliefs—while the experience of the imagery moves from left to right, the temporal sequence of the mythological narration is displayed in the opposite direction, from right to left.78

In their narrative solutions, the sarcophagus designers demonstrated great ability and willingness to take advantage of this phenomenon of scansion, so fundamental to visual narration, which was inherent in the pictorial organization of the sculptures’ form. One of the most complex of these solutions may be discerned on a relief now in the Vatican (Fig. 15).79 This sarcophagus displays in a different form the contamination of the Aphrodite and Adonis repertory by that of the Phaedra and Hippolytus sarcophagi.80 On the right is the familiar boar hunt; on the left, however, the imagery seems to have become confused. Once again the borrowed horseman motif appears; but instead of extending the departure scene as it had on the Giustiniani sarcophagus (Fig. 14), here it is appended to the motif of embracing lovers—customarily the final scene of the cycle.

While the integrity of the hunt scene is rendered with great clarity, there are no formal divisions between the two elements that make up the left-hand side of the frieze. The figure who stands at their juncture actually seems designed to link them. He turns with his head toward one, and with his outstretched arm he gestures toward the other, instigating a sequence of implied movements that intimate a continuity of these elements with the scene of the hunt at the right side of the frieze. In this conflation of scenes, Adonis, identifiable by his nudity, appears twice. This double presence, as it indicates the continuity of the narrative, represents the first two of three distinct moments depicted on the relief: Adonis, first in the arms of Aphrodite, then leading his horse toward the hunt, and finally (at the other side of the frieze) wounded by the boar. Thus the Vatican sarcophagus, despite its formal similarity to the Giustiniani example, is actually another variant of the more customary three-scene reliefs.

The very placement on the Vatican sarcophagus of the couple’s final embrace imbued it with a certain ambiguity. The motif that had conventionally served to depict the wound tending is thus stripped of both its poignancy and intimacy as its sense is undermined.81 Its visual conjunction with the departure motif, and the repeated appearance of Adonis that results, produce a false sense of the temporal relation between the two conflated scenes. The scene that is chronologically first seems to follow visually from that which is chronologically third. Installed as on the Mantua sarcophagus (Fig. 9) at the left end of the frieze, where scansion of the visual narrative begins, the Vatican sarcophagus’s scene of final embrace thus constituted both the beginning and the end of the tale: the beginning, as one confronts the narration on this monument; the end, as one recognizes the subject that is narrated (Fig. 15).

This conception of the myth’s narration on these sarcophagus reliefs—since it appears on more than one example—is unlikely to have been the result of a mistake on the part of the workshops that produced them. In the conflation of different scenes, just as in the transfer of motifs from other mythological subjects, one should recognize the artists’ awareness that both the departure and the final embrace had ultimately the same significance for the sepulchral interpretation of the myth. In both scenes, Adonis is about to depart from the goddess who loves him, despite her desire to prevent their separation, a desire made palpable on the reliefs by the erotic overtones of the symplegma motif. Such are the limits of even divine love; such is the extent and the power of Fate.82

That the visualization of the story on the sarcophagi might begin at the end is not in itself surprising. The rhetorical device may be as old as storytelling itself.83 More specifically, the artists were free to reorder the progression of scenes on the reliefs because the Adonis myth, like most moralizing tales, was understood retrospectively, with its conclusion already established. Indeed, the images’ moral significance and exemplary value depend on this, and it is the reason that such familiar myths—and moral tales in general—are invoked again and again.84 This conception of the myth’s character helps to explain the right-to-left order of the scenes on those sarcophagi where the narrative cycle begins at the point of the frieze that for the viewer is ordinarily the end. The awkwardness of this entirely conceptual order, at odds with the demands of the conventional sequence of the visual narrative, was understandably jettisoned and the scenes on the sarcophagus reliefs displayed in chronological order from left to right. Yet its reappearance on the Vatican sarcophagus suggests the value of such a disruption of custom as a device to prompt renewed attention to the myth’s significance. As the rearranged scenes are read from left to right, their distinctive temporal disjunction compels a new consideration of the narrative—and of the way that narrative has been represented. The final scene becomes not merely the starting point for the tale that is recalled by these images, but the vantage point from which the myth they relate is to be understood.85

The force of analogy

The visual composition for the three scenes of the cycle established an analogy between its beginning and end. This thematic reiteration, in even this abbreviated redaction of the myth, recalls the use of repetition to bracket episodes in epic compositions.86 The epitomization of the tale is fulfilled by this implication of closure, which endows these extracts from the myth with a sense of unity and completeness.

Yet the same visual means that allowed the artists to effect this sense of closure also served to expand the connotations of the myth’s imagery. With the transposition of compositional motifs from the depiction of one myth to that of another, the artists gave greater emphasis to those elemental plots that were shared by more than one tale. In this fashion the artists established visual analogies among different myths based on their narratives’ related plot structures, rather than on their individual stories’ details. Generalized motifs such as the symplegma, familiar from a host of representations of related themes, provided the sarcophagus designers with visual forms that had both their own established significance and connotations extending beyond the story lines of the tale they were enlisted to depict.

These are the basic strategies by which the sarcophagus designers effected the grand analogies that formed the raison d’être of so much funerary symbolism. And it was by these means that the artists freed themselves from the bondage of the codified visual programs for their myths and allowed their powers of invention free rein. These strategies permitted the artists not only to alter the way a myth was depicted, but to recompose the tale to reflect its insertion in a sepulchral context. As the images themselves suggested associations between tales, they provided the structural guidelines for their interpretation. In these pictorial renditions of myth one must recognize works of art unburdened of a subservience to texts so that they might produce original and profound effects of their own. Those who viewed these images were intended not merely to recognize the myth but to grasp that the sculpted figures and their actions exemplified certain ideas and values that are the true subjects of the sepulchral symbolism: these are tales told with concepts as well as with characters. The three scenes of the Aphrodite and Adonis repertory collectively render a story of heroic virtus, the amor of the gods, and the conquest of both by the power of Fate. The reliefs must be conceived as the manifestation of these themes. The real significance of their epitomizing form of narration is revealed only if their stories are considered as the vehicles, rather than as the content, of the sepulchral message.

Apotheosis

On a large early-third-century sarcophagus now in the Vatican (Fig. 7), are found all three of the usual scenes of the Adonis repertory: the departure, the boar hunt, and the final embrace.2 The three do not appear in chronological order. The first and second scenes of the cycle, which resemble those on the Blera sarcophagus (Fig. 5), are placed at either end of the panel. The scenes have been compressed into smaller, tightly compacted versions of the familiar compositions. On the left, amid the calm and stable forms of the departure scene, the gestures of the two protagonists now fuse them together. The poignancy of the lovers’ farewell is evoked as Aphrodite presses her hand to Adonis’s chest and he rests his hand upon her knee. At the right, in contrast, their tragic passion is figured in the composition’s swirling of forms and its clash of diagonals. Adonis is shown falling before the charge of the wild boar, and Aphrodite rushes, horror-stricken, onto the scene, led by an eros, her mantle billowing, her scepter in hand.

Instead of the customary failing Adonis, slumped and supported by Aphrodite, the Vatican sarcophagus substitutes the pair of lovers enthroned, their arms draped about one another. Yet the erotic overtones of the symplegma motif evoked by other versions of the cycle’s final scene have vanished. Here the injured Adonis is being “tended” by an older, bearded physician, clearly smaller in scale. While he dresses the youth’s wound, an eros washes his feet, which are raised from the ground. But there is no sign of Adonis’s languishing at the threshold of death: he sits erect, awake, the equal partner of Aphrodite.3

The standard formula for the scene of the final embrace has been strikingly transformed. This is unmistakably a wound tending, and it has been given new priority among the three moments of the drama by its central placement. More importantly, its composition has been thoroughly reconceived. The seated couple are framed architecturally and distinguished by a parapetasma that delineates the scene at the rear; they are larger in scale than in the adjacent scenes; and unlike the images of the mythological protagonists in the scenes to each side, they bear portraits, without doubt those of the couple interred within the casket’s marble walls. These portraits introduce to this scene a new level of reality, one that distinguishes it from the two scenes that frame it.4 The image of the hunt, with its evocation of heroic virtus, no longer dominates the relief; here, the healing of the young suffering hero, and the relationship of the couple portrayed at the center of the panel, have become the focus of attention and thus the key to the meaning of the new composition.

The visual type is known from other monuments, and its basic elements are recognizable. The figures are enthroned, their feet elevated from the ground, mortal and divinity thereby represented as equals.5 The sarcophagus designers have effected the novel composition on the Vatican relief by the appropriation of this recognizable model, and with it they have recast the image—and the sense—of Adonis dying in the arms of Aphrodite. The enthroned couple conform to that special imagery invented by Roman art that demonstrated visually the ruler’s all-encompassing power as equal to that of the gods. For this same motif provided the foundation for the symbolic depiction of the emperor’s divinization. More importantly, this imagery was intended to be seen as the harbinger of that triumphant apotheosis by means of which the emperor, like so many of the characters of myth, would become one of the gods—and thus triumph over death. To be enthroned not only served to indicate superior status and authority (since one was seated while others stood); it also provided an analogy to the customary representations of the gods, notably the image of Jupiter enthroned as world ruler.6 To grasp the allusion, one need only compare this image with that miniature masterpiece of Roman artistic propaganda which manifested the connection between triumph in life and in the hereafter, the Gemma Augustea (Fig. 16).7 There too, at the center of its complex scene, a goddess and mortal sit side by side, sharing a throne, while Augustus receives the corona civica, the emblem of military valor that doubles in this instance as the garland signifying his apotheosis.8 This visual formula of the enthroned couple as an image of divinization and apotheosis was often repeated—indeed, it became a visual topos. The motif outlived its pagan context and was adapted in Christian art for representations of the crowned Virgin enthroned at the side of Christ in Heaven.9

The congruity between these two images (Figs. 7 and 16), one public and one private, testifies to the ability of Roman artists to translate established compositions and their significance to new formats and contexts. By these means they conceived new images familiar in form and resonant with the content of the most highly trenchant works of official iconography. In this instance, the representational formula for the mythologization of the emperor is “borrowed,” not only to provoke the conscious equation of this hero of myth and the hero of state, but to serve as a visual metaphor that functions here as the signal of Adonis’s new fate.10 The visual implication of the hero’s apotheosis is testimony to the power of the gods to revive the dead and to render them immortal.11 In the presence of the bearded “physician,” the eros who on other reliefs bandaged Adonis’s wounded thigh here washes his feet. This is not the ritual washing of the corpse in preparation for its interment, but, as the reformulation of the scene suggests, the cleansing of his revivified body for its presence among the gods.12

Although the official ideology of the divine princeps may have motivated the visual form adopted on the Vatican sarcophagus, in the mythological context the form had additional connotations, hallowed by much older traditions. While Adonis’s revival was not part of the main Roman version of the myth—Ovid’s—it had a definite place in the fable’s Greek heritage, and nothing could be better suited to the telling of the tale in this sepulchral setting.13 Thus this particular sarcophagus image tells the tale of Aphrodite’s powers, if not to forestall Fate, at least to have the final say in the drama.

Heroic suffering

In the poignancy of his suffering, the nature of his wound, and—in this particular version—the image of his succor with its implications of revival, Adonis’s plight is paralleled by that of other ancient heroes.

On an ivory plaquette found at Pompeii (Fig. 17), there is an image strikingly similar to the scene on the Vatican sarcophagus (Fig. 7).14 This work also depicts a physician who tends a figure wounded in the thigh; yet here Aphrodite stands at the left and gestures imploringly, while an attendant behind the hero steadies him. It has long been thought that this plaquette was a representation of the wounded Adonis,15 yet Adonis was not the only ancient hero thus wounded. Aeneas, the beloved son of Aphrodite, was also wounded in the thigh, but it was his great fortune to then be saved from death by the goddess. The correspondence between these tales and their depictions was not lost on the ancient artists, as we shall see.

In Book V of the Iliad, Homer tells how, when Aeneas’s thigh had been crushed by the mighty Diomedes, Aphrodite, his mother, swooped down into the fray to rescue him.16 Vergil was to reuse the theme and recall the scene in Book XII of the Aeneid. When an arrow launched “by an unknown hand” wounds Aeneas in the thigh, the old physician Japis labors, unsuccessfully, to revive him:

Aeneas stood propped on his huge spear, raging bitterly, amid a great throng of warriors and grieving Iulus, unmoved by their tears. The old physician, his cloak pulled back, and girt in the Paeonian manner, with healing hand and the potent herbs of Apollo, acts hurriedly, with great agitation, to no avail.…No Fortune guides his way, nor does his mentor Apollo offer aid…Now Venus, his mother, struck by her son’s undeserved pain, seizes from Cretan Ida some dittany, a stalk luxuriant with downy leaves and purple flower.…This Venus brought down, her face enveloped in shadowy cloud; this, with secret science, she dips in water poured into a shining vessel, and sprinkles with beneficial juices and fragrant panacea. With that liquid, ancient Japis caressed the wound, unknowingly, and suddenly, all pain fled from the body, all blood ceased to flow from the wound. And now the arrow, following his hand, unforced, fell out, and new strength returned, as before. “Quick, summon arms for the man! Why stand still?” cries Japis…“This arises not from mortal means, not by the master’s art, nor are you, Aeneas, saved by my hand; a greater one—a god—acts, and sends you back to greater deeds.”17

Save that the hero does not stand but sits, the ivory plaquette’s composition echoes the scene described by Vergil; it was not the only work of art to do so (cf. Fig. 27).

