The Sphinxes Guarding the Lion Tomb Entrance at Amphipolis

[agesilaos]

Palatine Anthology VI 219
antipater

ἐκ ποτέ τις φρικτοῖο θεᾶς σεσοβημένος οἴστρῳ
ῥομβητοὺς δονέων λυσσομανεῖς πλοκάμους,
θηλυχίτων, ἀσκητὸς ἐϋσπείροισι κορύμβοις,
ἁβρῷ τε στρεπτῶν ἅμματι κεκρυφάλων,
ἴθρις ἀνήρ, κοιλῶπιν ὀρειάδα δύσατο πέτραν,
Ζανὸς ἐλαστρησθεὶς γυιοπαγεῖ νιφάδι.
τὸν δὲ μέτ᾽ ἀρρίγητος ἐπείσθορε ταυροφόνος θήρ,
εἰς τὸν ἑὸν προμολὼν φωλεὸν ἑσπέριος:
ἀθρήσας δ᾽ εἰς φῶτα, καὶ εὐτρήτοισιν ἀυτμὰν
μυκτῆρσιν βροτέας σαρκὸς ἐρυσσάμενος,
ἔστα μὲν βριαροῖσιν ἐπ᾽ ἴχνεσιν ὄμμα δ᾽ ἑλίξας
βρυχᾶτο σφεδανῶν ὄβριμον ἐκ γενύων.
ἀμφὶ δ᾽ οἱ σμαράγει μὲν ἐναυλιστήριον ἄντρον,
ἄχει δ᾽ ὑλάεις ἀγχινεφὴς σκόπελος.
αὐτὰρ ὃ θαμβήσας φθόγγον βαρύν, ἐκ μὲν ἅπαντα
ἐν στέρνοις ἐάγη θυμὸν ὀρινόμενον
ἀλλ᾽ ἔμπας ἐρίμυκον ἀπὸ στομάτων ὀλολυγὰν
ἧκεν, ἐδίνησεν δ᾽ εὐστροφάλιγγα κόμαν
χειρὶ δ᾽ ἀνασχόμενος μέγα τύμπανον, ἐπλατάγησεν,
δινωτὸν Ῥείας ὅπλον Ὀλυμπιάδος
τὸ ζωᾶς ἐπαρωγὸν ἀήθεα γὰρ τότε βύρσης
ταυρείου κενεὸν δοῦπον ἔδεισε λέων,
ἐκ δὲ φυγὼν ὤρουσεν. ἴδ᾽ ὡς ἐδίδαξεν ἀνάγκα
πάνσοφος ἐξευρεῖν ἔκλυσιν Ἀίδεω.

Goaded by the fury of the dreadful goddess, tossing his locks in wild frenzy, clothed in woman’s raiment with well-plaited tresses and dainty netted hair-caul, a eunuch once took shelter ina mountain cavern, driven by the numbing snow of Zeus. But behind him rushed in unshivering a lion, slayer of bulls, returning to his den in the evening, who looking on the man, snuffling in his shapely nostrils the smell of human flesh, stood still on his sturdy feet, but rolling his eyes roared loudly from his greedy jaws. The cave, his den, thumders around him and the wooded peak that mounts nigh to the clouds echoes loud. But the priest startled by the deep voice felt all his stirred spirit broken in his breast. Yet he uttered from his lips the piercing shriek they use, and tossed his whirling locks, and holding up his great tambour, the revolving instrument of Olympian Rhea, he beat it, and it was the saviour of his life; the lion hearing the unaccustomed hollow boom of the bull’s hide was afraid and took flight. See how all-wise necessity taught a means of escape from death!

Not much of Amphipolis here, it is not even about a lion statue.

[agesilaos]

Oops you mean this one VII 426

‘Tell, lion slayer of kine on whose tomb thou standest there and who was worthy of your valour?
Teleutias, the son of Theodoros, who was by far the most valiant of men, as I am judged to be of beasts. Not in vain stand I here, but I emblem the prowess of the man, for he was indeed a lion to his enemies.’

This is not the Spartan Teleutias slain at Olynthos (Xen Hell.V 3 iii-vi), his father was Archidamos.

[Efstathios]

Ok, so it is for Teleutias, thanks for clearing this up. Oscar Broneer quoted this in The Lion Monument at Amphipolis in 1941, as seen in this link http://nataliavogeikoff.com/tag/lion-of-amphipolis/ and someone thought that Antipater said this quote in Amphipolis and it's on all the news media now.

[agesilaos]

Happy to oblige; I am always suspicious of unreferenced quotes, but I believe the fault lies with the press rather than Broneer, he just found an interesting dedication; he could equally well have chosen the ' unshivering a lion, slayer of bulls, returning to his den in the evening, who looking on the man, snuffling in his shapely nostrils the smell of human flesh, stood still on his sturdy feet, but rolling his eyes roared loudly from his greedy jaws.' from the other poem, it certainly describes the statue, despite having nothing whatever to do with it.

