T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W 1

TEXTS ON THE MEMNON COLOSSUS

R O S E N M E Y E R ( P . A . ) The Language of Ruins. Greek and Latin
Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus. Pp. xx + 265, maps, pls.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Cased, £55, US$85. ISBN:
978-0-19-062631-0.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X19001094

Sometime between AD 89 and 91 Mettius Rufus, Prefect of Egypt, had a Greek elegiac
couplet-and-a-half chiselled on the left foot of the seated Memnon colossus at Thebes
(no. 11):

Even if vandals damaged your body,

you still speak out, as I myself, Mettius, witnessed by hearing
(you) Memnon. Paion of Side wrote these words.

With these verses Mettius broke with a half-century tradition of inscribing bland testi-
monies, in prose, that commemorated personal encounters with the colossus. He introduced
poetry into the graffiti rash that continued to grow for another 100+ years over the feet and
legs of the massive statue (nearly 60 feet high), which guarded, together with its twin to the
south, the entrance to the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III. The two colossi were erected
around 1400 BC during the pharaoh’s own lifetime, but only the northern one drew any
documented attention. The reason for its fame was the fact that it emitted a sound at
dawn when the sun warmed its base. This ‘ability’, if we can call it that, resulted from dam-
age the statue endured in an earthquake in c. 27 BC, and the matutinal sound was said to be
the voice of the Ethiopian hero Memnon, who was thought to greet his mother Eos at dawn
each day. In order to experience the phenomenon first-hand, politicians and soldiers, men and
women, believers and sceptics (Strabo being a prominent example of the latter, pp. 10–11)
travelled to Thebes. Some of them even documented the encounter with an inscription,
a practice that peaked under Hadrian (AD 117–138), the emperor himself visiting with
his wife Sabina in 130; the last text was likely carved in the early third century.
R.’s book is a well-executed and engaging treatment of the monument’s 107 inscrip-
tions (61 Greek, 45 Latin and 1 bilingual; 39 are in verse). For many who visited the
site, the colossus served as a direct line to an idealised Hellenic past, and the monument’s
surface became a display piece of the personalities who chose to memorialise both the
statue and themselves. The inscribed texts, which range from laconic expressions of adoration
to a nine-couplet elegy in the Aeolic dialect (no. 29), tell an intriguing story of educated
Romans appropriating an Egyptian monument and making it speak to their Hellenic
cultural tastes.
Over six chapters R. deftly explicates the multi-layered story the monument embodies.
In Chapter 1, ‘Reading the Colossus’, she describes the European rediscovery of it in the
first half of the eighteenth century by Richard Pococke, who risked the hostility of local
Arabs to record details of the monument (pp. 1ff.). From discussion of European explorers,
R. turns to a general description of the colossus and the ancient authors who mention it,
including Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus, Pausanias etc. (pp. 9ff.). When it became associated
with the Homeric hero, no one actually knows. Pliny is the first author to identify it as
Memnon, but already in AD 20, when the first inscription was incised (no. 1), Memnon
was named. R. thus rightly supposes that Germanicus could have known of this association
when he visited Thebes a year earlier, in AD 19 (p. 16).

The Classical Review 1–3 © The Classical Association (2019)

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 2 T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W

Chapter 2, ‘Worshipping the Colossus’, takes up the topic of tourism. The first two cen-
turies of Roman rule in Egypt witnessed increased ‘sacred tourism’. Motivated by both
intellectual curiosity and religion, pilgrims sought to experience the monuments of a
land that had appealed to the Greek imagination since the time of Herodotus. In the
case of the Memnon colossus, they wanted to connect with the uniquely Hellenic past
they believed it embodied. In other words, they went to Thebes seeking an ideal that
was of their own making. Drawing on J. Elsner, R. sums this up nicely when she states
that ‘the autoptic experience [was] not primarily to discover or explore the unfamiliar,
but rather to see for oneself what one already knows’ (p. 75).
With Chapter 3, ‘Talking with the Colossus’, R. turns from sightseeing to sight-
conversing, that is, to ways in which visitors conversed with the Memnon statue. Here
she investigates the two principal rhetorical devices, apostrophe and prosopopoeia, that
permitted conversation between the living listeners and the inanimate object. Through
apostrophe people engaged Memnon directly in much the same way in which a passer-by
animated a deceased relative in a grave inscription. Prosopopoeia, in turn, served as the
statue’s means of responding to the human visitor. This speech act comprised not only
the mysterious sound Memnon emitted at dawn, but also his highly personalised messages
to his visitors. R. unpacks this theme through a masterful reading of the verse inscriptions
(nos 92–4) commissioned by a woman named Caecilia Trebulla, who visited in the time of
Hadrian (pp. 97–100). Over the course of three inscriptions Trebulla goes from generic
passer-by to close acquaintance of Memnon, to trusted confidant and Sibyl-like character
through whom the colossus reveals past violence that had been done to it.
In Chapter 4, ‘Homeric Memnon’, R. teases out the different strains of Homeric influ-
ence in the inscriptions. Memnon was a Homeric hero, and, not surprisingly, many texts
draw on epic language. Members of the educated class who visited Thebes engaged
with the Homeric tradition in different ways. Some sprinkled their inscriptions with
Homeric allusions (pp. 119ff.). Others not only alluded to Homer but also sustained
‘the fiction of the larger epic context’ (p. 124). One poet, the self-styled Ὁμηρικὸς
ποιητής Arius, went so far as to create a four-line cento (no. 37) out of different lines
from Homer (pp. 134ff.). Through his poetic arrangement, Arius resurrected Homer and
let him acknowledge in his own words one of his now colossally-shaped heroes (p. 140).
From Homer R. moves in Chapter 5 to Sappho or, more precisely, to the poet Julia
Balbilla, who accompanied Emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina on their tour of Egypt
in the year AD 130. Balbilla, a member of an established family from Syrian
Commagene who was possibly raised in Athens (pp. 142–3), left over 50 lines of lyric
poetry on the colossus in an archaising Aeolic dialect. R.’s sympathetic handling of this
poetry reveals a clever and playful poet who, for example, flirtatiously suggests that
Memnon withheld his voice the first time Sabina visited him in order to ensure that she
come back (no. 30). Playful lyric of this sort stands in contrast to the loftier tones that
the Homeric language conveys. In the end, R. sees Balbilla appropriating Sappho as a
claim to her own personal fame and to the glory of the imperial household, rather than
out of any erotic feelings for Sabina (p. 164).
The final chapter, ‘Modern Memnon’, returns to the topic of the modern reception of
the colossus. From William Wordsworth to Lord Byron, to John Keates and many others,
R. charts Memnon’s Nachleben in the works of western writers. What she reveals are con-
tinued acts of cultural appropriation not much different from those observed in the Roman
period. While the Memnon colossus might have lost its voice already in the third century, it
continued to serve as a mirror to those who paid it homage well into the nineteenth century.
The book is well written and produced; there is little to fault in it. Nevertheless, and this
is less a complaint than a reflection of this reader’s laziness, it would have been nice to

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 T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W 3
have the date of each inscription (however uncertain it is in many cases) next to the respect-
ive text and translation in Appendix 2 (perhaps this could be added in a future paperback
edition). Otherwise, a few typos were noticed. In Chapter 1, fn. 26, read ἄξια, not ἄζια.
Chapter 2, fn. 34, the reference to Wilcken should be to no. 413, not no. 412. Chapter
2, last line of p. 67, gives the wrong era: read 5 September 122 CE. Appendix 2, no. 30,
line 8, change κατἐχες to κατέχες.

Universität Heidelberg RODNEY AST

ast@uni-heidelberg.de

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