The image on the plaquette’s reverse strongly suggests this identification of the scene, for other ivory plaquettes of this kind are known, and in all cases the mythological imagery on their two sides appears to be related.18 On the reverse is a scene (Fig. 18) derived from the Romans’ visual repertory for Homeric epic, where it represented Priam’s return with the body of Hector after its ransom from Achilles (Fig. 19).19

The basic type of the dead hero’s body borne by his comrades was well known and widely employed, not only for the representation of this Homeric scene but for the representation of a whole series of dead heroes, and thus has a long history.20 It has been pointed out that this scene, with the two warriors who carry Hector’s body, does not actually correspond to Homer’s narrative, for Priam conveyed the body back to Troy on a mule-drawn cart.21 It would seem that an older type was adapted for the representation of the Hector scene, and the figure of Priam was appended to it, an interpretation substantiated by the early uses of the visual formula in Greek art and the lack of known early depictions of the Hector tale that include the figure of Priam.22

The association on the ivory plaquette of Aeneas with Hector—another ancient hero renowned for his suffering, although in this case it was suffering endured after death—provided a double image of the hero as both exemplum virtutis and exemplum doloris: one rescued from death, the other from desecration. This kind of pairing is not unknown in the art of antiquity.23 In fact this same scene of the ransom of Hector is found yoked with a scene from the life of another famous hero eventually delivered from his suffering: Philoctetes (Fig. 20).24 This Greek hero, who had numbered among the Argonauts, had set sail with seven ships for Troy. On route he had been bitten about the foot by a snake, and both his cries amid the agony of his suffering and the stench of his suppurating wound led his companions to abandon him on the island of Lemnos. Yet because the oracles had foreseen that victory could not be achieved without the bow of Herakles—which Philoctetes had inherited—destiny forced them to return to acquire it.25

The tending of Philoctetes’ wounds was a standard scene of that myth’s visual repertory and appears on a variety of ancient works of art: Etruscan cinerary urns (Fig. 21) and mirrors, an ornate silver cup of the Augustan period (Fig. 22) as well as its reproductions in Arretine ware, and two surviving Roman sarcophagi (Figs. 20, 23).26 The tragic image of the hero, suffering in isolation yet destined to recover, served as a potent symbol of hope in the face of an unfathomable existence after death. The myth no doubt served as well as an elegant reminder of the merit of stoic ideals and the virtue inherent in the ability to rise above the sufferings of this life for the sake of higher values.27 While the allusion to stoic ideals had special significance in a sepulchral context, the intimation of suffering transcended had the merit of presenting the deceased to his heirs and descendants as an exemplum for the endurance of their sorrows.

That a special relationship bound together the tales of these two heroes—Philoctetes and Hector—is demonstrably acknowledged again on the two famous silver cups from Hoby, one of which displays the ransom of Hector (Fig. 24) as a pendant to the wound tending of Philoctetes (Fig. 22). The typological affinity between the sufferings of Aeneas and Hector suggested by the Naples ivory plaquette corresponds exactly with the analogy between Hector and Philoctetes established on these miniature silver masterworks, as well as on the Basel sarcophagus (Fig. 20).

The intermingling of iconographic traditions

All three of these ancient heroes—Aeneas, Hector, and Philoctetes—were related as exempla. Their parallel stories offered models for the revision of the Adonis tale told by the Vatican sarcophagus. If the emperor could provide the analogy of apotheosis, these other myths could provide analogies of suffering overcome and death conquered. The reversal of Adonis’s fate, as he is healed under the auspices of Aphrodite, corresponds to, and appears to derive from, the type established by the other three mythological figures, all rescued from their agony, their wounds healed.

The correspondence between these stories runs deeper still. In Aphrodite’s rescue of Adonis there may be seen, if only metaphorically, a parallel to the element of deception that marks the other two tales. For just as Odysseus’s ruse and theft of Philoctetes’ bow are essential to the suffering hero’s return to health, and just as Priam’s stealth allows him to convey Hector’s body safely from the Greek camp under the cover of darkness—so Aphrodite here intervenes so that Adonis’s life might be “stolen back” from Fate.

What is evident at the level of plot is also signaled visually at the level of form in the motif—the seated hero whose wounds are tended—that two of these other myths share with the rendition of Adonis’s tale on the Vatican sarcophagus (Fig. 7). There can be little doubt that the Philoctetes myth takes precedence in the visual tradition: not only does a larger repertory of imagery survive, but it was Philoctetes—and Philoctetes alone—who was explicitly described in the ancient sources as a seated figure.28 Thus the visual form of the seated figure of Adonis on the Vatican sarcophagus, like the seated figure of Aeneas on the Naples plaquette, would seem to have evolved from a compositional type devised originally for the Philoctetes repertory. And in the visual resemblances that associate these various myths is to be seen evidence of that subtle form of typological allusion that broadened the significance of images.

The intermingling of the iconographic tradition of the Adonis tale with that of Aeneas, Hector, and Philoctetes is one more facet of the evolution of the Adonis imagery and the enrichment of the myth as it was adapted to the sepulchral context. For in the realm of mythological allusion, the details that distinguished the exemplary suffering of one hero from that of another might matter little; that Adonis might be conceived as yet another of these heroes suggests the full dimensions of his tragic story. Like the suffering of Aeneas, Philoctetes, and Hector, Adonis’s would be overcome. The Vatican sarcophagus, with its focus on the wounded youth’s suffering and cure, thus elaborates further the list of heroic qualities its imagery bequeathed to the deceased interred within it. Adonis’s pain has passed, but in his upright posture and calm demeanor can be seen the nobility with which that suffering was borne—and thus it served here as yet another sign of distinguished character. This sarcophagus relief declares that in the end, with the revival of the wounded Adonis, Aphrodite’s desire would prevail and, by implication, the unbroken continuity of their mutual love.29

Revived by Aphrodite

Like the pairing of Aeneas with Hector and Hector with Philoctetes, the implicit typological relationship between the wounded Adonis and the wounded Aeneas did not escape the artists of the ancient world. The interpretation of the Vatican sarcophagus and the implications of its imagery are confirmed by another ancient relief now immured high on the facade of the Casino Rospigliosi in Rome (Fig. 6).30 Here the goddess Aphrodite’s heroic powers to heal her beloved emerge even more clearly because of the explicit evocation of a mythological parallel to Adonis’s fate.

This sarcophagus is the most unusual of the entire corpus. Its main relief relates the tale with five distinct scenes rather than the customary three. At the far left is the same leave taking seen on other reliefs, shown here with slight changes in the arrangement of the figures and a reduction in the scale of the goddess. A pilaster separates this scene from the next, the departure for the hunt. This hunt scene is the most elaborate of all those on the Adonis sarcophagi. Once again the horsemen borrowed from the Hippolytus imagery make an appearance, but here for the first time the figures of both Adonis and Aphrodite are repeated as the episode is given the status of an independent scene. The unusual incident at the center depicts a group gathered about what appears to be the standing figure of Adonis, while an old man kneels and tends his wounded leg and a female supports his head and seems to caress his cheek or chin. Next follows the familiar boar hunt, and finally a version of the customary wound-tending scene.

The curious episode at the center (Fig. 25) not only violates the temporal progression of scenes from left to right but has no place in the story, and nothing resembling it is to be found in the mythological sources of the Adonis tale. The scene was recognized and identified by Robert, who, in his discussion of the sarcophagus, noted its similarity to a fresco fragment from Pompeii, now in the Museo Nazionale in Naples (Fig. 26).31 Yet Robert did not pursue the question of its role here as the central image amid the visual narrative of the Adonis tale—the question to which we now turn.

Like the Naples ivory plaquette (Fig. 17), the Pompeian fresco fragment represents the tending of Aeneas’s wound, yet this work is a near-exact illustration of the scene from Aeneid XII.32 On the sarcophagus, the composition is reversed, some of the figures are eliminated, and those remaining are altered slightly as they are adapted to suit the new story they are enlisted to tell. The young Iulus has disappeared, his place taken by Venus, who is shown arriving at the scene in the fresco.

Despite the similarities between the two myths—both heroes wounded in the thigh, both loved by Venus—the scene has no place in the Adonis tale. It has been borrowed from the imagery of the Aeneas narrative and inserted into that of Adonis, at its very center, with almost total disregard for the story’s integrity and comprehensibility, in order to effect an analogy. Just as Aeneas was revived by the healing art of Venus, so too will Adonis survive the wound inflicted upon him.33 And given the context in which this analogy is brought about, the reason and motivation for this mythological invention are readily apparent: the sarcophagus image declares that the deceased who lies buried within shall be revived.

The success of this analogy is conditional upon the spectator’s recognizing this episode of the Aeneas legend and grasping its significance in this context. A well-established literary use of mythological exempla, particularly in the works of the great first-century poets, provided a solid foundation for the employment of such an analogical strategy in the visual arts.34 The tradition of programmatic display of mythological ensembles in ancient wall painting demonstrates the familiarity of Roman beholders with such a meaningful juxtaposition of different mythological images.35

Because the interpolated scene had to be comprehensible, it could only be one taken from a tale that would be known to all who would see it. More importantly, it had to be visually familiar, either a scene whose representation had been codified in pictorial form and consistently depicted or one that corresponded precisely to a well-known literary source. The scene from the fresco reused on the sarcophagus, as the comparison with Vergil’s text has shown, is one of the few examples of Roman wall painting that fulfills these criteria and truly functions as an “illustration.”36 Taken from the great epic of Roman literature, its subject was surely far from recondite.

The episode from Aeneid XII, however, does not appear among the scenes on the small group of surviving Aeneas sarcophagi, nor is it among those late-antique manuscript illustrations of Vergil’s poem that have come down to us.37 In addition to the Naples plaquette, the scene of the healing of Aeneas survives only on gems or their glass-paste imitations (Fig. 27).38 That this particular scene was singled out for representation on such small portable works suggests that these gems, like other talismans, were thought to possess apotropaic power.39 Thus the function of the gem’s image in its context may be considered similar to that of the image on the Adonis sarcophagus. In both instances the episode is extracted from Aeneas’s tale, appropriated as a symbolic denial of the omnipotence of Fate, and personalized by the bearer of the image—he who wore the carved gem, or he who was buried within the sarcophagus—in an implicit analogy between the ancient hero’s fate and his own.

Thus this sarcophagus (Fig. 6), like the Vatican relief (Fig. 7), provides a contrast to the examples cited in Chapter 2, where the imagery of the Adonis sarcophagi focused on the virtus of the hunter and the inescapability of Fate. In this instance the imagery was intended to compel a reappraisal of Adonis’s fate in light of Aeneas’s and, by analogy, a reappraisal of the fate of the deceased. The imagery asserts that all three—Aeneas, Adonis, and the deceased—are to be spared from the finality of death by Aphrodite’s love. Thus the myth was reinterpreted, and its precise significance in the sepulchral context inverted, in order to convey the idea that for this man—this Adonis—as for Aeneas, being loved by the gods was enough.

Ab fragmento ad historiam

The designers of the Adonis sarcophagus reliefs, in order to tell their story, reduced the extended narrative of their myth by epitomization; the designers of the Endymion sarcophagi reliefs faced a rather different, complex, problem. As they adapted the surviving fragments of the Sapphic tradition to a narrative mode of visual representation, they were compelled to expand them by the imperatives of the sculptural form and its context.

The myth’s visual adaptation reveals the continuing influence of the two textual traditions. The tale’s fragmentary form had to be visualized in a manner that not only summoned to mind a narrative concerning the love of the gods but evoked fully its allegorical implications.13 To this end the Sapphic tradition’s account of Selene and Endymion’s love played the crucial role and provided the sculptors with their basic motif. The lasting success of the artists’ fundamental invention can be inferred from the large number of surviving examples.14

The visual and narrative focus of the sarcophagus representations is the scene of Selene’s nocturnal arrival before the sleeping shepherd.15 The uncluttered simplicity of two of the earliest examples, a sarcophagus in the Louvre of circa 140–150 (Fig. 28) and one in the Capitoline Museum of circa 130–140 (Fig. 29), has been thought by scholars to reflect the Greek character of the original pictorial invention. The Louvre example was in fact discovered near Smyrna in Asia Minor, where Greek traditions continued to flourish.16

The pithy depiction of the tale on these two reliefs reflects, not a single source, but a synthesis of numerous aspects conveyed by both the aphoristic and epigrammatic texts of the literary tradition: the beauty of the youth,17 the desire of the goddess,18 the eroticism of the encounter,19 the similarity of sleep and death,20 and the sacred nature of the union.21 All these elements were fused here in a single, succinct, and trenchant image. This composite scene functions effectively as the representation of a continuous cycle of nights and visitations, endlessly the same. Among the implications of the monuments’ imagery is the idea that Endymion, amid his “deathlike sleep,” remains eternally young and beautiful—just as the sarcophagi always depict him (cf. Fig. 30).22

Selene’s veil billows as a sign of divine epiphany as she steps from her chariot, drawn by the figure of Aura, the personification of the breeze. Erotes light her way with torches and lead her to the prostrate form of her beautiful paramour. The presence of these divinities conveys the magical nature of the youth’s slumber. On the majority of the reliefs, this suggestion is enhanced as the youth reposes in the lap of Hypnos, the god of Sleep (Fig. 29). Both the appearance of genii loci and the tree in whose shade the meeting takes place signal the sacred character of the setting itself. The Latmian grotto in which Sappho had set the tale appears here as the sacred grove, the haunt of divinities who take their pleasure sub caelo, and the spare landscape is suffused with a quiet timeless languor.23

On the Capitoline sarcophagus (Fig. 29) no other mortals appear, only those attendant deities and personifications who aid and abet the goddess’s desire.24 Hypnos is here endowed with the beard and age of his common companion, Thanatos, and thus reiterates in visual form the proverbial likeness between the two.25 His actions nevertheless belie this allusion, as he raises the folds of Endymion’s garments, unveiling him before the eyes of Selene. The billowing drapery subtly echoes that of her own mantle, but its function and significance are exactly the reverse. While her appearance, framed by her veil, is a traditional sign for the magical revelation of divinity, the action of Hypnos is intended to convey not merely the beauty, but the physicality—and, implicitly, the sexuality—of the mortal youth who is the object of her passion. Endymion’s large figure—out of scale with that of Selene—together with the ithyphallic herm just behind Hypnos, confirm this emphasis on the youth’s sexuality, further corroborated by the display of Endymion’s genitalia on the majority of these monuments.26

These sarcophagi present merely the first phase of an erotic scenario, the sequels to which are easily imagined. The proleptic power of such a presentation derives, in large part, from its evocation of a primordial human experience.27 Imagination comprehends the force and the exalted, divine character of this union, and this love, all the more effectively because they are depicted in the recognizable and affective form of imminent sexual congress. Thus, one is able not only to perceive Selene’s desire, but to imagine its consummation.28

The repetition, throughout the corpus of the Endymion sarcophagi, of the basic motif—Selene advancing, Endymion reclining—testifies, despite compositional changes, to the success of the fundamental invention. Among the more significant changes is the reversal in direction of the principal figures’ orientation. On the early sarcophagi, Selene advances from right to left (Figs. 28 and 29). Once reversed (Fig. 31), the temporal sequence of events reflects that of the phenomenological experience of the visual narration as its elements are read quite literally from left to right: the halted chariot, the emerging goddess, and the slumbering youth who awaits her. That this transformation of the composition was regarded as an improvement may be inferred from its gradual replacement of the earlier type, very few examples of which survive that can be dated later than circa 180.29

There are, however, other changes. While the arrival motif continued to provide the basic organization of the scene, additional imagery often supplemented the existing repertory. The number of erotes who accompany the goddess might be increased and new personifications appended to specify the myth’s topographical setting. These accoutrements of the tale are, for the most part, inessential to its recognition or its significance. They do, however, underscore the symbolism or establish in greater detail the context of the mythological narrative. Such additions are a form of staffage—stage dressing and decorative work that accompany the essential visualization of the myth.30

The amplification of the basic visual motif by the addition of staffage and the elaboration of the fragmentary narrative by the introduction of such embellishments had a literary counterpart. There was an established tradition in which the form and content of the epigram had been similarly amplified. By a series of rhetorical strategies, the literary potential of this most pithy and compressed form was enlarged.31 Prosopopoeia, in which imaginary figures or personifications address the reader in direct speech, breathed life into conventional poetic compositions; apodeixis, the feigned exhibition of the described object to the reader, seemingly transformed literary description into immediate experience; and with apostrophe the author interrupted his narration to address the object of his description directly and pointedly.