There is alot of bad speculation out there, someone has suggested that the background of Sodoma's 'Marriage of Roxane and Alexander' depicts Amphipolis, and the Lion Monument ( it is actually the Sogdian Rock in the guise of an Italian mountain village/city, and the monument turns out to be the foliage of a tree overlooking a house!). Until the archaeologists publish you will neeed to take most things with a goodly pinch of Attic salt

[amyntoros]

Sorry to be so behind with posting a response, but if I may I'd like to go back to the discovery of the marble door. Can someone explain to me how the photographed marble piece (with fake nail-heads) fits design-wise into any of the tombs posted here OR the architect's rendering of the Amphipolis door? It's that angle which bothers me - it seems to be around 30 degrees or a little more, and no matter how I use my imagination I can't fit it into the design of the doors. Am I completely misinterpreting the shape of the piece or is it just my imagination failing me?

Best regards,

[Taphoi]

Sorry to be so behind with posting a response, but if I may I'd like to go back to the discovery of the marble door. Can someone explain to me how the photographed marble piece (with fake nail-heads) fits design-wise into any of the tombs posted here OR the architect's rendering of the Amphipolis door? It's that angle which bothers me - it seems to be around 30 degrees or a little more, and no matter how I use my imagination I can't fit it into the design of the doors. Am I completely misinterpreting the shape of the piece or is it just my imagination failing me?

The angle you are seeing is an optical illusion due to the oblique angles of some of the breaks, but the plane of the strip on which the nailheads sit and the other large plane to the side of their strip are actually parallel.
Best wishes,
Andrew

[Taphoi]

Nice try, but ampersand is only used in cursive and not Elizabethan inscriptions, so the reconstruction fails.

Thankyou. It is indeed my point that the righthand reconstruction is appalling scholarship and that nobody in their right mind would draw any serious conclusions from such a reconstruction.

What you seem to have overlooked is that there is preserved ‘…you may see the tomb….Olympia…the race of impetuous A…’ and that his reconstruction too is guided by metre and line length and also funerary formulae. The reconstruction ‘the tomb of Olympias ‘seems unavoidable, which makes ‘Aeacides’ a strong candidate and what epithet should attach itself to an Olympias that is not the mother of Alexander and yet be worthy of the passer-by’s interest and reflect glory on the house of Helenos? Add the fact that Kassandros definitely captured and most probably executed her in Pydna with no motive for giving her anything but a criminal’s grave to go with her criminal’s death.

Granted that the inscription probably mentions a tomb of Olympias, there is nothing in the surviving fragments to say where it was and it would probably be possible to reconstruct the full inscription to locate it wherever you wished (including Amphipolis), given that there are many letters missing from every line of its text. Nor is there anything in the surviving fragments even to make it probable that it is Olympias the mother of Alexander who is meant rather than some other Olympias.

If you wish to dispute Edson’s reconstruction you have to address the Greek of the inscription not cod up a bogus Hamlet. Or is your position that anything restored should be rejected? It is certainly fair to bear in mind what has been supplied may be wrong but an alternative has to suggested that makes more sense; that’s the rules of the game in Epigraphic Countdown.

A proper scientific approach would be to have a computer program find all viable reconstructions that are good Greek, then to choose the subset of these that make contextual sense. In this particular case there are probably millions of reconstructions that are good Greek and thousands of these that make contextual sense, just because so much is missing. This should alert the intrepid epigrapher to the fact that any single reconstruction will have a very low probability of being correct in this instance and dramatic conclusions inferred from any such reconstruction do not merit credulity.
Best wishes,
Andrew

[amyntoros]

Sorry to be so behind with posting a response, but if I may I'd like to go back to the discovery of the marble door. Can someone explain to me how the photographed marble piece (with fake nail-heads) fits design-wise into any of the tombs posted here OR the architect's rendering of the Amphipolis door? It's that angle which bothers me - it seems to be around 30 degrees or a little more, and no matter how I use my imagination I can't fit it into the design of the doors. Am I completely misinterpreting the shape of the piece or is it just my imagination failing me?

The angle you are seeing is an optical illusion due to the oblique angles of some of the breaks, but the plane of the strip on which the nailheads sit and the other large plane to the side of their strip are actually parallel.
Best wishes,
Andrew

Thanks Andrew, I appreciate your reply. However, (and don't I always have a "however"?) even a parallel plane doesn't quite work if one looks at the photographs of the tombs and the rendering of the Amphipolis door. In all of them there is the appearance of the nail pattern being raised above the surrounding area rather than being on a parallel plane. Am not sure why this should bother me but you know how I get engrossed in the small details.

