Memnon

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Memnon is a hero of Greek myth: king of the Ethiopians, son of the dawn-goddess Eos and the Trojan prince Tithonus, who came with an army to defend his uncle Priam in the last year of the Trojan War and was killed there by Achilles. The story does not survive in Homer, who only alludes to him. It was told at length in the Aethiopis, a poem of the Epic Cycle now lost except in summary, where Memnon slew Nestor’s son Antilochus before falling himself — and where his mother, grieving, won from Zeus some compensation for her son: in the usual version, immortality, or the morning dew counted as her unending tears.

For the Greeks he was the counterpart of Achilles — both sons of goddesses, both fated to die young, their duel a meeting of two doomed children of the divine. Greek vase-painters returned to the scene repeatedly: Eos and Thetis pleading before Zeus while their sons fight below, the two mothers mirror images of one another. Memnon’s Ethiopia was less a fixed place than the edge of the known world toward the rising sun, fitting for the child of the Dawn; later writers variously located it in Africa or in the East.

The name attached itself, in time, to something entirely Egyptian. At Thebes on the Nile’s west bank stand two seated colossi, sixty feet of quartzite each, which once fronted the mortuary temple of the pharaoh Amenhotep III. Greek and Roman visitors took the northern figure for Memnon. After an earthquake cracked it, traditionally dated to 27 BCE, the statue began at dawn to give out a sound — a sharp note or chord, most likely produced as the morning sun warmed the split stone and its trapped dew. Travellers heard in it the hero greeting his mother as she rose; many carved their names and the date of their visit on the statue’s legs, and those inscriptions, some still legible, remain the firmest record of the phenomenon. The sound is reported to have ceased after repairs made under the emperor Septimius Severus, early in the third century.

Two things sit under one name, and the tradition kept them loosely joined. The warrior belongs to the mythology of Troy; the singing statue belongs to the record of Roman tourism in Egypt and to the long Greek habit of reading their own figures into Egyptian monuments — the same impulse that turned Thoth into Hermes and Hathor into Aphrodite. What the two share is the Dawn: a hero born of her, and a stone that was thought to answer her each morning. The connection was the visitors’ to make, and they made it readily.

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