Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T21:17:57.294Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The erection and mutilation of the Hermai

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Robin Osborne
Robin Osborne
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A paper on the herms needs no excuse. There is no proper treatment in English of the origins of the herm or of the erection of herms by Hipparkhos. The Eion herm monument has been well studied by Jacoby and Harrison, but the recent treatment by Clairmont demands their reconsideration. The scholarly literature on the mutilation has been very narrowly focused on the questions of who mutilated the herms and why. These questions are clearly closely inter-related, and yet the attempts to answer the question ‘why?’ have been singularly unsatisfactory. Some have arbitrarily chosen to emphasise a single feature of the herm, and with little evidence have made wild claims: thus Farnell could write that ‘the mutilation of the phallic Hermai of Athens produced… in the Athenians the despondent sense that the luck of the state was gone and the divine power of fertilisation impaired’, Crome that ‘with this mutilation must be connected the religious world of the phallus cult of the old native population which had certainly always been strange to the oligarchs’. Others have ignored the fact that it was specifically herms that were mutilated and have reduced the activity of the hermokopidai to a massive act of general impiety, as Dover does when he argues that the mutilation was politically significant because as an act of impiety it would seem to bring down the wrath of the gods on the whole community, as a conspicuous act of vandalism it would make the number of people involved seem large, and as an offence against nomos it would prompt concern for the fact that a body of men had set themselves beyond the law.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 31 , 1985 , pp. 47 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

The following are cited by author's name only in the notes:

Aurenche, O., Les groupes d'Alcibiade, de Léagros et de Teucros. Remarques sur la vie politique athénienne en 415 avant J.C. (1974)Google Scholar

Beazley, J. D., Attic red-figure vase-painters ed. 2 (1963)Google Scholar

Bryson, N., Tradition and desire. From David to Delacroix (1984)Google Scholar

Clairmont, C. W., Palrios Nomos. Public burial in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (1983)Google Scholar

Crome, J. F., ‘’ AM 60–61 (1935-6) 300-314Google Scholar

Devambez, P., ‘Piliers hermaiques et stèles’, RA (1968) 139-54Google Scholar

Dover, K. J., [A. W. Gomme, and A. Andrewes], A historical commentary on Thucydides. Volume IV, Books V 25 – VII (1970)Google Scholar

Farnell, L. R., Cults of the Greek states V (1909)Google Scholar

Goldman, H., ‘The origin of the Greek herm’, AJA 46 (1942) 58–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Harrison, E., The Athenian Agora XI. Archaic and archaistic sculpture (1965)Google Scholar

Jacoby, F., ‘Some Athenian epigrams from the Persian wars’, Hesperia 14 (1945) 157–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Kahn, L., Hermès passe ou les ambiguités de la communication (1978)Google Scholar

Lacan, J., Écrits, a selection (translated by Sheridan, A.) (1977)Google Scholar

Loraux, N., L'invention d'Athènes. Histoire de l'oraison funèbre dans la cité classique (1981)Google Scholar

Richter, G. M. A., Kouroi. Archaic Greek youths 3rd ed. (1970)Google Scholar

Triande, I., ‘’, Arch Delt. 32A (1977) 116–22Google Scholar

Zanker, P., Wandel der Hermesgestalt in der attischen Vasenmalerei (1965)Google Scholar

1. Jacoby 185-211, Harrison 108-20, Clairmont 149-54.

2. Farnell 25, Crome 305.

3. Dover 284-5.

4. Thucydides 6.60.2, cf.6.60.4, 61.1. This paper is a less verbally extravagant version of that delivered to the Society on January 17, 1985. I am grateful to Mary Beard, Paul Cartledge, Pat Easterling, Peter Garnsey, Catherine Osborne, and Ruth Padel for comments on the earlier version. Without the encouragement of Simon Goldhill I would not have got halfway, so this is for him.

