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).