While such devices might expand the sense of a poem’s context, specify its content, or transform its connotations, the resulting literary work nevertheless remained firmly rooted in its genre and its topoi. The character and the traditional subject matter of the epigram were at times further elaborated in more substantial endeavors commonly associated with the major poetical forms.32 For instance, the aphoristic fragments of the Endymion myth could be inserted within a lyric or elegiac context, as one exemplum among many. The Endymion myth was employed in this fashion by Propertius and Catullus, who enlarged it by association and analogy with other, more complex, myths.33 The brief narrative could also be expanded, its concision cast aside and its matter elaborated, as in the case of Lucian’s dialogues, where the characters seemingly come to life and enact the drama implicit in the early accounts of the myth.34

The visual staffage on the sarcophagi may be regarded as a correlative to these rhetorical elaborations of the epigrammatic form. On these funerary monuments the mythological imagery was subject to similar modes of revision in an attempt to expand the Endymion narrative. Certain reliefs display more extensive compositional changes, and the proliferation of imagery suggests that, just as in the textual elaborations of Apollodorus and Pausanias, more of a narrative—more of a story—was desired. For the Endymion sarcophagi constitute an exception among the mythological sarcophagi, which, as a whole, are characterized by the depiction of multiple scenes arranged across the expanse of the long rectangular form of the casket.

Two distinct solutions appear, often simultaneously. These depend upon very different representational conventions. One seizes upon the temporality inherent in the goddess’s appearance before the sleeping shepherd and, by expanding on the scene’s implications, extends it narratively. Thus the arrival motif produces its sequel, the departure, merely by doubling the chariots along with the figures of Selene and Aura (Fig. 32).35 The other solution retains the single event as its focus and elaborates this basic scene allegorically. While the arrival motif remains the core of these representations, it is augmented by others, and this addition of complementary imagery signals the transformation of the myth to suit the sepulchral context.

Narrative extension

On the basis of a now-destroyed painting from Pompeii, Karl Schefold proposed the original existence of a specific additional scene in the Endymion myth's representational tradition. This wall painting (Fig. 33) represented Endymion asleep in the arms of Hypnos at the center of a landscape whose topography is distinguished by the column and sacred tree characteristic of the “sacral-idyllic” type.37 From above Selene descends in her car, while another rustic figure shields his eyes as he beholds the divine epiphany.38 Schefold assumed that this figure also represented Endymion=malthough no such detail is to be found in the textual sources=mand that the painting recorded an original element of the lost Endymion narrative.39 He concluded, from the evidence of this painting and those sarcophagi depicting both an arrival and a departure scene, that the Greek visual prototypes for these images must have been found in two consecutive scenes of an illustrated text, or “Bilderbuch.” Schefold even came to regard sarcophagus reliefs with relatively uncomplicated compositions as excerpts of what had originally been independent scenes in a larger narrative (Fig. 34).40

In the absence of either an extended narrative in the textual sources or a surviving ancient cycle of scenes depicting the myth in any medium, Schefold’s conjectural “Bilderbuch” for the Endymion myth is scarcely compelling. Moreover, the existence of such “Bilderbücher” can be convincingly deduced on iconographic grounds only in those instances where the imagery cannot be derived implicitly from the standard scene shared by nearly all the sarcophagi. This is a criterion Schefold’s sarcophagus examples frankly cannot be said to meet.

The extension of the Endymion imagery by the doubling of the chariots depicted in the basic scene more plausibly derives from the essentially decorative conventions that so often governed the display of sculpture. Such extensions of the existing imagery fail to add anything substantial to either the story or its exegesis. The same quantity of narrative material is stretched to provide more visual imagery; a reduplication of the basic forms serves as a substitute for additional content.41

This assimilation of narrative material to the formal character and conventions of a prevalent stylistic idiom can also be seen in the case of the Pompeian wall painting invoked by Schefold. The composition reflects the transference of the myth’s brief narrative to a complex pictorial format to which its concision was clearly unsuited. But not all the surviving mythological landscape paintings depict their stories as continuous narratives within the framework of their integrally conceived compositions.42 As von Blanckenhagen suggested, the multiplication of scenes in continuous narrative style in the independent panels of the mythological landscapes—in particular those characterized by a bird’s-eye perspective—may indeed represent a “genuinely Roman alteration” of the Hellenistic originals on which they were based.43 Whether or not its purported “second scene” constitutes evidence of a continuous narrative prototype, the addition of that scene to the tale played a role in the transformation of the Endymion myth’s imagery as the painters abandoned the compositional form and style of large panels organized around monumentalized figures in favor of the conventions associated with another type of mythological landscape.44

Allegorical elaboration

The other “solution” to the problem of forging a more complex narrative for the fragmentary tale was literally to add more—new—imagery. Here the sarcophagus designers employed pictorial density as an alternative to lateral, narrative, extension. Rather than try to make the story appear longer, indeed more of a story, they condensed more imagery within the original framework to make the little they had more complex visually. This solution produced reliefs whose sculpted surfaces were crowded with figures and thus wholly of a piece with the rise of a new stylistic idiom in third-century sculpture.45

These reliefs are marked, beyond the addition of more staffage, by new characters who take part in the action and by added elements that play a purely symbolic role—none of which are derived explicitly from the myth’s textual sources.46 The resulting compositions are distinguished by their density, which is not merely sculptural but intellectual. These reliefs must be conceived as assemblages whose elements stand in paradigmatic and vertical relationship to one another. The connotations of these supplementary elements serve to elevate the story to a new level of significance; indeed, reliefs such as these epitomize the very process by which such stories become myths at all.

The huge Endymion sarcophagus now in the Palazzo Doria-Pamphili (Fig. 31) demonstrates this new elaboration of the mythological fragment. This was a large panel with significantly more space to be filled, and it displays the arrival motif’s amplification in the new style.47 A great number of characters are added to the scene: the chariots of Apollo and Selene appear at the upper corners; the the personification of Mount Latmos establishes the setting; Hypnos, leaning over Endymion, is shown in his customary youthful form;48 here Hesperos, the evening star, leads the way for Selene with a lighted torch, taking the place of the eros who performed the same task on the Capitoline sarcophagus (Fig. 29);49 three of the Horae, or seasons, appear at the event; the personification of earth, or Gaia, reclines under the horses of Selene's chariot; and a sedentary old shepherd who tends his flock turns his head to witness the action. A great wealth of imagery is jumbled together here, piled up and tightly packed within the cramped space of the relief. The formerly simple scene of seduction has been transformed into the complex representation of a cosmic event.50 Its temporal setting is established by the chariots at the upper corners, which represent Apollo’s course across the heavens by day and Selene’s by night; together they situate the scene at the moment of transition between the two. The perennial cycle is alluded to by the presence of the Horae. The primary effect of this condensation of imagery around the moment of the goddess’s arrival is to demonstrate the concatenation of forces that conspire in the mythic event’s realization. As they are gathered about it, all these figures and symbols serve to unfold its implications and to elaborate its significance.

In both the allegorical and narrative “solutions,” these transformations of the imagery added nothing material to the myth per se. The lateral, narrative, extension of the existing imagery should be regarded as the equivalent of a rhetorical strategy intended to produce the impression and aesthetic effect of an expanded narration. In this sense it constitutes an example of the transposition to the visual arts of the literary device of amplificatio. An oratorical device of persuasion, amplificatio was a technique for making more of one’s material by means of argument, repetition, comparison, and accumulation.51 Its goal was the “more impressive affirmation” of the topic in question so as to produce greater effect.52 And it is in precisely this sense that the additional imagery and the subsequent changes in the double-chariot compositions of the sarcophagi reliefs should be understood.

The evidence of the surviving sarcophagi suggests that this approach to the mythological fragment was not employed very often. Certain peculiarities of the resulting compositions suggest one of the reasons: once the chariots and horses were doubled, they demanded a very large portion of the available space, and they impeded the designers’ ability to give priority to the fundamental scene of the encounter. On most of these examples the essential arrival motif was pushed toward one of the panel’s ends, and its central position was usurped by either Aura or one of the teams of horses. The presence of incidental figures such as these in the primary position on the central axis can only be regarded as a compositional shortcoming, and additional motifs seem to have been introduced to balance it. This appears to have been the case where Aura, standing at the center of the relief, holds garlands signifying apotheosis, as on another sarcophagus now in the Capitoline Museum (Fig. 32).53

The allegorical solution avoided this dilemma. The additional elements of such a solution could be added around the central scene without altering the relief’s basic composition or its focus. This allegorical mode allowed the artists to introduce, by means of pictorial elements that functioned symbolically as metaphors and analogies, new ideas that informed and structured the beholder’s response to the scene. The paradigmatic quality of the myth is signaled by these associations and parallels, whose relationship to the myth should be understood as if they were the visual equivalents of an interlinear gloss to a text. The allegorical elaboration thus not only amplified the fragmentary tale but, more importantly, offered a commentary on its appropriateness and significance in the context of sepulchral art.

Perpetuae nuptiae

The large wine-vat-shaped sarcophagus, or lenos, now in New York (Fig. 35), presents one of the most elaborate examples of the Endymion tale’s allegorical amplification.54 The entire surface of the marble vat—front, ends, and back—is covered with figured imagery, which extends onto the front edge of the lid. Below the lion protome at the left, behind the seated form of the old shepherd, appear the figures of Cupid and Psyche.55 Smaller in scale than even the numerous erotes that accompany the scene, they are not incorporated into the narrative but are present on the relief as symbols.56 They represent another couple—one of them mortal, the other divine—whose love was also consummated nightly under the veil of darkness. Their presence evokes the similarity of their story to the tale told on the sarcophagus relief and implies an analogy between the cycle of endless nights Selene shared with Endymion and the nightly rendezvous between Cupid and Psyche. The analogy provides a key to understanding Selene’s continual return despite Endymion’s endless slumber. For Cupid and Psyche’s eventual betrothal, and her subsequent deification, represent the ultimate reward of such constancy in love—an endless marriage. Just as the marriage of the mythological protagonists was to be eternal, so too that of the couple who are here commemorated in their guise. The imagery proclaims that this marriage, despite death, is everlasting, and this couple’s endless love, the equal of one divine.57

The same theme could be signaled in another fashion. On the relief now at San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome (Fig. 36), the conventional imagery has been strikingly revised.58 Here it is Aphrodite who appears at the center of the scene, seated on a chariot drawn by oxen. It is she whose naked figure is framed by a billowing veil that marks her epiphany. Thus Aphrodite signals her role as the divinity who presides over the scene of the moon goddess’s encounter with the sleeping shepherd.59

Selene, wearing the long veil of a bride, is led to Endymion’s side, not by erotes, but by Nyx, the personification of the night, under whose starry sky the event transpires.60 The incipient eroticism that played a regular part in the usual arrival scene is reflected in the youth’s nudity, yet it is subordinated here to the implications of Selene’s new comportment and costume. The pastoral elements have been relegated to minor roles, and the old shepherd who often accompanies the scene has been eliminated. The marriage analogy signaled on other reliefs by the presence of Cupid and Psyche has been assimilated to the Endymion myth itself.61

This interpretation of the Endymion myth as a “celestial marriage” is corroborated by another series of funerary images that represent the love of Selene and her shepherd. While these do not appear on the surviving sarcophagi, they are found on a group of grave stelai from provincial areas of the Roman Empire. These monuments represent a further scene in the Endymion narrative: a naked Selene rises from the bed of her sleeping lover, Endymion (Fig. 38).62

All the known examples are depicted in the tympana, or pediments, at the top of stelai designed in the form of temples to honor the dead. Thus the Selene and Endymion narrative appears in an architectural context that was traditionally conceived as the province of the gods and as a symbol of the celestial realm.63 The imagery of Selene’s love for Endymion suggested, on these gravestones as on the sarcophagi, a metaphor for the blessed life to come.64

The theme of the imagery and the significance of the architecture on these provincial reliefs are complemented on a very similar stele from Savaria by an accompanying inscription: Optamus cuncti, sit tibi terra levis. 65 The hope that the earth would not lie heavily on one’s grave found a counterpart in the accompanying image of Selene and Endymion, with its suggestion of an afterlife in the heavens. The myth on these stelai represents the fate of the dead among those lofty beings above who have found their way to the “prairies of the Moon and Venus.”66

Exemplum bucolicum

On the sarcophagi, where sleep functions so clearly as a symbol of the afterlife, the designers have taken pains to give a sense of what Endymion’s “deathlike sleep” would be like. The various qualities of this tale of mythical sleep have been translated into visual forms: its eroticism appears in the seduction scene and the characters’ nudity; its endlessness is figured by the symbols of the nightly and annual cycles; its role as a precondition for the youth’s divine “marriage” is signaled by the attendance of Hypnos; and the characterization of the entire episode as a form of deification is heralded by the presence at the scene of Cupid and Psyche.