5. Thucydides 6.27.1: .

6. Pausanias 1.24.3 (where the herm and the cult title Ergane for Athena are cited as evidence for the devotion of Athenians), and 4.33.3 (on the herm at the Arkadian gate of Messene). Herodotos 2.51.1 says that the Athenians learnt the practice of making the statues of Hermes have erect genitalia from the Pelasgians, and the other Greeks borrowed from the Athenians. Since it is ithyphallism and not the herm as such that Herodotos is interested in here this is evidence for rather than against the Athenian origin. Treating the herm as simply an ithyphallic statue leads Goldman to overstate the case for Dionysiac origins for the herm. It is true that it is not always easy to distinguish herms from other ithyphallic statues, especially on vase paintings.

7. Odyssey 16.471 for Ithaka; Pausanias 3.10.6, 8.34.6, 8.35.2-3, Polyaenus 6.24, and PAAH(1950) 234Google Scholar, ABSA 65 (1970) 87Google Scholar for border monuments. See also RE s.v. Hermai col.697.

8. For the vases see Metzger, H., Recherches sur l'imagerie athénienne (1965) 77–91Google Scholar no.s 1-6 (but the ithyphallic figure might not be a herm in all these cases). Babrius 48 has a dog offering unwelcome attention to a stone pile. For the etymological point see Devambez.

9. Cicero, , De Leg. 2.26, 64–5Google Scholar: sed post aliquanto propter has amplitudines sepulcrorum, quas in Ceramico vidimus, lege sanctum est ne quis sepulcrum faceret operosius quam quod decent homines effecerint triduo; neque id opere tectorio exornari nec hermas quos vocant licebat inponi…, Eitrem RE s.v. Hermai col.702.

10. The basic discussion is Lullies, R., Die typen der griechischen Herme (1931) 59Google Scholar. Hermoglyphs certainly made things other than herms: thus Euphron of Paros who was responsible for a herm found in the Peiraieus (IG i 2826Google Scholar with BCH 70 (1946) 263–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar) was also responsible for the sculptures which stood on two bases erected on the Akropolis in the quarter century after the Persian wars (IG i 2524–5Google Scholar, Raubitschek, A., Dedications from the Athenian acropolis (1949) no.s 298, 304Google Scholar). It is possible that Cicero got confused between the distinct semantic fields of ‘Ερμαῖ and ἕρμα.

11. For the vases see Zanker 91-103; for the earliest sculpture see Harrison 129-34 and Triande.

12. On the authorship of the Hipparkhos see Guthrie, W. K. C., A history of Greek philosophy V (1978) 383, 389Google Scholar.

13. Harpokration s.v. . The other relevant lexical entries are Souda s. v. ‘Ερμαῖ (a condensed version of Harpokration's entry), and Hesykhios s.v. .

14. Beazley 75.79 and 1623 (Copenhagen NM119). The vase was first associated with the invention of the herm by Crome, but Boardman, J., Athenian red figure vases: the archaic period (1975) 213Google Scholar thinks that the ‘Hiparkhos’ referred to is not the tyrant.

15. 228bl – 229e2.

16. Thuc. 6.54.2, 6.55; Athenaion Politeia 18.1. Herodotos does not state a position on this, but he clearly conceives of Hippias as the man with political power: 1.61, 5.55, but contrast 7.9.

17. Dover 321-22

18. Athenaion Politeia 16.7, 18.1-3.

19. 225d5 - 226a2. For cf. Plato, Gorgias 487e.

20. For the Sokratic behaviour of Hermes see Homeric Hymn to Hermes, especially 368-386.

21. SEG X 345Google Scholar revising IG i 2837Google Scholar. For the script see Jeffery, L. H., Local scripts of archaic Greece (1961) 78 no.35Google Scholar.

22. Cf. the kouros identified by its base with one Kroisos who died in war: Richter no. 136, Athens NM 3851.

23. Richter no. 159 bis. Athens NM.

24. Kritios boy: Richter no. 190; Athens, Akropolis Museum 698. Myron's Diskobolos: Lucian, , Philopseudes 18Google Scholar. For the terms of this analysis see Bryson ch.l.

25. Fourmont's herm is inscribed . Note also Aristotle's use of the phrase in the Metaphysics 1002a22,1017b 17. Note how the body that declares itself to be ‘just’ a block of stone is in fact entirely the product of the sculptor's artifice, reduced from a larger natural block so as to display the erect phallus. I owe this point to John Henderson.

