The monumental weathervanes of classical antiquity, though few in number, were luxury items shared by antiquity's major cities: Athens, Rome, Constantinople (and, I shall argue, Alexandria). What follows is the first collective study of the three weathervanes known to exist,Footnote 1 together with cautious suggestions that other lost Hellenistic artworks (two of them known only through Pliny the Elder) belonged in the same class of monument.Footnote 2 The task is difficult, since all of the objects concerned were made of valuable – and meltable – bronze, and no physical trace of any survives. But I propose to show that the weathervanes of the medieval period – which spanned Europe in the form of weathercocks on church spires, while also adorning Arabian palace domes – had classical forerunners.Footnote 3
As we shall see, monumental weathervanes were never merely functional, and are best seen as a mechanised sub-genre of bronze statuary: neither the Greeks nor the Romans had any special terminology to differentiate them from other statues. Although weathervanes had a practical use, since the direction of the wind was believed to foretell the weather, most so-called ‘anemoscopes’ were much humbler, windsock-like devices that used dangling cloth or ribbon.Footnote 4 The larger instruments (or, rather, sculptures) are known to us only through a smattering of images and texts, none of which was intended as a thorough study. In fact, the written evidence is so scant and brief that most of it will be reproduced below.Footnote 5 We cannot tell how long each vane functioned properly, or whether it was repaired.Footnote 6 But at least one of them adorned a major urban landmark for hundreds of years, to be admired by many thousands of citizens and visitors. Furthermore, as anthropomorphic figures moved by windpower (like many of Hero of Alexandria's working-fluid toys), monumental weathervanes should be classed as a form of automaton.Footnote 7 They arguably represent a ‘missing link’ between mechanisms and sculptural monuments.
For the three monumental weathervanes that our sources explicitly identify, the dates of manufacture are uncertain. The first vane was a ‘triton’ adorning the Tower of the Winds in Athens; the second was an imitation of this, at an unknown location in Rome; and the third was the Anemodoulion, a winged female figure atop a pyramid, which in turn crowned a tetrapylon spanning a major intersection in central Constantinople until the sack of 1204.Footnote 8 The Athenian example was made in the second or first century BC;Footnote 9 Rome's within the following three centuries; and Constantinople's at an unknown date before its alleged importation from Dyrrachium between the fourth and eighth centuries AD. I shall discuss them in chronological order, proposing connections with earlier monuments where relevant, in order to sketch a historical narrative from which general conclusions may be drawn.
The Tower(s) of the Winds
Our earliest reference to a monumental weathervane is in Varro, who mentions the Tower of the Winds when describing his elaborate aviary near Casinum. This had an astronomical clock inside its rotunda, combined with a weathervane of unknown exterior form (which cannot therefore be confirmed as a figural vane), whose display was internal (Res rusticae 3.5.17):
In eodem hemisphaerio medio circum cardinem est orbis ventorum octo, ut Athenis in horologio, quod fecit Cyrrestes; ibique eminens radius a cardine ad orbem ita movetur, ut eum tangat ventum, qui flet, ut intus scire possis.
In the middle of the same hemisphere, around the axis, is a ring of the eight winds, as in the horologium at Athens, which the Kyrrhian built. There, a spoke projecting from the axis moves around the compass, so that it touches the wind which is blowing, so that you can tell from indoors which one it is.Footnote 10
Vitruvius, writing two decades or so later, refers not only to the Athenian compass of winds but the entire monument, including the vane (1.6.4):
Nonnullis placuit esse ventos quattuor, ab oriente aequinoctiali solanum, a meridie austrum, ab occidente aequinoctiali favonium, ab septentrionibus septentrionem. sed qui diligentius perquisierunt tradiderunt eos esse octo, maxime quidem Andronicus Cyrrestes, qui etiam exemplum conlocavit Athenis turrim marmoream octagonon et in singulis lateribus octagoni singulorum ventorum imagines excalptas contra suos quosque flatus designavit, supraque eam turrim metam marmoream perfecit et insuper Tritonem aereum conlocavit dextra manu virgam porrigentem, et ita est machinatus uti vento circumageretur et semper contra flatum consisteret supraque imaginem flantis venti indicem virgam teneret.
