2. Adonis’s Tale

Adonis’s tale was an old one. The myth, evidently of oriental origin, had been told and retold by the Greeks in a variety of forms. The Romans adopted and adapted the tale, and by the mid second century—when the sarcophagi that are the focus of this study began to be produced—the story appears to have been among the most vital examples of mythology, one that found artistic expression in a wide range of Roman representations, both literary and visual.^[1]

The abundant literary sources that survive testify to the tale’s wide dissemination and its appearance in diverse genres. The myth comprised an elaborate narrative sequence, whose elements were extracted, and at times amplified, for presentation in new contexts. Some of the literary sources offer mere allusions to the myth in the proverbial form associated with commonplaces about the affairs of the gods.^[2] Among the sources are also found ancient commentaries on these allusions, such as the explications provided in the scholia to Theocritus.^[3] Still others present attempts at realistic, or “historical,” accounts of the myth: some ancient authors recounted the genealogy of the ancient hero,^[4] while others attempted to fix geographically the site of the river into which he was metamorphosed.^[5] The myth also appears in ancient texts as a symbol or metaphor, thus suggesting a basic knowledge of the tale on the part of the authors’ audience as well as a consensus about its broad significance and applicability in such a form.^[6] And, finally, in some instances the tale of Aphrodite and Adonis forms a topos that served as the inspiration for literary composition.^[7]

The most extensive account of the Adonis myth is that given by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. But even this must be combined with elements found in various other sources to provide a complete, if synthetic, narrative of the life and death of the hero.

The narrative begins with a tale of illicit passion, deception and their unfortunate consequences.^[8] Myrrha, daughter of King Cinyras, was overwhelmed with desire for her father. With the aid of her nurse, she contrived to deceive him, and, taking advantage of his drunkenness, fulfilled her extravagant passion under the cover of darkness. The passions of the father once incited, the act was repeated again and again. Finally, just as Psyche’s discovery of Cupid had led to disaster, so the unwitting king, eager to know his consort, brought light to his bed and discovered his daughter. Chased from the palace by her outraged father, Myrrha pleaded with the gods to take her from both life and death, and they heard her petition. She underwent a metamorphosis, and Adonis, the offspring of this incestuous union of father and daughter, was born from the myrrh tree into which his mother had been transformed.

This first section of the full vita has the formal character of an independent tale, whose central figure is the hero’s mother, and whose real focus is her passion, and her fate. Adonis’s passion and fate—along with the divine ardor he inspired—emerge amid the story of this mortal youth beloved by a goddess:

Excited by the beauty of a mortal, no more does she [Aphrodite] care for the shores of Cythera, nor does she seek again Paphos surrounded by the ocean deep, nor Cnidos with its abundance of fishes, nor Amathus laden with precious metals. She avoids even the sky: Adonis is preferred to heaven. She binds him to her, she is his companion.^[9]

But the passion of more than one divinity was inflamed by the young Adonis. Not only Aphrodite was overcome by his beauty, but Persephone as well. Other ancient sources describe how the two goddesses disputed for his companionship and how Jupiter intervened to resolve their dispute by the decree of an annual cycle in which Adonis passed from the upper to the lower realm, his life parceled out between his two paramours.^[10]

Aphrodite warned Adonis of the dangers of hunting wild beasts, but the youth failed to heed her counsel. Ignoring her warning, Adonis was drawn to the hunt, killed by a wild boar, and at his death transformed into a flower. According to other versions of the myth, Adonis’s death resulted from his having incurred the wrath of other gods, and both Artemis and Ares were at times held responsible for his demise.^[11]

The full mythological sequence is closed by the elaborate annual ritual of mourning instituted by Aphrodite in remembrance of Adonis’s death, the Adonaia.^[12] In this celebration of Aphrodite’s love for the mortal youth, women reveled—even if, like the goddess, only briefly—in the re-creation of that love’s erotic, sensual, indeed licentious aspects. There were rites of purification, and there was feasting, followed by lamentations, for which the women climbed to the rooftops, where they sang dirges over their small “gardens of Adonis,” the young plantings whose brief life would be symbolically extinguished in the heat of the sun. Thus, as this botanical symbolism re-enacted Adonis’s brief life, it echoed the metamorphic cycle from tree to flower within which the mythic action is set. According to legend, these rites culminated, albeit symbolically, in Adonis’s resurrection.

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 goddess^[23]—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.

Notes