Another element was appended to the myth’s visual repertory that continued to refine and develop these ideas about the afterlife, although in a different pictorial guise and along different metaphorical lines. This is the pastoral vignette that appears on many of the sarcophagi. Its central motif is a seated shepherd, often sleeping and accompanied by his dog and his flock, all set within a summary landscape (Fig. 39). The traditional identification of Endymion as a shepherd provided the rationale for including this image.67 The figure of the shepherd, who appears sometimes young, sometimes old, cannot have been intended to represent an additional episode in the narrative.68 In almost every instance, the shepherd is not part of the central scene but appears adjacent to the main action, either asleep or lost in thought.69 Yet shepherd and flock are not merely part of the setting and its staffage. They endow the sarcophagus imagery with another topos, the bucolic idyll, which serves to connect this myth to others that similarly invoke a beneficent image of the afterlife.70

This vignette exudes the quiet charm of the Theocritan pastoral. It is the descendant of those Hellenistic images that served as the visual counterparts to Theocritus’s Idylls, which praised the good life amid pastoral quiet as an antidote to civic turmoil.71 In early imperial times the Romans had adopted similar images that evoked the serenity of pastoral life. Such bucolic imagery, one aspect of the revival of rural values, was celebrated not only in the verse of the great Augustan poets but in the appearance of sacral-idyllic landscape painting as well.72 Moreover, this bucolic imagery held a privileged place in Roman tradition, as Varro had pointed out: “Is there anyone who doesn’t know that the Roman people issued from shepherds? who does not know that Faustulus, the guardian who raised Romulus and Remus, was a shepherd?”73

This visual topos took its rightful place amid the repertory of bucolic imagery. As Vergil tells of “joyous places, the green pleasances, and the blessed abode of the fortunate groves,”74 thus the image of the shepherd in reverie could serve as a dreamlike metaphor of the tranquillity waiting after death.75 In the visual arts, particularly in sepulchral contexts, it flourished far longer than the literary genre whence it came. On these monuments bucolic scenes remained a classicizing allusion to the past in a mode that was no longer vital to the poetic repertory. Indeed, literary taste for the pastoral appears to have waned, if not almost to have disappeared, by the late second century.76

Resonant with the values and virtues of the pastoral life, this bucolic image could function separately as a symbol. The shepherd’s independent appearance on other sarcophagi testifies to the vignette’s role as a discrete and significant element in the repertory of funerary images (Fig. 41).77 The vignette and its constituent motifs could also be reused in new contexts.78 This appears to have been the genesis of a unique sarcophagus, now in Naples (Fig. 42).79 On this relief the pastoral topos is juxtaposed with an image of the hunt, which was appropriated from the Meleager repertory. As the two images carried to their new context their customary significance, they thus served as symbolic expressions of the active and contemplative life.80 On another sarcophagus, now in Pisa (Fig. 43), the bucolic idyll was similarly represented side by side with an image of the Muses, and thus, following Vergil, these images served to symbolize two possibilities for happiness in human life.81 A related mode of invention seems to have been responsible for the so-called Rinuccini sarcophagus, where again a recognizable motif from another mythological repertory—the “death of Adonis”—was extracted from its narrative context and re-employed (Fig. 44) in conjunction with elements of the vita humana type. Set alongside the biographical scenes alluding to concordia and pietas, the mythological image of virtus completes the conventional sequence of virtues as it manifestly fulfills the allegorical implications of the series as a whole.82

In each of the preceding examples, motifs were reused independent of the narrative context in which their visual forms were customarily employed. In their new settings these motifs (the shepherd or the entire bucolic vignette, the hunt, or the dying hero) function in the generic sense fundamental to the very idea of topoi. A greater generality is reflected by the Naples and Pisa sarcophagi, where their conventional symbolism does not demand the recognition of their visual affinities with, or sources in, the standardized mythological repertories. Yet in the case of the Rinuccini sarcophagus, something of both the literal and metaphorical significance of the motif’s origin would have been evoked by the sculptural forms. For the “death of Adonis” would need to be recognized, and its significance as an exemplum virtutis recalled, if it were to play a meaningful role amid this complex composition dedicated to scenes of the vita humana. 83

The compositional principle that determines the overall mode of presentation on these sarcophagi is parataxis, the deliberate abandonment of the formal conventions of syntax and the organizing structures of subordination that syntax entails. Paratactic compositions involve the stringing together of discrete elements without connectives. In the absence of integrated structures of subordination, the independence of these elements is emphasized by the form itself, and their precise relationship to one another must be forged by the viewer from the interpretation of each in the context of the whole.84

Divorced from the central event, spatially, thematically, and narratively, the bucolic vignette was placed beside the image of Selene and Endymion as both a counterpart and a complement. As a peaceful addition to the tumult of Selene’s arrival and Endymion’s seduction, the pastoral scene has its parallel on the famous sarcophagus of Iulius Achilleus now in the Museo Nazionale Romano (Fig. 45), where similar imagery serves as an emblem of Elysium and symbolizes “the unavoidability as well as the consoling repose of death.”85

The bucolic idyll, as a topos, augmented the repertory for the representation of the afterlife found on the Endymion sarcophagi and offered another symbol for the favor of the gods. To the image of erotic encounter with the divinity amid the quiet of slumber, the bucolic scene adds that of a pastoral oasis of peaceful meditation. In the absence of a narrative relationship, the paratactic presentation of the motifs—and the scrutiny that presentation provokes—prompts the recognition of a special mode of correspondence.86 Juxtaposed, the motifs present a form of iconographic symmetry. The erotic motif literalizes the gaining of the gods’ favor, while the bucolic topos metaphorizes the paradise of the afterlife by likening it to a recognizable scene of pastoral simplicity and charm.

Both of these images provide answers to the question of what it is like to be loved by the gods. They were in turn augmented by the evocation of Selene and Endymion’s celestial marriage—literally on the San Paolo and Sassari sarcophagi (Figs. 36 and 37), and metaphorically in the figures of Cupid and Psyche on other reliefs (Fig. 35). The conjunction of these ideas on the sarcophagi would have been familiar, for in antiquity all three conceptions were connected, as Plutarch’s Life of Numa suggests:

Numa, forsaking the ways of city folk, determined to live for the most part in country places, and to wander there alone, passing his days in groves of the gods, sacred meadows, and solitudes. This, more than anything else, gave rise to the story about his goddess. It was not, so the story ran, from any distress or aberration of spirit that he forsook the ways of men, but he had tasted the joy of more august companionship and had been honored with a celestial marriage; the goddess Egeria loved him and bestowed herself upon him, and it was his communion with her that gave him a life of blessedness and a wisdom more than human. However, that this story resembles many of the very ancient tales which the Phrygians have received and cherished concerning Attis, the Bithynians concerning Herodotus, the Arcadians concerning Endymion, and other peoples concerning other mortals who were thought to have achieved a life of blessedness in the love of the gods, is quite evident.87

A Myth transfigured

A single fragment provides a significant variant amid the repertory of Endymion sarcophagus reliefs. This work, now in Berlin (Fig. 46), is different in both style and conception from other examples examined thus far.5 The relief is marked by the statuesque verticality of its major figures. The calm and stability they exude are underscored by their draperies, which fall heavily and cling to the motionless forms underneath. Their poses are silhouetted against the background plane, and there is no illusion of depth behind the composition’s foreground frieze. This relief displays little, if any, of the compositional style found on the other Endymion sarcophagi and differs markedly from those busy, complex renditions of the scene that appear on other early-third-century reliefs that have been considered examples of “allegorical elaboration.” These characteristics suggest that this relief was imported from the Eastern provinces of the empire or, more likely, had been sculpted by an Eastern workshop transplanted to Rome. Its similarities with other reliefs clearly of Attic style, such as the fragment of an Achilles sarcophagus now in Copenhagen (Fig. 47), would seem to confirm this.6

If the Berlin fragment is Greek in style, it nevertheless adapts conventional elements and characters basic to the Roman iconography and forges a new conception of the myth. This new conception is, moreover, far more complex a revision of the standardized metropolitan type than the adaptation figured on the sarcophagus from Smyrna (Fig. 28). Most importantly, the figure of Mount Latmos personifies the setting of the event just as it does in the Sapphic version of the myth and on the vast majority of sarcophagi that represent the tale.

At the fragment’s center, seated below the personification of Latmos, is the figure of Endymion, who appears with his eyes open, awake.7 He raises his arm as he gestures, seemingly toward the moon goddess. At the right stands the draped, bearded figure of Hypnos, with his winged head, while to the left of Endymion is a youth, naked save for the chlamys, who holds a lowered torch; behind him can be seen the bearded and winged head of a wind god who carries his shell-shaped horn.8 All eyes turn left, presumably toward the figure of Selene, and Endymion seems to call out to her with his gesture. At the left edge of the fragment stands a female, wearing both chiton and himation, whose head has been broken from the relief. The full sense of the scene is unclear and must be reconstructed, together with the balance of the relief, now lost.

The only explicit indication of the relief’s missing elements is the hand in the upper right corner that intrudes and firmly grasps a leafy stalk. It has been assumed that the leaves were part of the poppy stalk conventionally borne by Hypnos, who clutches with his left arm what remains of the badly damaged lower part of the branch. But the leaves cannot be securely identified, nor can the hand that grasps them, although it may be all that remains of one of the Horae, who make a similar appearance on other reliefs.9

Thus at least one additional figure once stood beyond the fragment’s broken right edge;10 surely other figures were represented on the relief as well. While the Endymion reliefs, on average, have a ratio of length to height of 3:1, or perhaps 3.5:1, those of the Attic style sarcophagi are somewhat less, roughly between 2.5:1 and 3:1. With even the lesser ratio a considerable portion of the relief would have been lost; at best what is preserved is just over half the original scene (Fig. 48).

The orientation of the figures toward the left—Endymion in particular—suggests that the bulk of the missing relief belonged at that end. If a ratio between the length and height of the original panel is assumed to have been approximately 2.9:1, it is likely that the headless figure at the left edge of the fragment would have stood near the relief’s center. This headless female has often been identified as Selene herself, because all eyes seem to turn toward her.11 Yet the torch she holds aloft, whose remains can be seen at the fragment’s left edge, is not one of the goddess’s attributes found on other sarcophagi, nor does she bear a typological relation to Selene as she appears on the other reliefs.

Several other aspects of the scene reveal the nature of the event depicted, signal the precise moment represented, and suggest another identification for the female figure at the panel’s left edge. It has always been assumed that the scene presented on the Berlin fragment focused on the arrival of Selene, just as on all the other sarcophagi. Consequently Endymion’s gesture, as he raises his arm and stretches out his opened palm, has been considered one of surprise at his goddess’s epiphany.12 While the interpretation of the gesture as one of surprise is corroborated by its employment in other works of ancient art, the assumption that Endymion is surprised by Selene’s arrival appears, as we shall see, far less secure.

Each of the attendant divinities who on the metropolitan style sarcophagi actively participated in Selene’s liaison with her sleeping consort appears on the Berlin fragment in a passive role. Hypnos stands aside, his sleep-inducing poppy stalk idle, as the symbolic correlative to Endymion’s wakened state.13 Similarly passive are the youth alongside Endymion, who stands with lowered torch, and the old wind god behind him, whose shell-shaped horn rests upon his shoulder. The youth has been identified as either Hesperos, the evening star, or Hymenaios, the patron deity of marriage.14 The latter would appear more likely on typological grounds, since Hesperos is usually identified with a small flying eros, while this figure corresponds to the type often employed for Hymenaios on the sarcophagi, where he is similarly depicted as a young, long-haired man, naked except for his chlamys.15

The scene is transformed as all these figures cease to play an active part in the depicted event; they no longer perform their usual roles because night has ended, and in contrast to his customary pose on the other sarcophagi, where he lies amid his slumber, here Endymion sits upright and awake. The figure at the center of this scene must be Aurora herself, who has just informed the lovers that morning approaches, and it is time for Selene to depart. Originally she must have dominated the scene with her flaming torch, symbol of the dawn’s arrival. The scene has its parallel in the iconography of Phaeton, where Aurora bursts upon the scene to identical purpose.16

Thus the inversion of the basic and familiar motif customarily employed for the figure of Endymion—from a passive sleeping form to an active awake one—is echoed by a shift not only in the roles of the attendant figures but in the temporal focus, from before to after. To complete this series of inversions, the missing portion of the relief may thus be construed as having represented Selene ascending her chariot, which stood ready to carry her off.17

Despite obvious differences in appearance and the different moment of the encounter on which it focuses, the Berlin fragment nevertheless survives from a relief that elaborated elements belonging to the standardized imagery of the metropolitan repertory that had evolved for the myth’s representation. For by the last quarter of the second century, the scene of Selene’s departure played a significant role in the visual tradition. The setting of the scene on Mount Latmos remains unchanged, and the sarcophagus designers have formulated the sequel to accompany the often-depicted image of the departing goddess. They have merely moved the focus forward in time and have replaced the arrival and seduction by a farewell and withdrawal.

The Berlin relief suggests that in this one instance, at least, the artists who designed representations of the tale might have reinterpreted the myth by refocusing on what was usually a secondary theme, Selene’s departure.18 The change of focus transformed both the narrative and its implications. For the proleptic nature of the scene no longer directs the beholder’s thoughts toward the couple’s night of conjugal bliss but now proclaims the visible anguish of the youth at their impending separation.

Endymion awake

The Berlin fragment is not the only ancient work of art to depict the young shepherd with his eyes wide open. This variant of the tale, despite its obvious difference from the conventional rendition, is not without its relation to tradition. In a passage roughly contemporary with this relief, Athenaeus relates how Licymnius of Chios wrote that it was Sleep who was in love with Endymion, and that “Sleep does not cover the eyes of Endymion when he slumbers but lays his beloved to rest with eyelids wide opened, that he may enjoy the delight of gazing upon them continually.”19 While such a passage may have provided, in some indirect way, the authority for representing Endymion with open eyes, this is not the scene the Berlin fragment depicts; for there is no doubt that Endymion is awake and plays an active role in the scene that unfolds.

Yet on the two other sarcophagi where Endymion appears with eyes open—one at the Palazzo Braschi (Fig. 49) and another in the British Museum (Fig. 50)—Endymion appears passive in his familiar recumbent pose. Thus these monuments cannot be considered analogous to the depiction of Endymion on the Berlin fragment.

Endymion also appears awake in a group of Pompeian wall paintings. All these images form part of decorative programs, upon which their precise significance depends.20 In one Pompeian ensemble, where Endymion appears along with Narcissus (Figs. 51 and 52), the young shepherd is seated upright and awake, therefore providing a more telling comparison with the relief in Berlin.21 In this painted room Endymion and Narcissus no doubt served as variant metaphors of death, but the relationship between the visualizations of these tales was clearly more complex. These images seem to have been devised as visual pendants, with each figure seated on a rock, at rest.22 Yet there remains a fundamental difference between the two protagonists that Endymion’s open eyes articulated. For Narcissus fades away to his death yearning after “a formless hope [which] he thinks to be a body,”23 while Endymion greets his goddess as she arrives to bestow upon him her embraces and her love—an event that will shortly send him to his “deathlike sleep.” The two images contrasted the sad end of the overproud Narcissus with the humble Endymion’s happier fate as the goddess’s eternal lover. It was the cruelty of Nemesis herself that doomed Narcissus, while Selene provided a kinder destiny for Endymion. Despite the vast difference in circumstances, both youths died of love: Narcissus from an obsessive attraction to his own fleeting image, Endymion from the divine favor bestowed upon him: two unconventional proofs of the adage Amor vincit omnia. 24

Endymion abandoned

None of these comparisons, in the context of their decorative programs, provides a pertinent analogy for the Berlin relief.25 In all the Pompeian fresco ensembles the focus of the Endymion representation remains Selene’s arrival—and it is precisely this that distinguishes them, as well as all the other Endymion sarcophagi, from this singular variant among the sarcophagus reliefs.

