Memnon

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Memnon is a hero of Greek myth: king of the Ethiopians, son of the dawn-goddess Eos — Aurora to the Romans — and the Trojan prince Tithonus, whom the Dawn had carried off and begged eternal life for and forgot to ask eternal youth. Tithonus was a son of Laomedon, which made Memnon a grandson of Troy’s old king and a nephew of Priam, who reigned there in the city’s last days. From the far edge of the world toward the sunrise he came in the war’s final year, after Hector had fallen, leading an army to defend his uncle’s walls — and was killed at Troy by Achilles. The story does not survive in Homer, who names Memnon only in passing; the Odyssey calls him the handsomest of the men who came to Troy and remembers that he killed Nestor’s son. The full account belonged to the Aethiopis, a poem of the Epic Cycle ascribed to Arctinus of Miletus, now lost except in the prose summary of Proclus.

The Colossi of Memnon at Thebes (modern Luxor), the pair of statues to which the hero’s name became attached — Onceinawhile, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In that summary the shape of the tale is plain. Memnon arrives wearing armor forged by Hephaestus — the same divine smith who armed Achilles, so that the two heroes meet matched even in their gear. He cuts down Antilochus, Nestor’s son, who had thrown himself between the Trojan and his aged father; and then Achilles, avenging the boy as he had avenged Patroclus, kills Memnon in turn. What follows is the heart of the older poem: Eos goes to Zeus and wins from him, for her fallen son, a gift that softens death. In the standard version it is immortality outright. In another, told and retold by later poets, the compensation is the morning dew — the eoa drosos, the dawn’s own moisture, counted as her unending tears, shed afresh each daybreak over the whole earth. From the smoke of his pyre, some said, rose flocks of birds, the Memnonides, that returned every year to wheel and fight and mourn above his grave.

Two doomed sons of goddesses

For the Greek imagination Memnon was the counterpart of Achilles, and the pairing was exact. Both were sons of goddesses by mortal fathers — Memnon of the Dawn, Achilles of the sea-nymph Thetis; both were the strongest of their respective armies; both were fated to die young in the same war, the one shortly after the other. Their duel was understood not as a mismatch but as a meeting of equals, two children of the divine whose brightness was the measure of how soon it would be put out. The kinship of their mothers’ grief gave the scene its lasting form. Vase-painters returned to it again and again: the two goddesses, mirror images, raised in supplication above the fighting sons.

The duel of Achilles and Memnon, their mothers Thetis and Eos behind them, on a Campanian red-figure amphora (c. 330 BCE), Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Athenian tragedians took up the same confrontation. Aeschylus wrote a Memnon and, joined to it, a Psychostasia — a “weighing of souls” — in which Zeus held aloft a balance with the fates of Achilles and Memnon in its pans, while Thetis and Eos stood beneath, each praying for her own son’s life. The plays are lost, but the image they staged is one the painters had already made their own. On Athenian pottery from the sixth century onward the scales are held not by Zeus but by Hermes, the messenger who escorts the dead — the two small soul-figures hanging in the balance, the mothers flanking him. The heavier soul sinks; the lighter man lives. Memnon’s sinks. In one of the most admired of all surviving cups, signed by the painter Douris around 490 BCE and now in the Louvre, the Dawn lifts the slack body of her dead son in her arms — the so-called Memnon pietà, the dark hero cradled by the goddess of light, an image that needs no caption to be read.

The “Memnon pietà”: Eos lifts the body of her slain son, interior of an Attic red-figure cup signed by Douris, c. 490 BCE, Louvre (G 115) — photo Bibi Saint-Pol, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Memnon’s Ethiopia was less a fixed country than a direction: the burnt-faced land at the world’s eastern rim, where the sun comes up, the natural homeland for a child of the Dawn. The Greeks placed it variously — sometimes in Africa beyond Egypt, sometimes in the East toward Susa and the Persian lands, where a later age pointed out ruins and roads it called Memnon’s. The vagueness was not a flaw in the story but a property of it: he belonged to the threshold of light, which has no postal address. His brother Emathion ruled another such edge-land until Heracles killed him; the family kept to the borders of the map.