Some have reckoned that there are four winds: Solanus from the eastern sky, Auster from the south, Favonius from the west and Septentrio from the north. But those who have explored this more thoroughly have taught that there are eight winds, especially Andronikos of Kyrrhos, who even built an octagonal marble tower at Athens as a model. On each side of the octagon he arranged sculpted images of the winds, each one facing its own breeze. Above the tower he constructed a marble cone and upon it he put a bronze triton holding out a rod in his right hand. He contrived it so that it revolved in the wind and always faced opposite the breeze, and held its rod as a pointer over the image of the wind that was blowing.
Athens' Tower of the Winds is an octagonal Pentelic marble tower standing about 12 m tall and 8 m wide, overlooking the Roman Agora from its east end, about 250 m north of the Acropolis. There is a sundial on each side; above is a relief carving of a personified wind, forming a frieze around the top. The shallow conical roof is crowned with a weathered Corinthian finial. Although all metalwork is lost and the size of the ‘triton’ can only vaguely be reconstructed, this stone base seems to have been capable of supporting a nearly or fully man-sized bronze sculpture as illustrated in Fig. 1, comparable in scale to the extant relief carvings. Marcus Cetius Faventinus is our only witness to a Roman copy of the Athenian vane. His epitome of Vitruvius, probably written in the early third century,Footnote 11 features a few insertions, one of which appears to describe an otherwise unknown copy of the Tower of the Winds in Rome. The original passage in Plommer's edition runs as follows (Liber artis architectonicae 2):
sed plerique duodecim ventos esse adseverant, ut est in urbe Roma Triton aeneus cum totidem thoracibus ventorum factus ad exemplum Andronici Cyrrestae similitudinem. supra caput venti virgam tenens eundem esse flantem ostendit.
Reconstruction of the Tower of the Winds (reproduced from Stuart and Revett (Reference Stuart and Revett1762): chapter 3 Plate 3).
But most people assert that there are twelve winds, just as in the city of Rome there is a bronze triton with twelve busts of the winds, created in imitation of Andronikos of Kyrrhos' model. Holding his rod above the head of a wind, he shows that same wind to be blowing.
Although we have no other evidence for what Faventinus is describing, he evidently means something different from the Tower of the Winds. Our closest Roman relics are the Pesaro Anemoscope and the so-called ‘Vatican Table’, two marble wind roses of the second or third century AD, whose twelve sides are labelled with the names of winds in transliterated Greek (the Vatican Table adds the Latin names).Footnote 12
Plommer's translation shows a determination to assimilate the Roman monument to these objects: cum totidem thoracibus ventorum becomes ‘above a pedestal of twelve faces, each showing a wind’, and supra caput venti becomes ‘above the head of the wind on the pedestal’. Yet the anemoscopes are nothing like monumental architecture, serving as stands into which a flag-like indicator was inserted, most likely set near ground level; figural decorations are absent, names are misspelled, and the Vatican Table has a more than passing resemblance to a repurposed column drum. Whether Faventinus' thoraces were sculptures or reliefs, they were nonetheless heads-and-chests,Footnote 13 and the central sculpture was a bronze vane that would require an elevated position in order to function reliably. It may have been a very close imitation of its model, albeit dodecagonal instead of octagonal, and apparently (unlike Varro's aviary at Casinum) shared both an urban setting and a public function.
The Pharos of Alexandria
Monumental weathervanes were probably invented earlier than the first century BC, when Varro and Vitruvius first mention them. Movable bronze statues already existed in the Archaic period,Footnote 14 and the sculptural weathervane – both a spectacular novelty and a meteorological instrument – recalls the intellectual and artistic experimentation of the Hellenistic era. I suggest that it was invented neither in Athens nor Andronikos' native Macedonia, but in Alexandria, the home of innovators such as Ktesibios and Philo. Our two references to the Tower of the Winds are both Roman, while written descriptions of the Anemodoulion vane postdate its erection by several centuries and even disagree over when it was built. However, our imperial Roman sources are detailed enough to prompt limited speculation on the nature of the earliest examples.