The sole monument that does depict Endymion active as well as awake is a mosaic at Piazza Armerina (Fig. 53).26 There Endymion’s tale appears conjoined with the myth of Andromeda in the predella-like panel below a scene of the Gigantomachia. The two scenes below provide examples of mortals who undergo metamorphosis and are translated to the heavens in a form of astral immortality, thus in contrast to the giants above who were defeated in their attempt to supplant the gods in the heavens.27

Endymion gestures with his raised arm, much as he does on the Berlin fragment, but Selene is nowhere to be seen; Andromeda appears freed from the rock, the monster slain alongside her, yet Perseus is missing. This “predella” is marked by the absence of the divine figures from each of the depicted tales.28 Moreover, that Perseus has already vanquished his foe and released Andromeda suggests that the artist decided to depict the aftermath of the famous mythic event rather than to follow conventional representations of the tale, which show Perseus’s arrival to do battle with the monster while Andromeda remains in chains. Only one of the two other adjacent “predelle” survives in sufficiently good condition to allow an interpretation of its imagery. Daphne appears amid her metamorphosis into the laurel, and there too, the moment depicted follows her encounter with the divine Apollo; so too Cyparissus, who sits beside the dead stag, his arms already transformed into the leaves and branches of the cypress by the same god.29 Perhaps this pattern of representing the final moments of the myths may be said to hold true for the image of Endymion as well: the customary depiction of the myth was reformulated, with Endymion awake, Selene having departed, so that it harmonize with the other images to which it is here conjoined.

If, however, a fully confident assessment of the moment depicted on the Piazza Armerina mosaic remains elusive, more may be said concerning its form. For the mosaic and the Berlin fragment are fundamentally different. Their representations diverge, not only in Endymion’s pose, but in the presence or absence of those attendant deities who, as we have seen, have specified the Berlin scene as a departure. What connects the two works is merely the similarity of Endymion’s gesture, and the burden of employing the mosaic as a fitting parallel rests on that gesture’s interpretation.

The arm raised, with open palm, functioned as a pathosformula and, as such, served to express a series of meanings in a variety of contexts; to associate it with a specific single sense is therefore tendentious.30 The gesture does indeed serve as a sign of surprise and as an entreaty to stay an imminent departure, as we have seen in the repertory of Aphrodite and Adonis (cf. Fig. 4), where the goddess gestures in similar fashion to the youth at their parting.31 Yet an identical gesture and its implications of surprise might extend, in other contexts—in the repertory of one and the same myth!—to an expression of outright horror (cf. Figs. 5 and 9 [Aphrodite at center]; cf. Figs. 4 [Adonis at center]; and 6) when the departure envisaged is that of death itself. This “gestural situation”32 is mirrored in other repertories, as when on the Vatican sarcophagus of Euhodus, for example, Hades acquiesces to the departure of Alkestis.33 In fact, beyond the realm of mythological imagery, this very gesture was enshrined in Roman imperial iconography as the sign of “clement response.”34 The eloquence of this open, gesturing hand served even more broadly to evoke a generalized sense of discourse, as can be seen in surviving late-antique illustrated books such as the Vatican Vergil or the Paris Terence.35

Thus this gesture, as it appears on the Berlin fragment in the context of Selene’s leave-taking, conforms to an established type and has its counterpart in a number of other myths where such a departure belongs, as a conventional plot element, to the repertory of other heroic tales. On other sarcophagi one witnesses, as we have seen, Adonis’s departure from Venus (Figs. 4, 6, and 7), or Hippolytus’s from Phaedra (Fig. 8). These were familiar scenes in which a hero abandoned the companionship of the woman who loved him. They were, however, subsidiary elements of the plots that set the stage for the main acts of both mythical dramas. In each case the central theme of the myth had yet to emerge, and thus these scenes of departure were subordinated in the visual narration.

The abandonment on which the Berlin fragment’s rendition of the Endymion tale focuses does have a fitting parallel, which appears as the central theme in the representations of a myth that provided a subject for both sarcophagi and wall painting—Theseus’s abandonment of Ariadne. Having killed the minotaur, Theseus had escaped the labyrinth thanks to the cunning of Ariadne, and together they fled. Yet on Naxos, Ariadne woke to find herself “wretched and deserted on the lonely shore,” for “on that shore [Theseus] cruelly abandoned his companion”:36 “Not quite waking, and languid from sleep, I turned onto my side, about to grasp Theseus with my hands—no one was there!”37 This image—found in wall painting (Fig. 54), but not on the sarcophagi—offers a convincing typological parallel for the Berlin fragment. Ariadne’s awakened state and the significant role of her gesture in the paintings of this scene, as well as in the textual accounts, underscore the connection.38

Sarcophagi also represent Theseus’s departure—but in these sculpted images he abandons Ariadne while she sleeps (Fig. 55). Theseus is revealed as the primary focus by the priority of the central lunette on the New York garland sarcophagus, which depicts the killing of the minotaur,39 and by his multiple presence on a sarcophagus at Cliveden.40 This characteristic emphasis, along with the archaeological discovery of male remains in the New York casket and the inscribed lid that formerly covered the one at Cliveden, suggests that the Theseus legend may have been employed particularly in the commemoration of men.41 Thus in this context, the abandonment of Ariadne appears merely as one event in the hero’s continuing saga. Yet Ariadne’s pose may have brought to mind her arousal by, and eventual divine marriage with, her new lover, Dionysus (cf. Figs. 55 and 56).42 Thus, just as the arrival of Selene before Endymion corresponded to that of Dionysus before Ariadne, so too the respective abandonments: on the Berlin relief the Endymion tale has been transformed according to this model.43

Much of what is peculiar to the Berlin relief depends on this adaptation of the tale of Endymion’s fate to the model provided by Ariadne’s. Along with the reversal of the temporal focus from arrival to departure, of Endymion’s state from sleeping to waking, and of the attendant divinities’ role from that of active participants to passive spectators, the inversion of the standard imagery for the Endymion tale extended to the significance of the myth as well. Similarly transformed were both the analogy established between the mythological hero and the deceased and the fundamental metaphors employed to give that analogy visual form. The conventional metaphors of immortality—Endymion’s “eternal sleep” and the goddess’s nightly love—are supplanted by another, less exalted, metaphor as Endymion is depicted abandoned. The continuity of association—of abandonment with eternal sleep and thus with death—is made clear by Ariadne herself, who protests her fate, crying: “Cruel slumbers, why did you hold me powerless? Better that I had been buried once and for all in everlasting night.”44

As Theseus abandoned Ariadne, so Hippolytus abandoned Phaedra. These famous companions of myth—all of them mortal—provided, by their virtus, their passions, and their fates, exempla of both noble and ignoble character. The pathos of the type is enhanced, and the exemplum exalted, when the mortal Adonis abandons the goddess who loves him.45 But in the Endymion myth the type undergoes inversion, as the hero is abandoned by his divine comes.

The Romans knew celebrated examples of such a fate. Plutarch told of how they recognized Antony’s abandonment by Dionysus in the midnight tumult and revelry of a bacchic procession that traversed the city and passed forth from its gate. Suetonius recorded Domitian’s own dream of his abandonment by Minerva.46 Timotheus, who had discredited the role of the goddess Fortuna in his successful campaigns, was punished by the deity, “so that from that time on he did nothing brilliant but miscarried in all his undertakings, gave offense to the people, and was finally banished from the city.”47 Denied the fellowship of their supernatural allies, these viri illustres were reduced to the mortality whose boundaries they strove to surpass—and in each instance, death followed swiftly. In these “modern” Roman myths, as in those of the ancient Greeks, to be forsaken by one’s protective divinity was a distinctive metaphor for death.

Visions of life, death, and the beyond

The Selene and Endymion image repertory thus comprises four distinctly different visions of life, death, and the beyond. Three of these suggest, each in its own way, the eternal love between goddess and mortal that survives his endless sleep. One offers a sexual metaphor for the joys of the blessed life to come (Figs. 28, 29), another reinterprets the liaison of goddess and mortal as a celestial marriage (Figs. 36, 37), and a third reflects Roman ideas of the bucolic Elysium (Figs. 32, 39). Their anecdotal natures complement one another as these images attempt to awaken in the beholder—by means of analogy—a sense of the glorious existence that awaits after the close of this life. All three visions, despite their differences, symbolize the conquest of death and the triumph of love over Fate.

The fourth of these visions of death, that represented on the Berlin relief (Fig. 46), calls for rather different conclusions. In replacing the standardized scenes of arrival and seduction with those of departure and farewell, this relief transformed the proleptic connotations of the Selene and Endymion imagery from joy to sadness. No longer destined to enjoy the goddess’s favor, the young shepherd fears her departure. In its focus on Endymion’s abandonment by the goddess the imagery evokes not only the cruelty of Fate but the great gulf that separates the dead from the living. In contrast to the prospective visions of the three other renditions of the myth, with their implicit eschatological claims for immortality or apotheosis, the Berlin fragment offers a retrospective refashioning of the myth. Rather than dreams of future gains in death’s beyond, this image emphasized the sense of loss that death invariably leaves in its wake.

This single significant variant, by the retrospective reflection it evokes, effects the closure of the cyclical pattern so fundamental to the mythological narrative. The scope of the analogy here appears far less exalted than the cosmic dimensions typically associated with the myth and conventionally depicted on the other sarcophagus reliefs. Thus, given the unusually large number of Endymion sarcophagi that have survived, this sole example of a markedly different composition and conception suggests more than the likelihood that it was a special commission—its imagery bespeaks a skepticism antithetical to the conventional renditions. The representation of the narrative by this scene of abandonment not only makes more vivid the sense of the tale’s end but renders more palpable its analogy with the end of life.

“In a vision of sleep…”

The Mars and Rhea Silvia story illustrates another form of inversion, one directly pertinent to the tale of Selene and Endymion because the two myths were represented side by side on the same sarcophagus (Fig. 57).6 Here a Roman myth was adapted to the Greek formula. In the Fasti, Ovid tells how the rape of Rhea Silvia by the god of war engendered the twin births of Romulus and Remus. Ovid dispatches the violation itself in elliptical fashion, noting that the god “by his divine power…hid his stolen pleasures.” The focus of the tale is the dream the rape incites and how this dream envisions and interprets the consequences of the seduction:

May it be beneficial and fortunate, I pray, that vision I saw amid slumber. Or was it too clear for sleep? I was approaching the Ilian fires when the woolen fillet, having slid from my hair, fell before the sacred pyre. Whence sprang together—a marvelous sight—two palm trees. Of these one was greater, and by its weighty branches spread to cover all the world, and with its foliage touched the highest stars. Behold, my uncle raised an axe to them; I was alarmed by the warning, and my heart trembled with fear. Mars’s bird—the woodpecker—and a she-wolf battled on behalf of the twin trunks: thanks to them, both palms were saved.7

The representation of the Mars and Rhea Silvia tale demonstrates that some of these sleeping figures may also be perceived as “dreamers.” But no dream is depicted on the Mars and Rhea Silvia sarcophagus, merely another version of the same arrival scene. The exigencies of the story, however, force one to reconsider the active and passive roles of the motif’s protagonists, and to invert them. Thus the object of the depicted event becomes the active agent of the essential, albeit implied, one.8 The significance becomes clear with the isolation of the sleeper type from the pair that make up the motif (Fig. 58).9 It is, therefore, not the image that we see but the one she sees that constitutes the truly significant image of the story and bears the fundamental content of the myth. For it is the dream, with its images, that announces in the form of a riddle nothing less than the glorious future of Rome.10

In the Fasti, Ovid has Rhea Silvia herself, when she awakens, describe the dream she has had, and thus the poet allows his audience to share the substance of her interior vision. In the rhetoric of the description, particularly in the schematic description of the trees, Ovid engages in a form of enargeia, as he attempts with his language to suggest the quality of visual experience, to render the scene as if it were a picture.11 For dreams are, essentially, things seen, as Aristotle had shown; they are experienced as a form of mental imagery.12 With the adoption of this rhetorical mode, Ovid attempts both to provoke a response in his reader commensurate with the profundity of a dream-vision, and to evoke a palpable image whose powerful immediacy resembles that of the dream itself.13

The visual representation of dreams posed problems, and to solve them artists employed a series of pictorial devices.14 In narrative cycles, dreamer and dream content could be depicted by the contiguity of scenes;15 in a single scene, dreamer and dream could be juxtaposed, and the dream content understood as such from the context;16 this juxtaposition could be elucidated by the differentiation of levels of reality within the image,17 or the visual subordination of the dream content as an appended motif, spatially sequestered from the dreamer’s space. Yet the Mars and Rhea Silvia sarcophagus adopts none of these techniques, for in it the dream is represented by implication alone. The single scene of Mars’s approach to the sleeping Vestal Virgin stands for the story as a whole, and serves as a catalyst to call forth the remainder of the tale from the beholder’s memory.