The stone that took his name

The name attached itself, in time, to something entirely Egyptian and far older than any Greek poem. At Thebes on the Nile’s west bank — the Egyptian Thebes of Upper Egypt, not the Boeotian city of the same name — stand two enthroned colossi of quartzite sandstone, each rising some eighteen meters, roughly sixty feet, above the floodplain. They were carved in the fourteenth century BCE to front the vast mortuary temple of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, of the Eighteenth Dynasty; the temple behind them is gone, quarried and washed away, but the guardians at its vanished gate remained, seated and staring east toward the river and the rising sun. Greek and Roman visitors, finding two weathered giants facing the dawn, took the northern figure for Memnon — the hero who faced the Dawn his mother — and the misnaming stuck so fast that the colossi carry it still. The reading was of a piece with a long Greek and Roman habit of finding their own figures in Egyptian stone — the same impulse that turned Thoth into Hermes and Hathor into Aphrodite, and that let a pharaoh’s mortuary guardian become a Trojan hero. The temple of Hathor at Dendera, downstream, would receive its own layer of such interpretation. At Thebes the equation was helped along by something the older monuments could not offer: a voice.

The colossus at dawn, painted after the artist’s 1856 voyage up the Nile — Jean-Léon Gérôme, “The Colossus of Memnon” (1857), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The marvel came of an accident. An earthquake, traditionally dated to 27 BCE, cracked the northern statue, shearing the upper body and fissuring what stood. Soon after, in the cool hour around sunrise, the broken stone began to give out a sound — a short, sharp note, compared by those who heard it to the blow of a hammer on bronze or to a lyre-string snapping. The cause was almost certainly physical: as the first sun warmed the fractured quartzite, the swift change in temperature flexed the stone and drove off the dew and air trapped in its crevices, and the rock spoke once, sometimes twice or three times, and then fell silent for the day. To the visitors the explanation was readier and more beautiful. This was Memnon, greeting his mother as she rose — the son calling to the Dawn each morning, and the Dawn, in the dew on his cold stone, weeping her answer.

The record of the phenomenon is unusually firm because the visitors wrote it down on the statue itself. The geographer Strabo, who came about 20 BCE, reports hearing the sound but adds, with a surveyor’s caution, that he could not say for certain whether it issued from the base, from the colossus, or from one of the men standing about — the earliest skeptic of the wonder he had traveled to witness. Pausanias, generations later, likened the note to a breaking lyre-string. Pliny knew of it. Above all, the legs and feet of the colossus were covered, over more than two centuries, with the carved names, dates, and verses of those who had come and heard — or, ruefully, come and not heard, for the stone did not perform to order. More than a hundred of these inscriptions survive, in Greek and Latin, the record of an ancient tourism as organized as any since. The most celebrated were cut during the visit of the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina in November of 130 CE: four poems in elegiac couplets and archaizing Aeolic Greek by Julia Balbilla, a learned noblewoman in their party, who wrote in conscious imitation of Sappho and recorded, among other things, that the statue had stayed mute on the first morning and obliged the imperial visitors only on the second.

The inscribed leg of the colossus, recording the carved verses and names of ancient visitors — engraving from Richard Pococke, “A Description of the East” (1743), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The singing ended as abruptly as it began. Early in the third century, under the emperor Septimius Severus, the fractured upper courses were rebuilt in sandstone blocks — a pious restoration of a famous monument, and the death of its voice. With the crack sealed, the stone no longer flexed and breathed at dawn, and Memnon fell silent. The repaired upper body, mismatched and blank, still sits there; it has not spoken since.

Texts, monuments, and scholarship

The mythic Memnon is reconstructed almost wholly from fragments and summaries. The Aethiopis itself is gone; what remains is the synopsis preserved in the Chrestomathy of Proclus, which supplies the sequence of Memnon’s arrival, his armor, the death of Antilochus, the duel with Achilles, and Eos’s appeal to Zeus. Around this skeleton cluster Homer’s brief allusions, the scattered notices of later mythographers, and the great visual tradition of Attic vase-painting, which preserves scenes — the weighing of souls, the Dawn bearing her son’s body — that the lost epic and the lost Aeschylean plays once dramatized. The standard modern handbook treatment of the whole dossier is Timothy Gantz’s Early Greek Myth (Johns Hopkins, 1993), which sorts the textual from the iconographic evidence with care.

The Egyptian colossus has its own scholarship, anchored on its inscriptions. The corpus of the tourist graffiti was edited by the brothers André and Étienne Bernand in Les inscriptions grecques et latines du colosse de Memnon (Cairo, 1960): one hundred and seven texts, sixty-one in Greek and forty-five in Latin, datable between roughly 20 and 250 CE — the working archive of who came, when, and whether the stone sang for them. Patricia Rosenmeyer’s The Language of Ruins (Oxford University Press, 2018) reads that corpus as literature, treating the inscriptions, and Balbilla’s poems in particular, as a body of verse in their own right rather than mere graffiti. The two literatures rarely touch: the philologists of the Epic Cycle and the epigraphers of the Theban plain are studying, in effect, two different Memnons who happen to share a name.

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.

→ Related: Laomedon · Helenus · Dendera · Aurora · Zeus · Thetis · Thoth · Hermes