Pausanias, Phocis

CHAPTER XXXI.

If you look again at the upper part of the painting, you will see next Actaeon Salaminian Ajax Palamedes and Thersites playing with dice, which were the invention of Palamedes. And the other Ajax is looking at them, playing : he looks like a shipwrecked man, and his body is wet with the foam of the sea. Polygnotus seems to have purposely collected together the enemies of Odysseus. And Ajax the son of Oileus hated Odysseus, because he urged the Greeks to stone him for his rape of Cassandra. And I have read in the Cyprian Poems that Palamedes going a fishing was drowned by Diomede and Odysseus. And a little above Ajax the son of Oileus is Meleager painted, looking at Ajax. All these except Palamedes have beards. As to the death of Meleager, Homer informs us that a Fury heard Althaea cursing him, and that this was the cause of his death. But the poems called the Great Eoeae and the Minyad agree in stating that Apollo assisted the Curetes against the Aetolians, and killed Meleager. As to the famous tradition about the firebrand; how it was given to Althaea by the Fates, and how Meleager was fated not to die till it was consumed by fire, and how Althaea set it on fire in a rage, all this was first described by Phrynichus, the son of Polyphradmon, in his play called Pleuronise :

"He escaped not dread fate, but was consumed by the swift flame, as soon as the ill-contrived firebrand was set on fire by his stem mother."

Phrynichus does not however seem to introduce the legend as his own invention, but only to allude to it as one well-known throughout Greece.

In the lower part of the painting next Thracian Thamyris sits Hector, like a man oppressed with sorrow, with both his hands on his left knee. And next him is Memnon seated on a stone, and close to Memnon Sarpedon, who is leaning his head on both his hands, and one of Memnon's hands is on Sarpedon's shoulder. All of these have beards, and some birds are painted on Memnon's cloak. These birds are called Memnonides, and every year the people near the Hellespont say they come on certain days to Memnon's tomb, and sweep all the parts round the tomb that are bare of trees or grass, and sprinkle them with their wings which they wet in the river Aesepus, And near Memnon is a naked Ethiopian boy, for Memnon was king of the Ethiopians. However he did not come to Ilium from Ethiopia, but from Susa in Persia and the river Choaspes, after vanquishing all the tribes in that neighbour hood. The Phrygians still shew the road by which he marched his army, the shortest route over the mountains. 1

Above Sarpedon and Memnon is Paris, as yet a beardless youth. He is clapping his hands like a rustic, apparently to attract the notice of Penthesilea, who looks at him, but by the toss of her head seems to despise him, and jeer at him as a boy. She is represented as a maiden with a Scythian bow, and a leopard's skin round her shoulders. Above her are two women carrying water in broken pitchers, one still in her prime, the other rather advanced in life. There is no inscription on either of them, except a notification that they are both among the uninitiated. Above this pair are Callisto the daughter of Lycaon, and Nomia, and Pero the daughter of Neleus, from every suitor of whom her father asked the kine of Iphiclus. 2 Callisto has a bear-skin for her coverlet, and her feet are on the knees of Nomia. I have before stated that the Arcadians consider Nomia one of their local Nymphs. The poets say the Nymphs are long-lived but not immortal. Next to Callisto and the other women with her is a hill, up which Sisyphus the son of Aeolus is laboriously rolling a stone. There is also a winejar in the painting, and an old man, and a boy, and two women, a young woman under a rock, and an old woman near the old man. Some men are bringing water, and the old woman's waterpot appears to be broken, and she is pouring all the water in the pitcher into the winejar. One is inclined to conjecture that they are people making a mock of the Eleusinian mysteries. But the older Greeks considered the Eleusinian mysteries as much above all other religious services, as the gods are superior to heroes. And under the winejar is Tantalus, undergoing all those punishments mentioned by Homer, 3 and also terrified lest a stone overhanging his head should fall on him. It is plain that Polygnotus followed the account of Archilochus : but I do not know whether Archilochus invented the addition to the legend about the stone, or merely related what he had heard from others.

Such is a full account of the various details in this fine painting of the Thasian painter.

1 So Carayus. The meaning and reading is very obscure.
2 See Homer's Odyssey, xi. 287 sq. ^Neleus refused the matchless Pero's hand to any suitor who would not bring as a wedding-present these kine of Iphiclus

3 Odyssey, xi 582-592.