The only known precedent for the octagonal, statue-crowned design of the Tower of the Winds, and probably its direct inspiration, was the world-famous Pharos of Alexandria commissioned by Ptolemy I Soter in the first half of the third century BC.Footnote 15 The tallest tower in the world when built, it is now completely destroyed, but can be reconstructed from later texts and images, especially imperial Roman coins of the second and third centuries AD (Figs. 2–4). Other ancient lighthouses are very little help, since all known examples are later and smaller and the few survivors are heavily damaged.Footnote 16 One type of coin representing the Pharos and its sculptures is exemplified by a hemidrachm of AD 107/8 (Fig. 3), which on the reverse shows two figures facing outward and a statue at the top. On this type the lighthouse bears the proportions given by much later Arab sources, although the sculptures may still be shown larger than life. They are greatly magnified on a drachma of AD 132/3, exemplifying a second type of coin, on which the Pharos is dwarfed by a figure of Isis Pharia holding a billowing sail (Fig. 4). The statue seems to be gripping a long object near its top. The sculptural elements are largest and clearest on another example of the hemidrachm type, from 136/7 (Fig. 5): the two figures on the reverse are fish-tailed and blowing long trumpets, and the central statue now loosely supports a long object in his elbow.
The Vatican Table (reproduced from Woods and Symonds (Reference Woods and Symons1894): 89).
Hemidrachm showing Pharos with figures facing outwards and statue on top.Footnote 17
Drachma showing Isis Pharia beside Pharos.Footnote 18
Hemidrachm showing Pharos with figures trumpeting and statue holding an object.Footnote 19
The Pharos monument is agreed to have stood well over 100 m high in three tiers: a square base, an octagonal middle and a cylindrical top accommodating a watchfire, crowned with a statue. This statue is one of many suggestive foreshadowings of the Athenian monument. The eight-sided middle section – really a smaller tower in its own right, founded upon the massive square base – is the only classical parallel for the eight-sided Tower of the Winds.Footnote 20 Furthermore, the coins all portray fish-tailed figures leaning out from a high ledge who, in the more detailed images, are shown blowing trumpets. Scholars discussing the Pharos, perhaps influenced by Vitruvius' description of the Tower of the Winds, or by the ancient tradition that Pharos was the home of the sea-god Proteus,Footnote 21 have referred to them as ‘tritons’.Footnote 22 I suggest instead that they are trumpet-blowing (or conch-blowing) winds,Footnote 23 numbering either four or eight and occupying the edges of the base around the octagon. It is unlikely that these winds had serpentine tails, as in archaic art;Footnote 24 more likely they were kneeling, as Konstantinos of Rhodes (193–4, quoted below) says those on the Anemodoulion monument were. We can securely identify the lone statue on the top of the monument (Fig. 7) as Zeus Soter (‘the Saviour’), thanks to verses written by two poets resident in Alexandria when the Pharos was built: an epigram of Poseidippos first published in 2001 explicitly refers to the Pharos and Zeus Soter, and Kallimachos asks Zeus Λιμενοσκόπος (‘the Harbour-Watcher’) to protect his beloved's ship.Footnote 25 Zeus Soter was doubly appropriate, being patron of harbours and also the namesake of Ptolemy Soter, who commissioned the tower.Footnote 26 The long, thin object he held instead of a thunderbolt is possibly a royal sceptre, but more likely a sceptre-like rudder symbolising protection of ships,Footnote 27 with which the weather-god rules his subjects.Footnote 28 It has been proposed that the statue and pointer were part of a mechanical clock,Footnote 29 but this seems unlikely on both practical and iconographic grounds.Footnote 30
Mosaic from Qasr el-Lebya representing the Pharos (reproduced from Fragaki (Reference Fragaki, Koetsier and Ceccarelli2012), Fig. 1).
Glass beaker from Begram representing the Pharos (detail from a 1970 photograph, reproduced from The Huntington Archive, scan number 0010399).
I suggest instead that the statue of Zeus Soter holding a royal sceptre was originally a weathervane, indicating which wind was blowing. A much larger bronze Zeus that was movable (though exactly how is unclear) had been built at Tarentum a century earlier.Footnote 31 A sculptural vane would illustrate Aratos' claim that Zeus gives weather-signs to sailors.Footnote 32 This increases the likelihood that the octagonal Tower of the Winds (sheer sides, sundials, clepsydra and marble reliefs notwithstanding) is a miniature adaptation of the Pharos, like the one at Abusir. On the other hand, no surviving text indicates that the statue of Zeus Soter was a weathervane; most images show the ‘pointer’ pointing upwards, not outwards; and the lower statues may conceivably have been a team of watchful tritons. Yet the design of an octagonal tower with a regal deity on its top, and lesser deities arrayed around it, still inspired the shape of the Tower of the Winds – and, as I shall demonstrate, the Anemodoulion monument.