26. Cf. Harrison 129: ‘The smile seems to have disappeared from sculpture in general at the time when free movement of figures made it no longer needed for giving the impression of life’.

27. For links between Dionysos and herms see Goldman. For masks on vases see Beazley 1249.13, Berlin Staatl. Mus. 1930, New York Met. Mus. 75.2.21.

28. For absorption see the Delphic Charioteer, for theatricality the statues of the Tyrannicides by Kritios and Nesiotes. For the terms absorption and theatricality in this context see Fried, M., Absorption and theatricality: painting and the beholder in the age of Diderot (1980)Google Scholar. On the gaze see Bryson 107-109 with Lacan 1-7 and Bryson, N., Vision and painting: the logic of the gaze (1983)Google Scholar.

29. See Frontisi-Ducroux, ‘Au miroir du masque’, in La cité des images: religion el société en Grèce ancienne’ (1984) 146–61Google Scholar, and Frontisi-Ducroux, F. and Vernant, J. P., ‘Figures du masque in Grèce ancienne’, Journal de Psychologie (1983) 53–69.Google Scholar

30. On frontal and profile in medieval art see Schapiro, M., Words and pictures. On the literal and the symbolic in the illustration of a text (1973) 37–49Google Scholar. But his remarks (44) on frontality in Greek art are at best unhelpful.

31. Herms are not, of course, identical to figures of Hermes, but they cannot escape Hermes' associations even though they have some peculiar qualities of their own.

32. Kahn 9-19, Vernant, J. P., ‘Hestia-Hermès: sur l'expression religieuse de l'espace et du mouvement chez les Grecs‘, My the et pensée chez les Grecs 124–170Google Scholar. The following paragraph is much indebted to Kahn 178.

33. Hermes Propylaios: Pausanias 1.22.8, 4.33.4, Schol. Aristophanes, Peace 922Google Scholar, Harpokration s.v. , Diogenes Laertios 8.1.31.

34. Hermes Strophaios: Souda s.v. , Photios s.v. , Aristophanes, Wealth 1153.

35. Hermes Enodios: Arrian, Kyn. 35, Theokritos 25.4, Schol. Plato Phaedo 107c. Hermes Hegemonios: Aristophanes, , Wealth 1159Google Scholar, IG ii 2 1496.115, 2873Google Scholar. Hermes Pompaios: Aiskhylos, , Eumenides 91Google Scholar, Sophokles, , Aias 832Google ScholarEuripides, , Medea 759Google Scholar, Diogenes Laertios 8.1.31.

36. Hermes Trikephalos: Hesykhios s.v. , Et. Magn., Harpokration and Souda s.v. . Hermes Tetrakephalos: Eustath. on Iliad 24.334, Hesykhios s.v. , Photios s.v. . Hermes Epitermios: Hesykhios s.v. .

37. Hermes Agonios: Aristophanes, , Wealth 1161Google Scholar, Pausanias 5.14.9, IG ii 23023Google Scholar, IG V. 1. 658Google Scholar. Hermes Euangelos: Hesykhios s.v. Hermes Agoraios: Pollux 7.15, Pausanias 1.15.1, 7.22.2, Lucian, Jupiter Trag. 33Google Scholar, Aristophanes, Knights 297Google Scholar and schol., [Plutarch, ] Moralia 844bGoogle Scholar, Hesykhios s.v. . See also Martin, R., Recherches sur l'agora grecque (1951) 191–194Google Scholar. Hermes Promakhos: Pausanias 9.22.2.

38. Hermes Spelaites: Pausanias 10.32.3. Hermes Epimelios: Pausanias 10.32.3. Hermes Nomios: Aristophanes, , Thesmophoriazousai 977Google Scholar, Cornutus ND 16. Hermes Kriophoros: Pausanias 2.22.2, 5.27.8, cf. 2.3.4.

39. Hermes Psukhopompos: Diodoros Sikelos 1.96, Diogenes Laertios 8.1.31, Beazley 1022.138. Hermes Khthonios: Aiskhylos, , Persai 628Google Scholar, Khoephoroi 1, Plutarch, , Aristeides 21Google Scholar.