Best regards,

[Paralus]

The paper in Hesperia by Edson offers zero evidence that Olympias is buried at Pydna

That goes too far. One might disagree with Edson’s conclusions but to claim that his paper “offers zero evidence” is wrong.

All the red text is invented by Edson! Are we really to believe that this constitutes evidence to make it "unlikely in the extreme" that Olympias the mother of Alexander was not buried near where this inscription was found (perhaps somewhere near ancient Pydna)? Really?

This too goes too far. Accusations of “invention” seem to be popular on Pothos these days. The use of the verb is clearly to discredit the paper and the scholar. Edson has not ‘invented’ text; he has proposed, on argued epigraphical grounds, a reconstruction of the damaged text. Again, one might disagree with that proposed reconstruction and Badian’s warning with respect to “history from square brackets” is still true. If so, as Agesilaos has pointed out, one should argue the case against it – on the same grounds. Merely labeling something ‘invention’ does not argue the case.

Perhaps we should, on that logic, dispense with many other ‘invented’ inscriptions in the corpus.

Granted that the inscription probably mentions a tomb of Olympias, there is nothing in the surviving fragments to say where it was and it would probably be possible to reconstruct the full inscription to locate it wherever you wished (including Amphipolis), given that there are many letters missing from every line of its text. Nor is there anything in the surviving fragments even to make it probable that it is Olympias the mother of Alexander who is meant rather than some other Olympias. [...] This should alert the intrepid epigrapher to the fact that any single reconstruction will have a very low probability of being correct in this instance and dramatic conclusions inferred from any such reconstruction do not merit credulity.

One cannot help at wondering what might be said of this stele were it found proximate to the Amphipolis mound rather than Pydna. In any case, the “intrepid epigrapher” should indeed be wary of drawing "dramatic conclusions". Far more so, as Badian observes, should the historian – professional or "intrepid amateur". It might well be wise for the 'intrepid amateur' to take the caution he demands of “intrepid epigraphers” and apply same to the current excavations at Amphipolis. To paraphrase Badian…

My concern has been to point out how, once we rid ourselves of an understandable eagerness to have Olympias as the occupant of the Amphipolis ‘tomb’ [a document of Alexander's beginning as king (and perhaps, i.a., to settle once and for all the question of the Macedonian king's official title before the conquests of Alexander)], we must consider alternative interpretations of this very important excavation [fragmentary document], which may in some respects present advantages and avoid difficulties.

[Xenophon]

I have often observed that here on this forum - and elsewhere - when a proponent has no rational arguments or points to put, then they resort to sarcasm and mockery to denigrate a different viewpoint - a sure sign that their case is weak.

Taphoi's post of Tues Oct 7 (previous page) above is a good case in point. He seeks to throw doubts on the evidence presented by Edson that Olympias almost certainly died and was buried in Pydna by scornfully suggesting that his attempted reconstruction of the inscriptions is 'fictional' by lampooning the Hamlet soliloquy. Of course we can all play the game of 'filling in the missing gaps', but that is a far cry from reasoned deduction, as employed by Edson to reconstruct what may have been the original, as Agesilaos has pointed out.

Edson himself is the first to acknowledge that this reconstruction is only an example of a possibility:
"This examination of the preserved text of Oikonomos' fragment demonstrates that it is to be closely associated with the new epigram. The salient point, of course, is that this fragmentary epitaph specifically mentions the tomb of Olympias. The
above observations have, I believe, given us the historical information desired and without recourse to the uncertain and necessarily subjective problem of the restoration of the poem as a whole. If I now venture upon a restoration of the first four lines of the fragmentary poem, it is only to suggest how the beginning of the complete epigram may have read and without any pretense that the restoration has any value other than that 'exempli gratia'......".

As Edson says , and again Agesilaos has pointed out, Taphoi completely misses the point. Any reconstruction is irrelevant to the salient point, which is that there is an undoubtable reference to the tomb of Olympias.

Taphoi's point one is a 'straw man' argument ( setting up a different premise - the reconstruction of the epigram - and attacking it) and a 'red herring' (distraction) and fails completely.

Taphoi's second point which amounts to "Well, it coulda been another Olympias" is of course an ( outside) possibility but really amounts to 'we can't be certain', an 'ad ignorandiam'( we can't say for certain) fallacy - which of course is true of virtually everything we know about ancient history , and hence an invalid argument. He suggests that the reference could be to Olympias II, daughter of Pyrrhus and married to her half-brother Alexander II of Epirus. We know very little about her ( from Justin circa XXLIII.3), but there is nothing to particularly associate her with Macedon, let alone Pydna. ( She may possibly have visited Macedon to attend her daughter Phthyia's wedding to Demetrius II, King of Macedon in 239 BC).

