4. Endymion’s Tale

The elaborate tale of Aphrodite and Adonis was recounted by a great wealth of textual sources upon which the sarcophagus designers could draw as they forged their visual renditions. Yet for Endymion’s tale they could find scarcely more than the bare remnants of a myth with which to work. For the myth appears to have survived through the centuries in only fragmentary form, and the scanty evidence that remains suggests that even in antiquity the tale of Selene and Endymion may have been the sparest of narratives. What has survived is a series of literary fragments, the oldest dating from the eighth century B.C., that indicate the early existence of at least two stories, subsequently conflated.^[1]

First-century scholia suggest two Greek traditions of the myth.^[2] The older, Western, tradition, which has its origins in Hesiod, makes no mention of the love of the goddess and the shepherd. Hesiod tells of Endymion’s receiving as a gift from Zeus the ability to choose the form of his own death. A reference to the youth as the son of Aethlius sets the tale in Elis.^[3] In another fragment Hesiod relates a strange tale of Endymion’s transport to the heavens, his attempted seduction of Hera, and his subsequent banishment to Hades. Neither of these disiecta membra—the second of which disappears from the textual tradition altogether^[4]—is reflected in the representations of the myth found on sarcophagi.

An Eastern tradition, whose early appearance is represented by the work of Sappho, recounts the tale of Selene and Endymion’s love that eventually found visual expression on the funerary reliefs.^[5] This tradition provided a story of the love of a goddess for a mortal youth that, like Adonis’s tale, had its origins in Asia Minor.

These two traditions generally correspond to a distinction found amid the extant literary material. The Eastern, Sapphic, tradition retained a fragmentary character, which was transmitted by a series of brief texts concerning the beloved of the goddess and his fate.^[6] The myth’s equation of sleep and death offered an aphorism—“Indeed, you really see nothing so similar to death as sleep”;^[7] “Endymion’s sleep, should such a thing occur, we should regard the equivalent of death”^[8]—which, with its evocative theme and concise yet elegant formulation of a fundamental similitude, not only proved a persistent topos of the philosophical tradition,^[9] and a fitting subject for the epigram,^[10] but rendered the myth a familiar analogue for many poets’ thoughts concerning love and death.

The myth’s Western strain, by contrast, attempted to fuse the disparate elements of the tale. By the sixth century B.C., in the surviving fragments of the works of Ibykos, the Eastern romance of Sapphic origin has been transported from its setting in a grotto on Mount Latmos to the historical sphere in the Hesiodic kingdom of Elis.^[11] In the accounts given by Apollodorus in the second century B.C. and by Pausanias in the second century a.d.—the most substantial of the existing sources—can be seen the continuation of this hybrid type, which emphasized the tale’s historical character and setting and, by implication, its realistic origins.^[12]

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]

Notes