The Anemodoulion of Constantinople
After Faventinus' description of a Roman ‘tower of the winds’ in the third century AD, the next reports of ornamental weathervanes appear in eighth-century Constantinople, to which we now turn. There are no visual images, but several verbal descriptions suggest great renown. The earliest certain references to the Anemodoulion date from the eighth century AD: the Parastaseis locates a bronze statue of Empress Verina near the ‘Anemodourion’ (29).Footnote 33 Over time, the name Anemodoulion came to denote the whole edifice, previously known as the ‘Bronze Tetrapylon’.Footnote 34 In the same way, the tower of Seville Cathedral is now called ‘La Giralda’ after its own bronze weathervane, the 4 m high sculpture of Faith Victorious erected there in 1568.Footnote 35
Our first detailed description of the Anemodoulion comes from the tenth-century poet Konstantinos of Rhodes: it is fifth (lines 178–201) in his ‘seven wonders’ of the city.Footnote 36 The other six wonders seem selected as the loftiest of Constantinople's many monuments.Footnote 37 The lines giving concrete details of the decorations (187–201) describe it as:
It is not clear how many winds the Anemodoulion portrayed, though it was probably more than four; unfortunately the enduring competition between the eight-wind and twelve-wind compasses limits their value in dating.Footnote 38 The ‘kneeling’ winds, whatever their form, apparently resembled the figures surrounding the Pharos. The next account appears in the Patria of the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. The new description in the Patria, although transmitted in the same corpus as the earlier Parastaseis (114), seems entirely independent:
τὸ δὲ Ἀνεμοδοῦριν τὸ χαλκοῦν ἐστηλώθη παρὰ Ἡλιοδώρου τοῦ δυσσεβοῦς ἐν τοῖς χρόνοις Λέοντος τοῦ Συρογενοῦς, καθώς εἰσιν ἐστηλωμένοι οἱ ιβʹ ἄνεμοι. τὰ δὲ τέσσαρα χαλκουργεύματα τὰ μεγάλα ἤχθησαν ἀπὸ τοῦ Δυρραχίου· εἶχεν δὲ αὐτὰ γυνὴ εἰς προῖκα αὐτῆς ἀπὸ ναοῦ τινος· μετὰ πολλῆς δὲ ἐπιστήμης καὶ ἀστρονομίας τοῦτο ἐποίησεν.
The bronze Anemodouris [sic] was set up by the impious Heliodoros in the time of Leo III the Syrian, such that the twelve winds are portrayed on it. The four large works of bronze were brought from Dyrrhachium. The woman herself had them as spoils from some temple. Heliodoros made it with great scientific and astronomical skill.
This passage – which gets the name of the monument wrong – is our sole evidence that its bronze decorations were taken from Dyrrhachium, and that it was created under Leo III (by contrast, the Parastaseis says Constantine I and Konstantinos says Theodosios I). The emphasis on the nefarious skill of the architect should cast both of these claims into doubt, because a wicked sorcerer called Heliodoros is prominent in the hagiography of another eighth-century Leo (AD 709–89), who was bishop of Catania. This Sicilian Heliodoros, in turn, was created by an iconodoule author of the ninth century as a caricature of John VII the Grammarian (patriarch AD 837–43), who postdated Leo III.Footnote 39 The Patria seems (understandably) to confuse Leo III with his Sicilian namesake and near-contemporary whose nemesis was a sorcerer called Heliodoros. It thus names the architect as an impious and learned ‘Heliodoros’ who is almost certainly fictional, while also disagreeing with the more reliable Konstantinos about the date of construction. It is quite plausible that the bronze works came from Dyrrhachium, a major Hellenic port in the third century BC,Footnote 40 but the dating to Leo III in the eighth century is at best uncertain.
Our final notices of the Anemodoulion postdate its destruction in the sack of Constantinople in 1204. Niketas Khoniates names it twice, first only briefly (Annals 333):
ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐπὶ κίονος κατὰ τὸ χαλκοῦν μετέωρον τετράπλευρον, ἐν ᾧ γυμνοὶ περιβλημάτων μηλοβολοῦσιν ἀλλήλους Ἔρωτες, ὃ Ἀνεμοδούλιον κέκληται, ἑαυτὸν ἀναστήσειν ἐμελέτα χαλκοῦν.