40. Homeric Hymn to Hermes 68-141, on which see Kahn.

41. Hermes and the Graces: IG i 2 821, 834Google Scholar, cf. Pausanias 1.22.8, 9.35.3. Hermes and Eros: below n.86. Hermes and Aphrodite: Odyssey 14.435. Hermes the adulterer: Lucian, Philopatr. 7.

42. Hermes Psithuristes: Aristophanes, Peace 693ff., 706ff., Harpokration s.v. .

43. IG ii 22640Google Scholar is an example of a non-Hipparkhan herm publicly set up at a halfway point.

44. That the herm shoud I bear a stikhos enjoining is an indication of how integrated a monument the Hipparkhan herms were.

45. Devambez 148 claims that the phallus was just a lucky charm (cf. Aurenche 172, 174), while Farnell 7, 11,32, sees it as a relic. Dover, K. J., Greek homosexuality (1978) 105Google Scholar refers to his first-hand experience of apprehensive captive apes.

46. Artemidoros 1.45. Cf. the fact that the statue of Hermes at Kyllene was simply an erect phallus: Pausanias 6.26.5. It is in the context of trickery that Hermes is called Kyllenios in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes lines 304, 318, 387, 408.

47. See Lacan 281-291.

48. Portrait herms: Harrison 124-129, and Marcade, J., ‘Hermes doubles’, BCH 76 (1952) 596–624CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. Beazley 537.12, on which see Zanker 95.

50. For another discussion of what it is to pray to a herm see the pelike by the Perseus painter, Beazley 581.4. Here the herm's beard is not being grasped by some human suppliant but pecked by an outsize bird perched on the herm's equally outsize phallus. The altar on the right of the scene ensures the religious context. This is praying as preying! The scene is reproduced in Boardman, J., Athenian red figure vases. The archaic period (1975) Fig. 330Google Scholar.

51. The Pergamon herm was first published in AM 29 (1904) 179–186Google Scholar. Failure to consider the effect of medium on message is just one reason why the ingenious attempt by Bousquet, J., ‘Inscriptions de Delphes. 6. Connais-toi toi-même’, BCH 80 (1956) 565–579Google Scholar to show that the Delphic maxims were inscribed on herms displayed in the pronaos of the temple fails to convince.

52. We cannot be certain which side of the herm faced which way, but this seems the most sensible arrangement.

53. Hermes dolophrades: Homeric hymn to Hermes 282. See Kahn, passim, and Detienne, M. and Vernant, J. P., Les ruses de l'intelligence, la mètis des Grecs (1974) 263-8, 285–88Google Scholar.

54. Homeric hymn to Hermes 62-7: .

55. Athenaion Politeia 16.2-6.

56. Relevant here is Siewert, P., Die Triltyen Attikas unddie Heeresreform des Kleisthenes (1982) 37-86, 139–53Google Scholar. On the pattern of settlement in Attika see Osborne, R. G., Demos: the discovery of classical Attika (1985) 15–46Google Scholar.

57. In the light of the ideological work that these herms set out to do, the radical redirection of the polis by Kleisthenes in reducing the town of Athens itself to a collection of demes of no special status becomes very clear.

58. For early herms as dedications see Triande; for the vases see Zanker 91-5.

59. Beazley 555.88.

60. Beazley 563.12.

61. Beazley 292.32.

62. Beazley 551.10.

63. Thucydides 1.98.1. The conventional date for the capture of Eion is 475 (Meiggs, R., The Athenian Empire (1972) 68Google Scholar). Smart, J. D., ‘Kimon's capture of Eion’, JHS 87 (1967) 136–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues for 469.

64. Aiskhines 3.183-5.

65. Demosthenes 20.112.

66. Jacoby 185-211. Harrison follows Wycherley, R. E., The Athenian Agora 3. The teslimonia (1957) 104Google Scholar in thinking Jacoby too sceptical, but the proposal that the rearrangement of the herms had occurred on the monument is gratuitous and will not explain the additional distich. Plutarch quotes the epigrams in the same order as Aiskhines and with the additional distich, and his account thus presumably derives directly or indirectly from the same rhetorical context: Kimon 7.3-5.

