Artifacts in MANTO: what’s in name?

Written by Greta Hawes

In the midst of our recent efforts to add data from ancient artifacts into MANTO, I was delighted to take up an invitation to spend some time at the Canellopoulos Museum in Athens. CAMU has an extraordinary collection of Greek art, which you can explore on-line here (or of course in its beautiful premises tucked in under the Acropolis). Because CAMU holds a good number of ancient objects that depict myths, my visit was a great opportunity to think through some of the issues we are facing in working with this material. I began documenting these in my last three posts and am continuing the series with this one.

Scott wrote a lot of early posts on this blog about the difficulties of identifying and disambiguating mythic characters in texts. The big issue that I’m encountering in this context when working with depictions of myth on artifacts relates to the question of names. Here I’m going to talk about two opposite sides of this problem: characters that are named specifically by the artist, and characters that aren’t.

Greek vase painters frequently included characters’ names in their scenes. In some instance, this can be of great use to us, particularly where the scene itself is damaged (example here) or even lost (example here). But in other instances, over enthusiastic naming by these painters made me doubt the wisdom of our long-agreed-on rule in data collection:

All named characters must be created as entities.

(Manual, p. 14)

So, when I entered the frieze on the François Vase that shows Achilles’ ambush of Troilos, I found myself making entities for the two figures who flanked the fountain house at which Troilos had been drawing water. These onlookers have inscribed beside them the names “Rhodia” and “Troon”. They are otherwise unknown in Greek myth.

Attic Black-Figure Krater (“The François Vase”) by Cleitias, ca. 570 BCE. Florence 4209. Part of the middle frieze on the body, showing Achilles’ ambush of Troilos. “Troon” is the man with the water vessel to the left of the fountain house; “Rhodia” is the woman with her hands raised in alarm on the left of the fountain house. Image from Wikimedia.

“Rhodia” and “Troon” mean little more than “the woman from Rhodes” and “the Trojan man”, so should we even treat them as having the status of named individuals? It’s tempting to ignore them. After all, in this same scene the painter even labels the seat on which Priam sits, and a water vessel. On the other hand, these two characters are treated seriously in LIMC, which has entries and minimal biographies for both (“Rhodia: nom d’une Troyenne”; “Troon: Gefährte oder Bruder des Troilos”) while admitting that neither is depicted anywhere else. For now, I’m keeping to our policy of including all characters who are given names in such scenes, whatever my reservations.

My second illustration of the difficulties of names comes from an Attic red-figure calyx krater in the Canellopoulos collection depicting the departure of a warrior:

Detail of Attic Red-Figure Calyx Krater by the Dinos Painter depicting the departure of Meleager for the Calydonian Boar hunt (ca. 420 BCE). See in MANTO.

Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, no. Δ 2500. Photograph: George Vdokakis. Image used with permission.

The man in the centre of the composition is identified by an inscription: this is Meleager, who led the hunt for the Calydonian Boar. The scene thus shows him taking leave of his family; that would be his parents Oineus and Althaia on the right. Two problems remain: who are the pair on the left similarly dressed for travel, and who are the woman and child?

Above one of the men on the left was once the partial name “LYK-” (it can now no longer be read). This would seemingly give us yet another character called “Lykos”, a common name in myth albeit not known otherwise in this particular context. But as Angelos Zarkadas points out in his description of this vase in the catalogue (The Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum: Ancient Art (Athens, 2006) p. 138), we might instead chose to read this as part of the name “Lynkeus”, and thus identify the pair as the sons of Aphareus, who also took part in the Calydonian Boar hunt, a much neater scenario.

The emotional centre of the scene lies in the three-way interaction of Meleager with what must surely be his son and wife. So, Zarkadas: “Notable is [Meleager’s] affectionate look as he gives his little son a bunch of grapes as a departure gift […]. The figure of Alkyone is impressive in her quiet grief as she looks penetratingly into the eyes of her husband, uncertain if she will see him again” (The Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum: Ancient Art (Athens, 2006) p. 138). It comes as some surprise, then, to find the woman described elsewhere not as Meleager’s wife, but as the child’s nurse. Why would this be? There is one further piece to this image, and that is constant identification of the child as Parthenopaios.

Now, Parthenopaios would grow up to become one of the Seven who attacked Thebes. His name means “Son of the maiden” and he is most commonly said to be child of Ares and Atalante, the Arcadian heroine who joined the Calydonian Boar hunt. A variant tradition made him son of the Argive Talaos. But why should he be identified in this scene? It turns out that the only son of Meleager identified in ancient literature is Parthenopaios: we have two later Latin attestations of this (Hyginus (Fab. 70, 270) and Schol. Stat. Theb. 4.309). Hence the (modern) convention of naming this figure. In this minor tradition, however, the mother was still Atalante, and so Meleager’s wife Alcyone was, at best, his stepmother. (Alcyone had another name, Cleopatra, which is the main one we use in MANTO.)

Identifying this central group thus becomes a push-and-pull between the need to explain the central scene as an intimate moment between a tight-knit family, and the desire to align each figure in it with the mythographic data we get from elsewhere. My general rule for working with artifacts is that I rely on the expertise of others and enter plausible interpretations of the scenes where I find them. Here, however, I cannot follow the consensus in aligning this little child with our entity “Parthenopaios” on the evidence of a much, much later authority, and then perhaps explaining away the presence of Alcyone. The logic of the image speaks to a farewell between husband, wife, and child, and I doubt that the exact identity of Parthenopais is at all operant here in the solemn little toddler. And so I have created a new entity, “Son of Meleager and Cleopatra (name unknown)” to capture this particular figure, which resolves some of the issue, but nontheless illustrates again how our list of characters depicted in myth has a tendency to proliferate without limit.

My warmest thanks to Nikolas Papadimitriou, director of the Canellopoulos Museum, for hosting me in Athens and for providing the images of objects in the collection that appear in this blog series.

This blog captures some material I presented at a workshop at the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Uppsala: I thank also Anna Foka and the team there for a fika-licious visit.

Ewan Coopey has been instrumental in developing the practices and processes for collecting data from artifacts in MANTO.