Such a strategy depends, of course, on knowledge of the myth and the viewer’s ability to recognize the story from the depiction of a single salient episode. The familiarity of the tale is due to a series of factors: the myth’s fundamental role in the mythology of Rome itself; the wide dissemination of the Ovidian version; the standardized significance of the motif that is the vehicle for the story’s depiction; and, the unmistakable iconography of the god of war. All of these facilitate the success of the pictorial invention. The proleptic nature of the image itself leaves little doubt as to the sequel and plays upon the beholder’s willingness to continue the narration. By recalling the myth, by rehearsing the actions, not merely of the depicted scene but of the tale as a whole, the viewer forms a series of mental images that continue the representation of the subsequent scene of the action and, most importantly, of the crucial dream. The truly profound aspect of the sculpted invention is its ability to allow beholders to experience that dream, just as Rhea Silvia does, in the manner appropriate to dreams—as a mental image. 18

The juxtaposition of these two tales—Mars and Rhea Silvia, Selene and Endymion—establishes an analogy, something similar to the conflation of the stories of Adonis and Aeneas on the Casino Rospigliosi sarcophagus (Fig. 6). Here too the analogy seizes on the similarity of the two stories, their plots, and their shared visual motif;19 more importantly, it calls for the Endymion image to be considered in a new way. The contrast guides interpretation and effectively transforms the Endymion myth, for the emphasis on the Roman tale may be construed from the comparison. That Rhea Silvia’s sleep is equated with death was already clear from the image's funerary context; Endymion's endless slumber, however, is now reconceived according to the implications of a sleep filled with dreams. Thus the visual pairing of the two myths suggests that just as Rhea Silvia dreams in the course of her slumber, so too Endymion. Since awareness of her dreaming generates those mental images essential to the significance of the story—images fundamental to the comprehension of that myth within the sarcophagus repertory—does not the pairing of the two scenes suggest Endymion's dreaming, as well?20

Somniorum coniectio

On the sarcophagi, particularly where Endymion and Selene bear the features of both the casket’s patron and his wife, the personalization of the myth intimates precisely such an active role for the slumbering youth. For choosing to represent this myth constitutes, in itself, a form of dream or wish on the part of the patrons: a dream to be identified with the protagonists into whose mythic drama they are inserted by means of portraiture. On the sarcophagus reliefs these patrons appropriate the myths and thus act out symbolically a dream of how the future will remember them. The very permanence of the sculpted identification, of the image that marks the tomb by which these patrons are to be remembered, guarantees that this wish will be fulfilled, that this dream will come true.

To understand these funerary “dreams” requires that we determine who lay entombed in the marble coffins on which such hopes are given visible form. The most obvious interpretation of the reliefs identifies Endymion with the deceased, whose portrait features he wears on several extant examples, and who therefore must have lain buried in the casket.21 In lieu of a portrait, an inscription may reveal for whom a sarcophagus proved the final resting place, as on the casket of Aurelius Licanus now in Copenhagen.22 The choice of the Endymion myth for such sarcophagi seizes upon the seduction that takes place during the young shepherd’s “deathlike sleep” as a positive image of the afterlife.

From the dream literature of antiquity one learns, according to Artemidorus, that in a dream, “to have sexual intercourse with a god or goddess or to be possessed by a god signifies death for a sick man. For the soul predicts meetings and intercourse with the gods when it is about to abandon the body in which it dwells.”23 But the dreams Artemidorus speaks of are open to other interpretations, as he readily admits:

Some are called theorematic, others allegorical. Theorematic dreams are those which come true just as they are seen. Allegorical dreams are those which disclose their meaning through riddles. But since there is, in this group, some margin for error in a person’s deciding whether he should accept the dreams exactly as they have been seen or if they will come true in some other way, the possibility of interpretation is still open.24

According to Xenophon,

There is nothing in the world more nearly akin to death than sleep; and the soul of man at just such times is revealed in its most divine aspect and at such times, too, it looks forward to the future; for then, it seems, it is most untrammeled by the bonds of the flesh.25

Plutarch makes an even more explicit claim for the value of dreams: “Since [the soul’s] arrival in the world, it is by means of dreams that it joyfully greets and gazes upon that which is most beautiful and most divine.”26

Cicero held the view that the gods converse with men, by means of visions, in their sleep; the same could be said for converse with the dead.27 The literary evocation of this belief was nothing new. Euripides provided the classic example: “visiting me in dreams, you might still bring me some cheer: for sweet it is, by night, to look on loved ones, for as long as they may stay.”28 And Vergil echoed the theme when relating Dido’s dream: “She seemed to hear sounds and speech, of her husband calling, whenever the night held the earth in darkness.”29 Thus, when a young Roman woman buried her husband—stolen from her by “an evil hand”—she might declare to the manes her desire for such a reunion as she speaks to him beyond the grave. His epitaph reads:

Husband most dear to me: I knew that as boy and girl we were bound together by love. I lived with you for so short a time, and during that time we were destined to live, we were separated by an evil hand. Thus I entreat you, most sacred souls of the dead, that you might consider my dear man acceptable, and that you might wish to be most indulgent to this woman, so that I might see him during the nocturnal hours; and he also wishes that I compel Fate, so that I am able, sweetly and quickly, to come to him.30

Or, in Statius’s birthday poem composed for Polla Argentaria in remembrance of her dead husband, Lucan, the deceased is implored to reappear from beyond the grave: “obtain one day, I beseech you, from the gods of silence: the door is open to husbands returning to their brides.”31 Yet wives might also be granted such a reprieve, if only in the guise of myth. Indeed, some surviving Endymion and Selene sarcophagi bear antique, if not original, inscriptions that record their use as the caskets of women. Their employment for the bodies of women gives special significance to one of the formal features of the reliefs that is seldom remarked upon: the prominence of the upright, striding figure of Selene at the center of the panel. The inscription on the Capitoline sarcophagus (Fig. 29) demonstrates that it was used—in antiquity—as the coffin of a young woman named Gerontia.32 Thus this monument’s imagery exploits the motif of Endymion’s sleep, and a wife seemingly claims a chance to be reunited with the husband who survives her by a visit “in horis nocturnis”—as it were, in his dreams.33

Such an interpretation of these sarcophagi and this funerary inscription is found in a parallel allusion, again in the poems of Propertius. For there the same imagery is evoked when yet another female figure—the image of the deceased—arrives at the side of her sleeping paramour as the poet dreams of his lover’s return from the realm of the dead:

The shades are no fable: death is not the end of all, and the pale ghost escapes the vanquished pyre. For Cynthia seemed to bend over my couch, Cynthia so lately buried beside the roaring road, as fresh from love’s entombment I slept a broken sleep.…34

These testimonials pertain to the funerary use of the Endymion myth because they offer a context for the myth’s interpretation. They express very human fears of death and an equally human desire to transcend it. The myth provides tangible, recognizable—and above all, evocative—imagery in which these fundamental emotions are condensed and focused; and what is more, the myth testifies to a belief that in death one will enjoy—quite literally—the love of the gods.

Some of these sarcophagi must also have been intended, regardless of whether husband or wife died first, to hold the remains of both. This intention, suggested by the presence of double portraits on the reliefs and the large scale of some of the monuments,35 is confirmed by an inscription along the lid of one of the known examples. Renaissance drawings record the kline-type lid of a Selene and Endymion sarcophagus (Fig. 59) that carried, along with a portrait of the reclining wife, the following inscription:

This myth was chosen because, unlike the Mars and Rhea Silvia story, it focuses solely on the couple. The lovers here cast in mythological roles apparently bore no progeny; otherwise their children would no doubt have been included in the inscription according to custom: to the future this pair bequeaths only their memory.37 It is a memory of a couple who remain, even in death, as constant in their mutual love as the moon goddess in her endless visits to her young sleeping shepherd.

Constancy in love, as in all other aspects of life, could be for the Romans, like heroism, a challenge and a virtue. Roman funerary monuments and their inscriptions declare their praise for such constancy in love.38 Valerius Maximus tells how Antonia, the wife of Drusus Germanicus, after the death of her husband moved to the home of her mother-in-law so that she would pass her aged widowhood in the same bed in which he had spent his vigorous youth.39 And Statius, in his poem of consolation to Abascantus on the death of his wife, Priscilla, speaks of his castissimus ardor, and how concordia had bound the one to the other by an unbroken chain, collato pectore. But the poet's highest praise of his friend is reserved for his constancy: “Your greatest honor was that you knew but one marriage bed, that but one fire smoldered within the secrets of your bones.” 40

Identifications with the Endymion myth, with its endless nights of passion, imply that to be so chosen by the gods is to be granted the gift of a love equally everlasting, a love that survives death. The monument depicting a couple as goddess and youth elevates their love to the plane of myth and realizes the dream of such an eternal union. Indeed, this is an image of heroic love. The sepulchral image declares theirs to be that “great love that passes beyond the shores of Fate.”41

Dreams of Adonis

These variations worked upon the Endymion myth provide a parallel to the transformations found among the Adonis sarcophagi. On the two unique Adonis reliefs identified in preceding chapters (Figs. 6 and 7), the standard images used to represent the myth were altered, its story reformulated, and its protagonists similarly reidentified by the imposition of portraits. It was recognized that the myth no longer focused on the virtus of Adonis but had been effectively remade to tell another tale, one of hope for revival rather than acceptance of the inevitable finality of death. There, as with the Endymion myth, the resulting images may be accounted the expression of dreams.

These myths recounted on the Aphrodite and Adonis as well as the Selene and Endymion sarcophagi are like many others in which the gods intervene in mortal life, not merely to take their transient pleasure but to challenge the power and ubiquity of Fate to rule over the lives of their mortal loves. Herakles’ retrieval of Alkestis from Hades, among the most renowned of the myths that tell of such a challenge, also found expression on sarcophagi.42 The voluminous writings of Aelius Aristides offer further examples of what must have been a widespread belief in the ability and willingness of the gods to intervene in the lives of mortals. These writings describe the near-fanatical belief in the powers of Aesculapius to protect and intercede on behalf of his disciples—a belief vouchsafed by personal assurances from the divinity himself that were communicated in dreams.43 As the Adonis sarcophagi have demonstrated, the exemplary virtus of the youth could be supplanted by a faith in the power of Aphrodite to heal, to triumph over the “will of Fate,” and to rescue her beloved Adonis—just as she had rescued Aeneas—from the clutches of mortality.44

The same conception of the goddess and her healing powers appears in a grave inscription from the Flavian period. A certain “Nepos,” having died young, speaks in the inscription of how Venus herself has delivered him from oblivion: “For Divine Venus decreed that I not know the abode of silence and led me to her shining temple of the heavens.”45 Some verses of Tibullus tell of his dream to be similarly delivered by the goddess from the pain of death to the Elysian fields: But since I have always been amenable to tender Love,Venus herself will lead me to the Elysian fields.46 In both instances, Venus plays the psychopomp, the conductor of souls, a role usually reserved for Hermes. Here she assumes responsibility for delivering each of these men to the Elysian paradise. In these imaginings, her actions assert a belief in the permanence of her devotion to her disciples; for them she truly serves as comes. And in the case of Aphrodite and Adonis—and, by extension, of the couple whose portraits grace their figures on the sarcophagi—her role as psychopomp makes the claim that this union is unsunderable, even by death: Amor vincit omnia.

Tableaux and gesture

The relationship between the sarcophagus images and memory had its parallels in the other arts.10 Just as their carved reliefs evoked recognizable stories, so too in the literature of antiquity did the recitation of stories evoke recognizable images. These practices were related as if they were two aspects of the same phenomenon. Memory lay at the heart of the signifying process of both the visual and verbal forms.

The historiated compositions displayed on the sarcophagi were familiar to those who beheld them. That familiarity can be gauged by the frequency with which similar tableaux appear, not only in other visual representations of the myths, but also in literary descriptions. The account in Theocritus’s Idyll XV of a tapestry representing Aphrodite and Adonis derived much of its rhetorical force from its readers’ visual familiarity with the subject from a wide variety of monuments.11 The poet’s description, or ekphrasis, directs readers’ thoughts from the realm of words to the realm of things, in which his literary images find their correlative in the reality of visual works of art.12 While the Imagines of Philostratus provide the most extensive example of the genre, the same may be said of Achilles Tatius’s account of a painting of the Rape of Europa, Apuleius’s description of Lucius’s encounter with a statuary tableau representing the Death of Acteon, or Xenophon’s mention of a bed canopy painted with a scene of Ares disarmed by Aphrodite.13 The power of all of these passages resides in the recognizability of the standardized scenes their descriptions evoke, the reader’s ability to visualize the reality of the depictions they describe, and the intensity of a response that welds together these two realms of experience.

In much the same fashion that the mythological scenes on the sarcophagi provided an analogy for memory of the deceased, in these ekphrases mythology offered an analogy that characterized the tale about to unfold. The mythological protagonists of the images described in these texts served as exempla, and they figured typologically as the “heroic analogue” for the author’s characters. Knowledge of the “depicted” myth thus raised the readers’ expectations, as it provided, proleptically, a foreshadowing of the events of the narrative.14

The mythological scenes from the literature written for drama and pantomime provide a distinctive variation to the customary relation between text and image—for drama and pantomime were performed, and their scenes were known in visual as well as literary form.15 The desire for visual clarity in the performance of pantomime is specified by Lucian, who claims that it is essential for the mimetic art of the dancer—as for the orator—that everything be intelligible without an interpreter.16 As an example, Lucian tells of Demetrius the Cynic, from the time of Nero, who disparaged the dancer’s pantomime as meaningless movement. Demetrius was challenged by the leading dancer of the age to witness a performance without the usual accompaniment of musicians before passing such a judgment. According to Lucian,

He danced the amours of Aphrodite and Ares, Helius tattling, Hephaestus laying his plot and trapping both of them with his entangling bonds, the gods who came in on them, portrayed individually, Aphrodite ashamed, Ares seeking cover and begging for mercy, and everything that belongs to this story, in such wise that Demetrius was delighted beyond measure with what was taking place and paid the highest possible tribute to the dancer; he raised his voice and shouted at the top of his lungs, “I hear the story that you are acting, man, I do not just see it; you seem to me to be talking with your very hands!”17

In all ancient dramatic performance, physical, bodily gesture carried the mimetic burden, since facial expressions were eliminated by the masks worn by the actors.18 While the grouping of figures on the stage in tableaux could reproduce narrative scenes recognizable from works of visual art, gesture was the chief means by which the actions of the plot were represented.19 Gesture, its importance accentuated in pantomime by the absence of speech, played a far more significant role in a solo performance, such as the one described by Lucian, than when a group of actors staged a scene.