On the other hand, our evidence is that it was Olympias I who spent her last days at, and met her end, in Pydna.[Diodorus XIX.49 ff]. If we add up all the evidence - the fall and capture of Olympias in Pydna, her subsequent trial by the Macedonian Assembly, which she did not attend, Cassander's offer to give her a ship to escape to Athens (which she refused), and her subsequent execution, all of which must have taken place in Pydna; The later inscriptions of her Aeacid descendants in Pydna, one of which specifically refers to "..you may see the tomb...Olympia...the race of impetuous A... ", are very strong evidence that Olympias' tomb lies undiscovered in or close to Pydna.

It is unfortunate for Taphoi that he chose to publicly suggest in the media that the Amphipolis tomb/mound is to be associated with Olympias, perhaps the least likely candidate ( after Alexander), and that he now finds himself reduced to fatuous justifications and arguments to try and bolster what is a very weak position indeed......

[agesilaos]

images.watchit.gr.jpg (233.42 KiB) Viewed 3532 times

Amyntoros, hope this is clear the piece would be here,

louvre doors.jpg (60.83 KiB) Viewed 3532 times

This form of door deems universal for Macedonian tombs so the reconstruction is probably wrong.

On 'Olympias' Tomb' the point is that it can be seen from the tomb of Neoptolemos, and this has not been reconstructed, anyone who can see from Pydna to Amphipolis belongs in Baron von Munchausen's train!

[gepd]

I think that there is a big confusion in the press because the excavation team and/or the ministry of culture are not so careful with the way they release some of the initial interpretations of the findings. Interpretations appear to be presented as facts and are adopted accordingly by the press, while for many of these "facts", justification is not provided. On the other hand, during several interviews, the team hints that what they present is just "working hypothesis", so this is really confusing (also because the press cannot understand why the team would release "working hypotheses", if that may change soon as the excavation progresses). I think the point is to be very skeptical for any interpretation, even if it comes through the releases by the ministry.

There are several examples on that, e.g. the team has released sketches showing that the caryatids extend their hands to block the entrance to the second chamber behind. One argument is that they did not find traces indicating a connection of hands to the architrave. This sounds reasonable and likely is true, but when we look the image below, we see that while the hand of the left caryatid appears to extend parallel to the architrave, the one of the right caryatid has a slight upward incination. Since I assume I am not misled by the view angle (other photos indicate the same), I find hard to believe that the hands were extended to block the entrance in the way the sketches from the team show (ie. the Caryatid statues are not completely symmetric).



Sketches also show the caryatids reconstructed with the hands, and the sphinxes with wings but no heads, so in the press they assume that the sphinxes were headless originally (a statement that the team never made, however).

[Zebedee]

I can't see your picture sadly gepd. [edit: can see it now, thank you!] But I had an interesting interpretation of how things may have looked shared with me, and it raises the same question you ask.



On the blog, the suggestion is made that the pair are holding something between them, perhaps a wreath, but he also suggests that it's also possible they're holding something fairly light individually too. Lefantzis' drawing does seem to show them empty handed but I agree with you that what are presented are things as they are seen at the moment they are done. New evidence, new ideas. We've seen that already from the shift from 'Roxana's tomb' to 'someone significant', based perhaps on Lefantzis' work on the lion monuments and the probability (but not certainty) it was made for a man.

[Taphoi]

On 'Olympias' Tomb' the point is that it can be seen from the tomb of Neoptolemos, and this has not been reconstructed, anyone who can see from Pydna to Amphipolis belongs in Baron von Munchausen's train!

That is wrong. As you can see below, the inscription fragment was broken off on either side. This means that the width of the original inscription is unknown. Therefore there is an arbitrarily large number of letters between the "As you pass the memorial of Neoptolemus," line fragment and the "you may see the tomb of famed Olympias" line fragment. This means that there is no need for the two ideas to be closely associated in any way. Just as a random example, there could have been room for "As you pass the memorial of Neoptolemus, recall his beautiful city of Amphipolis, where you may see the tomb of famed Olympias".
Best wishes
Andrew

olympiastombinscription.png (41.65 KiB) Viewed 3489 times

[gepd]

There was a problem with the link, now fixed.

I was also about to post that article with the drawing you are showing, but you were faster

This drawing seems more accurate to me, and it is therefore not unlikely that the caryatids were holding something in the middle.

On a similiar matter, the Lion is always sketched to be at the center of the Kastas hill. However, the excavators mentioned that they have discovered the base of the lion on the hill. Still if you look the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS5Q1cB2J68

the center of the hill does not appear to be excavated. Excavated parts appear to be along the line of the chambers - I assume the lion was there? So that is also confusing and contradictory from what we learned from the team...

Finally, in case you don't know, the greek version of National Geographic had a special edtion about Amphipolis. Part of it is available on line for free. You all are probably aware of many of the things written in there, but at least there are some nice illustrations:

http://nationalgeographic.gr/specialedi ... x.html#p=1