And on a column near the lofty four-sided bronze monument on which unclothed Erotes throw apples at one another, which was called the Anemodoulion, he [Andronikos I] intended to set up a bronze of himself.
In the second and more lavish description, Niketas eulogises it among the major bronze sculptures that the invaders tore down, cut up and melted (De signis 648):
τὸ δὲ τετράπλευρον χαλκοῦν μηχάνημα μετέωρον ἀναβαῖνον καὶ μικροῦ τοῖς τῶν κιόνων μείζοσιν ἐς ὕψος ἀνθαμιλλώμενον, ὅσοι πολλαχῇ τῆς πόλεως ἀνεστήκασι, τίς οὐκ ἂν ὀφθαλμὸν ἐκείνῳ ἐπιβαλὼν τῆς ποικιλίας ἐθαύμασεν; ἅπας μουσικὸς ὄρνις τὰ ἐαρινὰ μελῳδῶν ἐκεῖ ἐντετύπωτο· γεηπόνων ἔργα καὶ αὐλοὶ καὶ γαυλοὶ καὶ προβάτων βληχήματα καὶ ἀρνῶν σκιρτήματα ἐξεικόνιστο· ὑφήπλωτο καὶ θαλάττιον πέλαγος καὶ νεπόδων ἀγέλαι καθωρῶντο, οἱ μὲν ζωγρούμενοι, οἱ δὲ τὰ δίκτυα τυραννοῦντες καὶ κατὰ βυθοῦ πάλιν ἀνέτως φερόμενοι· οἱ δ᾿ Ἔρωτες σύνδυο καὶ σύντρεις ἀλλήλοις ἀνθοπλιζόμενοι, γυμνοὶ περιβλημάτων, ἐβάλλοντο μήλοις καὶ ἔβαλλον, γλυκεῖ περιβρασσόμενοι γέλωτι. τοῦ δὲ τοιούτου τετραπλεύρου ἐς ὀξὺ σχῆμα κατὰ πυραμίδα τελευτῶντος ἀπῃώρητο ἄνωθεν γυναικόμορφον εἴκασμα καὶ ταῖς πρώταις τῶν ἀνέμων κινήσεσι περισοβούμενον· ὁπόθεν καὶ Ἀνεμοδούλιον ἐπεκέκλητο.
Now, the four-sided bronze device, mounting up aloft and almost equal in height to the tallest columns which have been set up in many parts of the city: who, laying eyes on this, did not marvel at its ornamentation? Every musical bird, giving its springtime song, was carved there; the works of husbandmen – pipes, pails, sheep bleating, lambs skipping – were fully rendered. The ocean waves were outspread and shoals of fish were on display, some being caught, others mastering the fishing-nets and swimming freely again in the deep. The Erotes in twos and threes, arming themselves against one another but unclothed, threw apples and were hit by them, convulsed with delightful laughter. Suspended above this four-sided monument, which terminated in a point like a pyramid, was a female likeness which revolved around at the first breath of the winds; for this reason it was called the Anemodoulion.
The monument was clearly a surpassing work of craftsmanship, primarily praised for its reliefs with their rich scope for ekphrasis and only incidentally for its vane. Niketas seems to describe four thematically unified scenes on the sides of the pyramid: songbirds, shepherding, fishing and apple-picking. (The amount of detail raises the interesting question of how, and how well, these panels could be seen.)Footnote 41 These probably represent the four seasons with a cardinal wind presiding over each, since wind direction was thought to herald the progress of the weather: as discussed above, the Andronikos who built the Tower of the Winds was an astronomer and probably intended that vane as part of an astrometeorological assembly, together with the armillary sphere and sundials.Footnote 42 Niketas mentions this vane, both to explain the name and because it added to the monument's beauty. His omission of the images of the winds suggests not that they had disappeared, but that they seemed mundane and functional: his concern is the beauty of the monument.