The fixing of gestures in visual form emphasized the representation’s memorable character and resulted in a more highly codified repertory of images. As familiar gestures were transferred from the realm of everyday life to the stage, and then to the visual arts, there was a progressive “petrification” of their form, and concomitant “crystallization” of their content, necessary for their continuing intelligibility.20

Thus the relationship between the dynamic gesticulations of individuals and the static tableaux effected by the group was altered when dramatic scenes were reproduced in contemporary paintings—just as the mythologies were altered when reproduced on the sarcophagi. Crucial scenes were extracted and codified in images whose repetition ensured their comprehensibility. The affinity between these frescoes and the sarcophagus reliefs may be seen in the painted scenes derived from Euripides’ Madness of Herakles from the walls of both the Casa del Centenario and the Casa dei Quadretti Teatrali in Pompeii (Figs. 60 and 61), as well as in the related mythological scenes found at the former site (Fig. 62).21

These “illustrations” of Greek drama suggest that familiarity with the imagery of the staged tableaux increased because it was adapted for painted wall decoration. Conversely, the scene of the Punishment of Dirce in the Casa di Giulio Pubilio, which illustrates Euripides’ Antiope, indicates one of the ways dramatic imagery might rely on the visual arts.22 This painting demonstrates as well how the creation of visual works of art could be conditioned by one’s ability to visualize a literary text, to call forth from the imagination the vision of a scene reported by words. For Dirce’s death would have taken place offstage and would have been narrated, not enacted. This particular scene of the painting’s continuous narrative—the crucial scene—thus corresponds to the mental image an audience was required to form in response to, and as a result of, the poet’s ekphrasis and the actor’s rhetoric.23

Vita simia artis

The figures on the painted and sculpted monuments, statuesque in their poses and frozen in their gestures, conveyed the antithesis of natural action. Yet the clarity and the gravity of these images—in fact, their very theatricality—explain not only their comprehensibility but their desirability as vehicles of symbolic expression. The fleeting impression of things amid the flux of life—above all, the impression of significant acts—could be fixed in an image that would sustain the extended engagement of the beholder. Consequently, the very permanence of this image would stand as a symbol for the eternal character of its significance.

The most profound acknowledgment of such imagery’s effectiveness was its adoption as a model for real life. Thus Ammianus Marcellinus reports the adventus of Constantius II at Rome:

He himself sat alone in a golden chariot, shining with the splendor of a variety of gems, amid whose brilliance another sort of light seemed to mingle.…And there marched on both sides twin ranks of soldiers, arrayed in shining breastplates, with shields and crests radiant with gleaming light.…Such was his stillness, that he showed himself as he was seen in his provinces.24

The theatricality of the event was intended to convey its sacral character.25 The emperor’s numinous presence was produced, as Ammianus explains, by the glistening of the regalia—the fourth-century equivalent of “special effects.” His gravitas was projected by the rigidity of his pose: his head never moved, his eyes stared straight ahead, “nor was he ever seen to spit, or to wipe or rub either his face or his nose, or even to move his hands”; thus the entirety of his figure presented an icon of dramatic immobility.26 Constantius appeared to the Romans “as he was seen in his provinces”—as a statue. For the adventus numbered among the standard repertory of scenes common to innumerable imperial monuments. It was a visual topos familiar to Romans at the center and at the periphery of the empire: in one instance a celebration of the emperor’s triumphant return to the seat of power, in the other a demonstration and acclamation of his presence and authority at the farthest reaches of the state.27

Ammianus’s description captures the reciprocity between the promulgation of an emperor’s image in statuary and his imitation of that imagery in real life. The emperor needed not only to conform to his imagery, and the conception of his person it had disseminated, but to confirm the sense of gravitas and maiestas it imputed to him.28

To keep the dead before the eyes of the living

This reciprocity between life and art lay at the heart of the employment of mythological imagery on sarcophagi. Yet in contrast to the emperor’s effort to project stabilitas by assuming a statue’s lifeless pose, funerary imagery was charged with keeping the dead alive, if only in memory. The mythological sarcophagus was heir to a long Roman tradition that celebrated the past by preserving images of the dead.

Herodian describes the ceremonies that attended the deification of the emperor and the ritual that presaged his apotheosis.29 A wax effigy was fashioned showing the deceased lying upon an ivory couch and was displayed before the imperial palace. For seven days his death was re-enacted in a public spectacle as the mourners surrounded the image, and then the effigy was carried to the funeral pyre. To this public testimony of the living was added that of the dead. The charioteers who accompanied the body to the pyre wore masks, by means of which they portrayed all the famous Roman generals and emperors. Thus these heroes of state seemed to emerge from the past, to gather as witnesses to the newly deceased emperor’s virtus, and to symbolize his proper role in Roman history and tradition.

The parade of images from the past, as if come to life, played a part in the funerary rites for the viri illustres as well as for the emperor. Polybius reports how the body of the deceased was carried to the rostra in the forum. Often the body was displayed seated upright, as if symbolically to deny the reality of his death. The members of his family removed the wax ancestor masks from their household shrines,

putting them on men who seem to them to bear the closest resemblance to the original in stature and carriage…They all ride in chariots preceded by the fasces, axes, and other insignia…according to the respective dignity of the offices of state held by each during his life; and when they arrive at the rostra they all seat themselves in a row on ivory chairs. There could not easily be a more ennobling spectacle for a young man who aspires to fame and virtue. For who would not be inspired by the sight of the images of men renowned for their excellence, all together and as if alive and breathing? What spectacle could be more glorious than this?30

The virtues and achievements of the deceased were recounted for those gathered so that the facts of his life could be “recalled to their minds and brought before their eyes.”31

The power of rhetoric was aided by the image of the deceased himself, seated before the crowd, as if present at the event. The oration specifically linked him to the illustrious forebears conjured by the actors with their wax masks who surrounded him. Following the funeral he would take his rightful place alongside them: both symbolically, in the atrium filled with these waxen images of the ancients, and experientially, in the memories these images would keep alive for those who survived him.

This was a fundamental purpose of these ancestor portraits: to keep the dead before the eyes of the living. Ovid declares that the waxen images were kept “to give back your features to my sight.”32 Statius attests the mimetic power of these “deceiving forms of wax, about to speak.”33 And Sallust proclaims their exemplary value: “eminent men of our country had the habit of saying that whenever they contemplated the imagines of their ancestors, their souls burned with the most vehement desire for virtue.”34 The imagines not only took the form of masks but appeared as portrait busts as well.35 These representations of the ancestral viri illustres were often accompanied by their honorific tituli.36 Together text and image declared the glorious history of the family and announced the standards of accomplishment against which future generations might measure themselves.

Echoes of this great tradition can be found on even modest funerary monuments:

Here lies Varius Frontonianus whom his charming wife, Cornelia Galla, has placed here. To revive the sweet solaces of their old life she added his marble image, so that for a long time she would be able to satisfy her eyes and her mind with his dear form. This sight will be her comfort. For a pledge of love is preserved in the breast by the sweetness of mind; nor will his lips be lost in easy oblivion; but while life remains, her husband is totally within her heart.37

The appearance of the ancient myths on the sarcophagi, particularly in those instances where they feature the portrait of the deceased, served a similar purpose. They provided a text to accompany the image of the deceased—one that proclaimed his accomplishments and his virtues. Locked away in the tomb, just as the cerae imagines were usually shuttered within cabinets, the mythological sarcophagi continued the tradition of ancestral portraiture. Thus the audacity of the sarcophagus imagery—the consecratio in formam deorum—was justified as an innovative continuation of a revered ancient custom.

The appropriation of the myths, as it forged an identification of contemporary individuals with the ancient heroes, elevated the lives of those who were recalled to the status of myth. The insertion of such individuals into the mythological fabric transferred to the deceased those ideas and values the tales exemplified. But in the context of the ancient traditions and customs the sarcophagi reprised, the reciprocity between art and life, between myth and reality, suggests a grander significance. For just as the mythologies elevated those who were recalled by them to the status of myth, so the imposition of portraits rationalized the mythological heroes and their exploits. The exemplary character of real persons celebrated by comparison with the ancient heroes reinvested the myths with a new validity and a new immediacy. In the ritual processions of the ancestor masks, the actors had assumed the roles of those whose facial features they bore; on the sarcophagus reliefs mortals seem to imitate heroes; a certain ambiguity and reciprocity bound together heroes and mortals at the heart of this tradition. The force of that ambiguity and reciprocity may be seen in parody, where the heroes who have taken on these portrait features may be seen to impersonate the dead. Thus in the Amphitryon of Plautus, Mercury assumes the form of the slave Sosia, and after she has examined him thoroughly, she exclaims: “for this one possesses my complete likeness, which was mine till now. He does for me while I’m living what no one will do for me once I’ve died.”38

The sarcophagus images subjected life to a form of mythopoesis. Recognition of this transformation was an act of imagination and belief; it was fueled by memory and confirmed the value of remembering itself. Not only did it give continued meaning to those extinguished lives, but it granted to the act of remembrance the power to transform the lives of one’s ancestors—it endowed them with the unmistakable yet intangible aura of a living tradition. And in the celebration of ancestors by such mythological analogies, memory provided a form of apotheosis.

But it was the myths chosen to represent the deceased to their descendants that announced this fate. It was the myths that told the present and the future how the past was to be remembered. The dead, as they selected their own “vision” of their future and composed it in a mythological key, left behind this prospective vision as a monumental memory image of the past. If the posterity toward which this vision was directed continued to hold to the same beliefs, the dreams expressed by the sarcophagus imagery would appear as wishes fulfilled. Posterity’s retrospective regard for these images would then confirm this faith as it carried on the tradition.

If there is any place for the spirits of the devout, if, as the wise believe, the great soul is not consumed with the body, you should rest peacefully, and call us, the members of your household, away from weak grieving and womanly weeping, to the contemplation of your virtues, which by rights should be neither mourned nor bewailed. Let us revere you, by admiration, with never-ending praises, and, if our nature enables us, even by imitation: this is true honor; this, the duty of one’s kin.39

Res caelestes terrestresque

The goddess’s contrasting actions and the different resolutions of the tale they suggest reflect a profound division between the celestial and terrestrial realms. This division figured prominently in the Roman world’s reception of the Greek heroes and the problems they posed.1 Heroes no longer existed for the Romans in their original sense as the semidivine offspring of the gods’ intercourse with mortals. The Romans’ language lacked an equivalent for the Greek term, and their culture lacked the conception of semidivinity.2 Even in the Greek world the term “hero” had become devalued and often served as the general designation for all valiant protagonists of myth, as well as all those whose exploits were recorded in the epics of Homer and the other ancient poets.3 And as the breadth of subjects on the mythological sarcophagi reveals, in the age of the Romans all mythic allusion had come to serve as a form of heroization.4

By the end of the Republic, amid the rise of a self-conscious classicism,5 the precise nature of the Greek heroes—and of the Roman counterparts who were heirs to the tradition—presented a dilemma. Cicero put the problem succinctly: there were two kinds of gods, “those who have always been considered to dwell in the heavens, and those who have been installed there on account of merit.”6 The distinction accounts for the traditional view of the divinity of Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor and Pollux, as well as Romulus.7 Yet Cicero was less than certain how such merited elevation was effected: “As for those men whom you declare to have attained the state of divinity, you should explain—and I would be glad to learn—how this [apotheosis] could be done, or why it has ceased to be so…”8 For Cicero, to resolve the problem was to reconceive it in more comprehensible terms. One aspect of his explanation had recourse to the tradition of the exemplum: “Is it not that these [divine] honors are granted on account of men’s virtues, not their immortality?”9 Another aspect, which reinforced the fundamental belief in the important distinction between things terrestrial and celestial, was to deny divinization to mortals who were known to have been laid to rest in tombs and who remained the subjects of funerary rites. Thus the category of the divinized could be logically restricted: “I could not be persuaded to unite any mortal with the religion of the immortal gods, so that there might exist a tomb for one to whom prayers and sacrifices are publicly performed.”10

The divergent actions of Aphrodite on the sarcophagi, and the variant conclusions of the tale they advance, were easily accommodated to this terrestrial-celestial dichotomy. For these actions often mirror the long-standing distinction of the goddess of love’s complex nature.11 The great authority on Aphrodite’s manifold nature was Plato. In his Symposium he declared that she was indeed not one, but two goddesses: “there is the elder, of no mother born, but daughter of Heaven, whence we name her Ourania; while the younger was the child of Zeus and Dione, and her we call Pandemos.”12 Aphrodite Ourania was the celestial goddess “untinged by wantonness,” who “compels lover and beloved alike to feel a zealous concern for their own virtue.”13 Aphrodite Pandemos, conversely, was the terrestrial deity of the random and wanton love that causes those under her spell to regard their desires of the body more than those of the soul.14 By means of this mythological allegory Plato was to cleave in two a basic human emotion—love—and to elevate one of its aspects as a fundamental tenet of philosophy and ethical behavior.

The basic dichotomy proved decisive. The doctrine was echoed by other ancient authors, and the number of Aphrodite’s aspects was at times expanded.15 Plato’s original dichotomy was given its fullest elaboration in the early third century, in a lengthy commentary written by Plotinus, the most important of the Neoplatonists. According to Plotinus, the pure soul represented by Aphrodite Ourania had its rightful place in the heavens above. The love she fostered taught man to aspire to such heights and to find fulfillment in his contemplation of the gods. Aphrodite Pandemos, by contrast, was a universal deity, whose manifestation of an earthly love was among her responsibilities as patroness of marriages.16

Pausanias attests a similar division in the mythology of Aphrodite, who was worshiped in Attica as Aphrodite Epistrophia (“she who turns men to love”) and was venerated at Thebes as Apostrophia (“she who turns one away from love”).17 These contrasting aspects of the Greek goddess were echoed by specifically Roman traditions, most strikingly in the celebrations marking the first of April in the Roman calendar that were dedicated to both the cult of Venus Verticordia and that of Fortuna Virilis.18 The former cult, instituted to revive the mores of Rome when they had fallen from their former chastity,19 venerated that aspect of Venus who “turns the hearts” of the mulieres honestiores toward virtue.20 The contrasting celebrations of the cult of Fortuna Virilis, in which the mulieres humiliores—common prostitutes—shared a common bath with the men, displayed themselves naked, and drank aphrodisiacs, were the expression of rather different values.21

Duplex Aphrodite, duplex Selene

This pair of opposing allegories provided the structure reflected in the contrasted Aphrodites of the sarcophagi.22 This tradition allowed the goddess to be easily accommodated to the Romans’ distinction between the heavenly and earthly realms. The eroticism customarily associated with the Adonis myth—the eroticism of Aphrodite Pandemos—played little role on the sarcophagi. Yet by the goddess’s actions as Aphrodite Ourania, Adonis—the mortal hero—was revived and elevated as her equal.

Selene and Endymion posed a somewhat different problem. On the majority of reliefs Selene appeared as an acolyte of Aphrodite, thus conforming to the heightened eroticism of the mythological narrative. Surrounded by erotes, her breast bared, she was cast in the role of the seducer, and thus iconographically associated with Aphrodite Pandemos.