67. Thucydides 1.98.1, Ephoros frg. 191 37-45.

68. Plutarch, , KimonGoogle Scholar 7.4, 8.1.

69. See Harrison 116. Clairmont 109 has now argued against this again.

70. Harpokration s.v.‘ Ερμαῖ, quoted above at n. 10.

71. Harpokration s.v.

This is Jacoby, FGH 328Google Scholar F 40. The date is guaranteed by the reference to the fifth book of the Atthis, cf. Jacoby's commentary (IIIb I p. 325): ‘A building of walls mentioned in the fifth book can only refer to the activity of Konon... It is inexplicable that modern writers again and again connect this fragment with the building of the wall by Themistokles’.

72. Compare the mention of euergesia in Anth. Pal. 6.144 (an expanded version of IG i 2821Google Scholar). For the use of the Trojan war cf. Loraux 53-4, 69-72.

73. For private herm dedications cf. IG i 2 820, 821, 826, 834Google Scholar, IG vii 3500.Google Scholar

74. The Greek is nicely ambiguous – ‘instead of doing him good’? ‘in return for the good he had done them’?

75. See above n.35, and Powell, C. A., ‘Religion and the Sicilian expedition’, Historia 28 (1979) 22Google Scholar.

76. Beazley 654.9, 553.33.

77. de la Genière, J., ‘Une pélikè inédite du peintre de Pan au musée du Louvre’, REA 62 (1960) 249–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78. Loraux 52-55 and index s.v. anonymat.

79. Xenophon, Hipparkhikos 3.2 for the hipparkhs, Athenaios 402f. for the phylarkhs, reinforced by AM 76(1961)Google Scholar 128.12, Arch. Dell. 18A (1963) 99–114Google Scholar.

80. Cf. Athenaios 167f.

81. Clairmont 151-153.

82. Clairmont 150-151. Note that Clairmont misstates the evidence provided by IG i 2821Google Scholar.

83. Iliad 1.501 for this gesture used to a god, Iliad 10.454 for this gesture used to a man. See generally Gould, J., ‘Hiketeia’, JHS 93 (1973) 74–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84. Andokides 1.62 and Harrison 117-120.

85. The account which follows relies heavily on Zanker 98-103.

86. Würzburg 524, Vienna KM 727, Brussels Mus. Cinqu. IVc Plate 2.1.

87. Compare the generally greater prominence of Eros in the late fifth century: Eros appears on 82 vases in the first volume of Beazley, on 573 in the second volume.

88. Plutarch, , Alkibiades 18.8.Google Scholar

89. See Aristophanes, Wasps 804 for Hekataia and 875 for altars of Apollo Agyieus (with MacDowell's notes ad locc. [D. M. MacDowell, Aristophanes Wasps (1971)]). Herms are not mentioned in the Aristophanes passage, but seem to be implicit in the joke in 808.

90. cf. Aristophanes, , Lysistrata 1094Google Scholar (not quite conclusive – the joke might be that they so look like herms that they are in danger of having their faces smashed up).

91. Dover 289.

92. The relevance of the Eion herms to 415 is seen but not explored by Aurenche 173. For the association of Eion with subsequent disasters see Schol. Aiskhines 2.31. That the Athenians were particularly sensitive to successes and failures in this area is further indicated by the fact that it seems to have been those who fell at Drabeskos who were the first to have enjoyed the pathos nomos of public burial: see Jacoby, F., ‘Patrios nomos. State burial in Athens and the public cemetery in the Kerameikos’, JHS 64 (1944) 37–66 at 50-54. Note that Pausanias discusses the Drabeskos campaign in a Trojan war context when he notes the Kerameikos monument (1.29.4).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

93. Plato, Kratylos 407e1 – 408d5.

94. Artemidoros 2.37: seem to be first used in extant texts with reference to the mutilation of the hermai. But the figurative use of at Aristophanes, Knights 372 suggests that the words were originally used of trimming the edges or surplus off an object. In some late papyri the words are specifically used of the trimming done by a mason/sculptor.

95. RE s.v. Hermes col.783.

96. Dover 285-6.

97. It is worth noting how limited is the overlap between those named in connection with the mutilation and those named in connection with the profanation. We cannot, of course, as e.g. Dover 284 does, assume that those who were condemned were those who were actually guilty.