Motifs and symbolism
All of these sources represent the vanes as nameless type-figures, though this is almost certainly not what their sculptors intended. (I have proposed that the sole exception is the Zeus Soter on the Pharos that the sources, conversely, do not identify as a vane.) Seeing figural pointers as generic may seem natural today, when metal weathervanes have been conventionalised as flags, roosters and so on (just as a modern clock's hands are usually non-figural, or at best arrow-shaped). Yet these long-lost bronze weathervanes were landmarks in the history of art, as well as in the history of science. Remembering that each was a highly visible sculpture, crowning a highly ornamented monument, we might well expect them to represent specific individuals. This was customary for the elaborate monumental clocks of late antiquity, which marked time with automata as well as sound-making instruments and whose pointers bore figural designs.Footnote 43 The clock described in sixth-century Gaza by Procopius in his Ekphrasis of the Horologium featured twelve doors, which opened in hourly sequence to reveal Hercules dressed for one of the Labours. But they only did so when a moving statue of Helios pointed at them.Footnote 44 The position of the Sun marked the passage of time, allegorically combining the iconography of myth with observed reality. Figural motifs sharply distinguish monumental clocks and vanes from more commonplace instruments, being rare and inconsistent on sundials, and absent from wind roses.
Given these circumstances, it is worth asking why the rotating statues of Athens and Constantinople took the forms they did. The presence of Zeus on the Pharos is very logical, but why would the winds be accompanied by a triton or a winged woman? In each case, clues exist, but they lay hidden even from our ancient witnesses, who were not concerned with iconographic details. For example, Varro and Vitruvius merely state that images of winds adorned the Tower of the Winds, whereas we know from the surviving reliefs that they were given individual named portraits and distinctive attributes. We must look not only at our textual sources, but through them, since they convey only the impressions of later viewers and not the designs of the creators.
I suggest that the weathervane of the Tower of the Winds represented a meteorological deity, in keeping with its other figural motifs. It was built before the first century BC but was attributed – at least in its later form – to Andronikos of Kyrrhos, and was much more sophisticated as a scientific apparatus and architectural specimen than as a sculptural monument. It originally bore a weathervane, sundials and a water-clock (Varro calls it a horologium) that probably gave astronomical information.Footnote 45 Around the top of the surviving building are the eight cardinal winds, relief carvings of male figures, of indifferent quality. Their presence in the composition is easily understood. However, the lost central vane is described by Vitruvius as ‘a bronze triton holding out a rod in his right hand’.Footnote 46 Scholars from Faventinus to the present day have repeated this assertion, apparently accepting the presence of a merman as an allusion to the seafarers trading nearby, and incurious as to why he would extend a rod instead of his customary conch; only von Freeden has attempted an explanation.Footnote 47 Vitruvius may have expected to see a triton because mechanical tritons were employed in their conventional role as trumpeters.Footnote 48 I suggest that the vane actually represented Aiolos, keeper of the winds, who was regularly identified in antiquity with Poseidon's son of the same name, and consequently imagined as a fish-tailed marine deity.Footnote 49 Identifying the vane as the mythical governor of the winds, who indeed (according to Odyssey 10) has them in his gift, would support Kienast's persuasive argument that the whole monument emblematised cosmic order.Footnote 50 Aiolos would naturally rule the winds with a symbol of his power, either a magic wand like Circe's or more likely, since he is regularly imagined as a king, a royal sceptre.Footnote 51 Since vanes point towards the wind, he is playfully portrayed as commanding (while really obeying) his subjects, just as ancient mechanical automata purported to act for themselves while really being acted upon.
The Anemodoulion vane is even more in need of identification, as our sources give it no name at all. We have seen that it stood at the apex of a pyramid, clad in antique bronze reliefs, which rested on a tetrapylon.Footnote 52 Two sources unambiguously call it a statue of a woman;Footnote 53 Konstantinos adds another detail by dubbing it ‘a bronze-composed marvel blown about in a circle by its bronze wings’.Footnote 54 I suggest that we identify this winged woman as Iris, who directs the actions of wind-gods in Homer and Apollonius.Footnote 55 Artists usually depict Iris as a winged female holding a herald's staff or kerykeion;Footnote 56 like Aiolos' sceptre, this would serve well as a pointer. Furthermore, the tradition that Iris was mother by Zephyrus to one or more Erotes would link her thematically with the apple-throwing Erotes on the reliefs.Footnote 57 More generally, there are many visual and literary parallels for the collocation of conventional fecundity symbols, wholesome ‘ripening’ winds and personifications of desire.Footnote 58 The whole sculptural assembly is therefore likely to be a unified design, transposed intact from some earlier monument at Dyrrhachium.