Yet the myth’s visual tradition was characterized by a seeming contradiction. Selene could also be regarded as a reflection of Aphrodite Ourania.23 This was no doubt exaggerated in later periods by the assimilation of the Greek moon goddess to the famously chaste figure of Roman Diana.24 As the essential motif of the sleeping Endymion had come to be associated with that of the sleeping Ariadne and Rhea Silvia, all three myths came to serve for the representation of a peaceful rest in death. Because their divine encounters, particularly those of Endymion and Ariadne, were also construed as celestial “marriages,” these mythological narratives were regarded as the equivalent of apotheosis.25

The celestial-terrestrial dichotomy lived on in the Graeco-Roman world’s reception and transformation of the ancient Greek myths and is found in the treatment of other tales as well. The same Platonic myth underlies Achilles Tatius’s discussion of the two kinds of love and distinguishes the special fate of Ganymede from that of Zeus’s other conquests.26 Its role in other myths testifies to its importance and fundamental significance. For it was undoubtedly as a descendant of Aphrodite Pandemos that Venus rewarded the prayers of Pygmalion by transforming Galatea and watching over “the marriage she had made.”27 This same conception of the goddess of love—gleefully rewarding the baser instincts—appears in Apuleius’s account of the Judgment of Paris.28 And it is surely as Pandemos that Aphrodite was the lover of Adonis, an interpretation the eroticism of the poets’ treatment of the myth frankly declares, and which is borne out, if only subtly, on the majority of sarcophagi. The contrasting conception of Aphrodite Ourania continued to play a role as well, and thus she appears as an aspect of Isis in Apuleius.29

Mythography and typology

The appearance of analogous myths played a significant role in the continuity of Greek mythological traditions as they were received and transformed at Rome. The columnar type of sarcophagus in particular lent itself to the demonstration of these analogies, as on the relief at the Palazzo Mattei (Fig. 64).30 There, isolated in their separate niches, related tales appear in abbreviated form as symbols. The myths, juxtaposed here, reduced to the presentation of their paired protagonists, suggest that the Romans regarded them as equivalent “symbols of love.”31

Similarly, on the lid of the New York Endymion and Selene lenos (Fig. 35), a group of independent scenes in small panels display a series of variations on the theme of “unrequited love.”32 In this instance Endymion’s passivity provides the interpretive key. The sleeping shepherd’s lack of response to Selene’s seduction is likened to the unusual scene of Eros turning away from Psyche or, by a subtle allusion, to the spurning of Aphrodite in the Judgment of Paris.33 By yet another form of allusion, to emphasize the idea of separation implicit in the theme of “unrequited love,” Selene and Endymion are represented by a visual formula borrowed from the repertory of Aphrodite and Adonis.34

This was apparently not the only ancient work to conflate the visual typologies of the Aphrodite/Adonis and Selene/Endymion tales, for a gem recorded in the seventeenth century shows Aphrodite arriving in her chariot before a recumbent wounded Adonis (Fig. 65).35 That the same type might be employed for different stories is demonstrated as well by the parallel representations of Endymion and Ganymede. In the Casa di Ganimede at Pompeii the two myths were paired (Figs. 66 and 67), with Ganymede adapted to a standard type from the Endymion repertory to effect, once again, a striking pendant relationship.36

This phenomenon—the evocation of analogies—was marked by an obvious loss of mythographic specificity, as the tales were adapted to new contexts and purposes. Yet this loss was balanced by a broadening of significances as fundamental aspects of one myth were seen to play a structural role in the conception of others. If from a mythographic perspective the original significances of the ancient tales waned as the tradition evolved, when regarded typologically, transformations in the mythological tradition, such as those undergone by the myths of Aphrodite and Selene, appear to reaffirm the tales’ continuing validity: what might have been conceived as a sign of mythographic decline is rather to be construed as evidence of typological efficacy. These characteristics are evident in the metamorphosis of Aphrodite’s essential celestial-terrestrial dichotomy: as the myth evolved from the cult worship of the Greeks to that of the Romans, the Selene tale came to be assimilated to it.

In the preceding chapters, typology has been seen to play a variety of roles in the representation of the myths that have been discussed. It has been shown to operate in the assimilation of one myth to another, a process that depended upon a recognition and acknowledgment of perceived sympathies between different subjects. A motif that rendered one element of a narrative might become the central focus of a representation, so that its affinities with similar motifs associated with other myths might be underscored. This was seen to have occurred with the early Adonis sarcophagi, where the prominence of the hunt scene likened the depictions of the myth to others associated with the representation of virtus.

At times this assimilation was accomplished and emphasized by significant omissions: in the subordination of the Adonis tale’s eroticism on the sarcophagus reliefs and, more importantly, in the absence of scenes referring to the Adonaia. Further examples are found in other mythological repertories, where elements of the myth seemingly of special pertinence to the funerary context are similarly omitted. On the sarcophagi representing Hippolytus, the portrayal of the hero as an exemplum virtutis was given prominence, but the legend of his metamorphosis into Virbius—a legend well known in the Roman world—was always excluded.37 On the monuments representing Pelops, the episode of the chariot race provided the focus while his literal reassembly and revival by Jupiter was forgotten.38

In some instances the myths were invested with new meanings, as typological allusions transformed them to suit new needs. Such was the case on the Rospigliosi sarcophagus (Fig. 6), where the likening of Adonis to Aeneas was tantamount to a remythologization. So too on the unusual Berlin fragment representing Endymion abandoned, where the correspondence with Ariadne’s fate furthered a fundamental likeness between the two stories and exploited the relationship that connected them, if only on the basis of their similar visual forms.

Finally, it has been shown how regularized and recognizable mythological motifs were at times extracted from their narrative settings. Divorced from specific contexts, they exhibited a generic significance and were effectively employed as abstractions. Such a reuse of motifs was governed, however, by their function in their original context; even when re-employed, the visual forms might retain the charge of their original meaning. This could occur in two ways. The myth itself might be recalled, as is the Adonis myth on the “Rinuccini sarcophagus” (Fig. 44). Or, conversely, what remained significant might be the metaphor for which the myth had served as the vehicle, as in the case of the Naples sarcophagus (Fig. 42), where elements familiar from both the Endymion and Meleager repertories contrasted the vita activa with the vita contemplativa.

From narrative to symbol

Two other reliefs from the Endymion corpus present yet another stage in this fundamentally typological process of abstraction that the myths underwent on the sarcophagi. One example is now at the Palazzo Braschi in Rome (Fig. 49),39 the other in the British Museum (Fig. 50).40 Both works date from the mid to late third century and are characterized by the marked isolation of the central motif—the recumbent figure of Endymion—from its narrative context.

The Endymion on the Palazzo Braschi sarcophagus is set against a starkly barren panel, without a trace of setting. An eros hovers above, and the youth is flanked by two pairs of smaller figures. To the left are the young Dionysus and a satyr, to the right Mars and Venus. Thus despite the figure’s dissociation from its customary setting and its detachment from its renowned narrative, the context remains explicitly mythological. The central figure bears the portrait features of a young man, whose eyes are wide open.

The Endymion of the British Museum sarcophagus is also distinguished by its portrait head of a young man. He lies in the familiar pose, again with open eyes, and surrounded by erotes, who clutter the surface of the small lenos-shaped casket. As Sichtermann pointed out long ago, the familiar recumbent figure of Ariadne has been recut to play a new role.41 The inelegance of this transformation from female to male and the severe mid third-century military hairstyle of the superimposed portrait clash with the idealized depiction of the many erotes, the languorous pose, and the overall style of the image.

On these reliefs no goddess arrives to bestow herself upon the sleeping youth, and he lacks as well those attributes of the shepherd that would identify him as Endymion; yet the figural form itself provides a powerful allusion. The selection of this visual type was not only suited to the form and shape of the relief but had itself accrued specific connotations in funerary contexts as a reference to the peace of “eternal sleep.”42

On the Palazzo Braschi sarcophagus, the framing pairs at either side of the central motif—a lascivious satyr with the androgynous god of intoxication, and Venus with the god of war—belonged as well to the established repertory of funerary images.43 Both groups are linked thematically to the Endymion myth since they allude to the sexual pleasures of the gods. The formal role played by these images on the Palazzo Braschi sarcophagus corresponds to that of similar small-scale figure groups, such as Cupid and Psyche, which accompany other narratives and serve as analogies.44 In the case of the Venus and Mars group the allusion is all the more poignant in that the composition recalls a famous sculptural type often appropriated as a vehicle for portraits.45

All three visual elements on this sarcophagus lack not only an explicit representation of the narrative to which they allude but the conventional setting and staffage associated with those tales. Yet these three vignettes function together, the part for the whole, as metonymic symbols: the Mars and Venus group refers to the tale of their famous passions; Dionysus and the satyr belong to a more general set of images that represent the drunkenness and sexuality of bacchic revelry; so too the recumbent figure whose form they frame. Despite the portrait features he bears, as well as his open eyes, in this explicitly mythological context—confirmed by his otherwise indecorous and inexplicable nudity—his form alone provides a sufficient allusion to the sleeping figure of Endymion.

From the apparent age of the central figure on the British Museum sarcophagus and the curious character of its relief, it may be presumed that this young man’s death was most unexpected—and with respect to burial, certainly unprepared for. An available sarcophagus was resculpted, so as to include his portrait, on what must have been relatively short notice.46 The immediate need for the casket might seem to have precluded the acquisition of one in need of such adaptation, yet the choice was fortuitous. For the recumbent figure of Ariadne offered a motif that, once reworked, effected an identification of the deceased with Endymion. Thus this man’s early and unfortunate death was transformed into a vision of his blissful, endless sleep.

While there seem to have been very few of these “abbreviated” images of the myth, the radical nature of these sarcophagi can be gauged by comparing them with other works that similarly isolated Endymion. The Endymion panel of the so-called Spada reliefs (Fig. 69)47 similarly lacks the image of Selene, but the panel retains the familiar landscape setting and—more importantly—its narrative mode, as the youth’s dog looks to the sky and barks to signal the goddess’s arrival.48 The Piazza Armerina mosaic (Fig. 53) offers another variation in which the sole figure of Endymion retains its narrative character. In each of these images something happens; by contrast, in the Palazzo Braschi or the British Museum sarcophagi, the mythological narrative was held in abeyance. Similarly, other representations of Endymion alone abandoned the mythic event, focusing instead on the familiar motif of the sleeping shepherd’s outstretched form (Fig. 70; cf. Fig. 71).49 As on the Palazzo Braschi and British Museum reliefs, in all such cases the imagery has relinquished narrative and adopted the mode of the symbol, as the “abbreviation” of mythological content transformed that imagery from literal illustration to a visual form of allusion.

These “abbreviated” reliefs have been the focus of a long-running discussion in the scholarly literature, one that can be briefly summarized here. They have been regarded as examples of Entmythologisierung, the “demythologization” of well-known subjects by the rejection or suppression of their standardized depictions, the simplification of their form, and the omission of significant details. The argument about Entmythologisierung has its origins in Gerke’s Christlichen Sarkophage der vorkonstantinischen Zeit, which focused on the bucolic motif found on the Endymion sarcophagi, and the British Museum sarcophagus's isolated Endymion.50 Weigand extended the consideration of the British Museum's Endymion sarcophagus, noting how the myth had been “suppressed” (vergrängt), “repressed” (zurückgedrängt), or “neutralized” (neutralisiert) by the isolation of the protagonist.51 The discussion was elaborated in more general fashion by Matz, who argued that the distortion of the mythological types presupposed the loss of both their significance and their affect,52 an argument that is contradicted by the preceding chapters of the present study. Sichtermann applied the argument to these “abbreviated” Endymion sarcophagi, which he understood to demonstrate a “loss of feeling” for the myths and their traditional significance, declaring implausible all attempts to see in the abbreviated compositions the meaningful equivalents of the complete renditions of the myth.53 Engemann objected to this characterization of the isolated figures on these reliefs, claiming that while they indeed suggested a renunciation of the mythic event, this did not extend to a renunciation of the mythological hero, who not only remained recognizable, but in this presentational mode offered a more direct and forceful means of analogy: the isolated figures on these reliefs represented an extreme form of the attempt to identify with those ancient heroes “spared from death.” 54 Fittschen has ignored neither the obvious mythological context in which these “Endymions” are set nor the continuing production of conventional representations of the tale throughout the third century.55 He has sensibly pointed out that it was not just the attributes that identified the figure, but the pose as well. This abbreviation of the myth, with its focus on the figure with whom the deceased was to be identified, was thus a “logical conclusion” that followed from the appropriation of the myth.56 Finally, Wrede, who follows in large measure the lead of Sichtermann, employs the concept of Entmythologisierung in his study’s emphasis on the fundamental realism imbued by the presence of portraits on the monuments; the presence and implications of the myth diminish, he concludes, since self-presentation in formam deorum was nonetheless a mode of commemorative portraiture, and thus demanded realistic images.57

Yet much of this commentary obscures the essential point: these idiosyncratic representations were entirely dependent on both the recognizability of their central motif outside its usual narrative context and the independent significance the myth had acquired as a funerary symbol. This was a fitting mode for the portrayal of the dead precisely because it was associated with Endymion’s deathlike slumber; the same may be said, mutatis mutandis, for the two Ariadne reliefs mentioned above.58 Moreover, they were a fitting form for memorial of the dead because they were indeed so memorable, not only as visual images but, as we have seen, from their vivid presence in the literary tradition. While these works are indeed marked by a diminution in the illustration of mythological content, they suggest less a “demythologization” than a highly sophisticated mode of mythological allusion; these images are the true parallel to the strikingly allusive poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, or Catullus. Indeed, the survival of more conventional depictions throughout the third century testifies to the continuing power of the visual tradition and its significance.59

In the absence of the youth’s divine paramour, to whom the allure of his pose was originally directed, Endymion here appeals to the beholder of the image. As the arrival of the spectator before the sarcophagus relief re-enacts the famous and more propitious arrival of the myth’s divine heroine,60 it suggests an additional aspect of this abbreviated form, one that may help to define its sophistication. For the absence of setting, and the focus on the single figure, suggest the encroachment on the relief medium of a representational mode fundamental to freestanding sculpture (cf. Figs. 70 and 71). This was indeed signaled by the Mars and Venus pair on the Palazzo Braschi relief, with their allusion to a famous statuary type.61 On these sarcophagi, the reclining youths, while deprived of so much of the imagery by which they were customarily accompanied, nonetheless evoke their implicit narrative—as did so many famous works of freestanding ancient sculpture: Alkamenes’ Prokne with her son, Itys, in which Prokne’s son unknowingly awaits his fate; Praxiteles’ Aphrodite, in which the goddess is shown emerging from her bath; Lysippos’s “Weary Herakles,” in which the hero rests from his labors; or, most tellingly, the Vatican Ariadne (Fig. 72).62