CLASSICAL CORNER
260: FALLEN IDOLS
(See also the entertainingly instructive essay by Christopher Dickenson in History Today 70.8, August 2020, available online. I am leaving out tales of bleeding and sweating statues, covered in FT145:18,
though will stick in the statue of Victory that turned around in flight, presaging Boudicca’s/Boadicea’s British rebellion)
“Frank Bruno had the physique of a Greek statue, but with fewer moves” (Andrew Harrison, The Queensberry Rules,
28 Nov 2014, online)
I write this piece at a time when statuetoppling is all the rage. As usual, no shortage of ancient precedents.
The classical topplers were spoilt for choice. The cities teemed with targets. Pliny ( Natural History, bk 36 ch4) provides a large inventory. Dickenson estimates (e.g.) around 3,000 in Athens and Rhodes. There was a particular abundance of statues of athletes, which says something about the tastes of the times. Also, enormous private collections, such as the one owned by Byzantine functionary Lausus, destroyed in AD 475. The contemporary public Baths of Zeuxippus had effigies of 80 individuals ranging from mythological figures to poets to emperors. A detailed catalogue is furnished by Alan Cameron, ‘Palladas’, Wandering Poets, 2016, 93-101).
Ancient statues, it should be remembered, were either made of various metals or of marble. Some individuals went wildly overboard, for example the Greek ruler Demetrius of Phalerum (c. 350-280 BC) erected 360 to himself, all subsequently torn down, some tossed into the sea, others melted down to make chamber-pots – a common fate of such monuments: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, bk5 ch5.
Various Greek and Roman sources report how Dionysius (tyrant of Syracuse, fourthcentury BC) ripped off the gold cladding of a statue of Zeus because it was too hot for the god in summer, too cold in winter.
Thucydides (bk6 ch27) reports how (416 BC) many statuettes of Hermes were nocturnally mutilated (Aristophanes naturally emphasises genital damage), casting a shadow over the just-planned great invasion of Sicily).
Similar damage was frequently wrought on the garden statues (phallic garden gnomes) of Priapus, on which women were frequently alleged to satisfy themselves.
Pausanias ( Description of Greece, bk6 ch11 para9) tells of a man from Thasos who nightly whipped a statue of the famous Olympian athlete Theagenes until it wearied of this, fell on the man and killed him – Memo to modern statues under attack…
The statue was tried for murder, condemned, and thrown into the sea, but later retrieved, this being deemed necessary to restore the state to prosperity. Theagenes has another last laugh: the island’s football team is named after him.
Many centuries later, an eighthcentury AD guidebook to the statues of Constantinople (edited with English translation by Averil Cameron & Judith Herrin, 1984 – cf. my review in Speculum
61 (1986, 388-90) – reports (ch28) how a statue took offence at a civil servant, fell and crushed him to death.
Statues naturally varied in height. The most ardent topplers would have found the Colossus of Rhodes beyond them, likewise the 120ft (36m) effigy of Nero, the size of which gave rise to the name of Colosseum for the Flavian Amphitheatre, thanks to the surviving decapitated head.
Not always easy work demolishing a statue. In February 1991, in Tirana, it took 5,000 people an hour to bring down the 30ft (9m) monument of late communist dictator Enver Hoxha.
The most dramatic Roman account of such events is Juvenal’s ( Satire 10, vv55-64, left out of Johnson’s famous imitation The Vanity of Human Wishes. It describes the destruction of the statue of Sejanus, prætorian prefect of Tiberius, nicknamed by him ‘Partner of My Labours’, second most powerful man in Rome. He suddenly fell from grace in AD 31, and was summarily arrested and executed – one thinks of what befell Beria after Stalin.
(Sejanus was played by Patrick Stewart in the television series I, Claudius. Read also Ben Jonson’s play Sejanus His Fall,
1603)
Juvenal, who elsewhere (1.136-7) recommended that people (his words) both piss and shit on the statue of Jewish-born prefect Tiberius Julius Alexander, penned this lively account, as translated in Peter Green’s Penguin:
The ropes are heaved, down come the statues,
Axes demolish their chariot-wheels, the unoffending
Legs of their horses are broken. And now the fire
Roars up in the furnace, now flames hiss under the bellows:
The head of the people’s darling grows red hot, Sejanus
Crackles and melts. That face only yesterday ranked
Second in all the world. Now it’s so much scrap-metal
To be turned into jugs, basins, frying-pans, chamber-pots.
As seen, a common statuary fate. The epigrammatic poet Palladas (4th century AD) laughs ( Greek Anthology, bk9 no773) at a Cupid melted down into a frying pan, suitable fate for a deity that inflamed human passions.
The same episode would of course be differently treated by a satiric poet and a terse sardonic prose historian. Thanks to a large gap in his Annals manuscript, we don’t have Tacitus’s version. However, there is another such incident where comparisons are possible. At Annals 14. 60, he simply mentions that mobs tore down the statues of Nero’s mistress Poppæa in support of his young, soon-to-be-executed wife Octavia. However, there is a play Octavia (by Seneca or not is a long-running debate) that contains this exuberant description (vv80614, as translated in WS Watling’s Penguin): That is their desperate policy, which now Fills them with fire and urges on their haste To acts of madness. Every graven image, Each polished bronze or gleaming marble statue
Bearing the features of Poppæa, lies Demolished by the mob or overturned By iron weapons, the dismembered limbs Are being dragged away with knotted ropes. Kicked, trampled under foot, and fouled with dirt,
With insults added to these injuries With words such as I dare not here repeat. They are about to ring the emperor’s house With fire…
These Tacitus-Octavia passages are analysed in an online anonymous essay, ‘A Riot of Images: Statue Destruction and Historiography In Nero’s Rome’. Time, I think, for this column to melt away. If you still want more, consult the characteristic massive list of primary references in JEB Mayor’s note on 10.58 in his edition of Juvenal. For marginal conclusion, I recall Winston Churchill’s (himself under statuary threat) description of Mussolini as ‘Hitler’s utensil’, along with Fort’s remark (Books, p8): “Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly.”