Anthropomorphic weathervanes held enormous potential interest for Hellenistic intellectuals and their Roman successors, not only as scientific instruments like the sundials that appeared in that period,Footnote 59 but also as statues ‘given life’ by the wind. The animation of statues had multiple resonances: early myths ascribed golden and bronze automata (both humanoid and otherwise) to the supernatural art of Hephaistos and Daidalos,Footnote 60 while dreams and miraculous anecdotes empowered cult statues to speak, act and function like living beings.Footnote 61 The conceit that artistry, including the verbal artistry of ekphrasis, brings figural art ‘to life’ preoccupied ancient art criticism in general and gathered considerable momentum in the Hellenistic period, especially in ekphrastic epigram.Footnote 62 For these reasons it seems likely that the weathervanes of antiquity were born not from necessity alone, but from the same desire for ingenious installations that produced Ktesibios' musical statue of Arsinoe, or indeed the Horologium of Augustus, a vast sundial created at Alexandria before Augustus transferred it to Rome.Footnote 63 As a fusion of scientific engineering and ‘living’ art, the monumental weathervane is a characteristic product of the Hellenistic Zeitgeist.Footnote 64
If I am correct that the vanes at Athens, Rome and Constantinople soon lost their intended names, they are now at last restored, long after the monuments themselves were destroyed. If we interpret them as Aiolos and Iris (whether or not Zeus Soter on the Pharos is included), then all known monumental vanes have a consistent theme. They represented deities who exercised authority over the winds in Homer and in later myth, holding pointer-like objects that conformed to iconographic convention. However, in each case except the Roman copy of Aiolos, the sculpture was apparently original. This speaks against the existence of a shared direct model, as do major architectural differences including the octagonal versus pyramidal shapes. However, we must note how few examples are known, and the fact that both the Pharos-style octagonal tower and the Egyptianising pyramidion shape may well derive from the same city of Alexandria. Furthermore, although our sources give the impression that the Pharos and Tower of the Winds were superior scientifically and the Anemodoulion artistically, the vanes themselves could have been very similar in manufacture and style.
Finally, although we have no record of the size of the vane sculptures, it now seems possible that they numbered among the largest mechanised statues in the ancient world, and that their semiology related closely to their function. The Pharos was over 100 m high, the Tower of the Winds 12 m and the Anemodoulion nearly as high as the tallest columns (Khoniates, De signis 648), therefore at least 25 m. If the statues were portraits of specific gods, not mere mannequins or generic tritons, then we can more easily imagine them as far greater than life-size, suiting the Hellenistic taste for grand designs that produced the Tarentine Zeus and the Colossus of Rhodes. Looking beyond those famous statues, we find other massive experimental creations concentrated at Alexandria that often combined engineering with ornamentation. Ptolemy IV Philopator's enormous galley, the ‘Forty’, was one, the Pharos another. Others still were representations of deities: the statue of Helios in the Serapeion built by Ptolemy III Euergetes was reportedly to be suspended in midair using magnets, amazing worshippers.Footnote 65 A more relevant construction is attributed to Ptolemy II Philadelphos: this was a 4 m tall (i.e. 8 cubit) automaton representing Nysa, which Kallixeinos of Rhodes describes as part of the stupendous procession of 270 BC.Footnote 66 Drawn on a cart by sixty men and adorned with gold, it could rise to its feet, pour a libation and sit down again unaided. The Pharos was under construction at the time and would be completed twenty-three years later. If its statue of Zeus Soter was a weathervane, as I have argued, then it was a far simpler instrument than the Nysa automaton had been. Four metres seems disproportionately large for the Aiolos on the Tower of the Winds, which was probably man-sized at most, but quite plausible for Zeus Soter or the Anemodoulion on their much taller monuments: it is also the exact height of La Giralda, and slightly shorter than Saint-Gaudens' Diana of the Tower (the first version was 5.5 m tall, the second 4.4 m). Anyone who objects that the wind could not easily stir such large and heavy objects may inspect La Giralda outside Seville Cathedral, the Diana at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the dragon in the belfry of Ghent, or indeed the vane still in use at the Yukon Transportation Museum, which is a Douglas DC-3 airliner.Footnote 67
