In 2009, a case was made for locating the floruit of the Greek epigrammatist Palladas in the early decades of the fourth century c.e., with a life perhaps spanning c. 259–330s, some 60–100 years earlier than previous estimates.Footnote 1 The three most concrete elements in the argument, in brief, were as follows: (1) some of Palladas’ epigrams had appeared already in an anthology that was known to Ausonius, whose imitations of Greek models Roger Green would place before the year 350;Footnote 2 (2) a fragmentary papyrus codex containing epigrams by Palladas was executed earlier than the middle of the fourth century on palaeographical grounds, and the only precise indicators of date among its contents point to the decades on either side of 300 c.e.;Footnote 3 (3) one of Palladas’ epigrams refers explicitly to a Roman law that prevented unilateral divorce and can only be Constantine’s revolutionary divorce law of 331, which was rescinded by Julian (361–363) and was not reinstated after Julian’s death.Footnote 4
Another plank in the argument, more conjectural than the points just enumerated, was an attempt to demonstrate that several epigrams that had been read by others (conjecturally) as reflecting a context under Theodosius in the 390s make a good deal more sense in the period after Constantine had acquired the eastern provinces (324). Though literary interpretation is more conjectural, this is arguably the most important test of the hypothesis: in which historical context do his topical epigrams in fact make sense?
The argument has been accepted by some and has been incorporated into some historical accounts of the early fourth century.Footnote 5 Of course, a complete paradigm shift is rarely achieved in an instant, so the negative reaction in other quarters is unsurprising.Footnote 6 But no cogent argument against has appeared — nor, in my opinion, is one possible — and the evidentiary basis for a late date for Palladas remains just as unconvincing as it always was.
This first return to the topic in a decade is also a return to Palladas’ relevance for the early years of Constantinople.Footnote 7 The argument presented here is that an ekphrasis of an Eros (Anth. Gr. 16.207) only reveals its depths of meaning and humour when read as a description of a statue that had been imported into Constantinople under Constantine and transformed into an expression of imperial ideology. Furthermore, there is a case to be made — indeed, it has been made already by some art historians — that the statue described was Praxiteles’ Eros of Parium. The argument requires for its plausibility a review of both the relevant historical context under Constantine and also the literary context supplied by Palladas’ other ekphrastic epigrams, all of which exhibit a unique theme of divine images that had been transformed in some way.Footnote 8 While this review is intended primarily as context for the subsequent analysis, there is also much in it that is new. And the article in its entirety offers a challenge to the widely held view that the temple statues imported into Constantinople under Constantine are indicative of his openness to traditional religion. On the contrary, these statues had been ripped from their temples and transformed, in one way or another, by a Christian emperor who was contemptuous of the gods and their cults.
The article begins by briefly establishing the historical context in Constantine’s plundering of the temples, including their statues, some of which were publicly abused and destroyed while others were erected in Constantinople (I). This provides the context for a review of Palladas’ ekphrastic epigrams, except for Anth. Gr. 16.207 (II). An initial pass at Anth. Gr. 16.207 encounters several puzzles that invite closer scrutiny (III). A second pass in light of Palladas’ other ekphraseis unlocks its hidden depths (IV). This is followed by a consideration of the long-standing hypothesis that this poem describes Praxiteles’ Eros of Parium (V). Finally, there are brief concluding remarks on the significance of it all for our understanding of Constantine and Constantinople (VI).
I
Constantine’s reign, and especially his religious policy post-324, is a notorious source of scholarly controversy.Footnote 9 But one thing that can scarcely be denied is that he undertook an enormous spoliation of the pagan temples between his victory over Licinius in September 324 and the formal dedication of Constantinople in May 330.Footnote 10 According to Jerome’s Chronicon, Constantinople was dedicated in 330 ‘after almost all the cities had been stripped bare’, presumably meaning their temples (see the other testimonies cited below).Footnote 11 He says ‘almost all the cities’. The only two that were certainly exempted from the temple confiscations, as well as from Constantine’s contemporary law banning sacrifice, are Rome and Alexandria.Footnote 12 It is possible that temples in some other locales were spared owing to policy, oversight, deception, bribery, or negotiation.Footnote 13 However, Jerome is not the only source to indicate a massive scope. Libanius provides corroboration on one point when he admits that the confiscations were indeed used to build Constantinople, and he says in universalising terms that they left the temples impoverished and empty.Footnote 14 According to the De rebus bellicis, Constantine’s temple confiscations initiated a broad transition from bronze to gold exchange (accompanied by an increase in societal greed).Footnote 15 Zosimus, while noting the ancient statues by famed sculptors that adorned Constantinople’s Senate House, says that these were ‘part of the universal temple confiscations that occurred in the time of Constantine’.Footnote 16 This was evidently an unprecedented spoliation of the temples of the Roman world.Footnote 17
Our earliest and fullest report, preserved in Eusebius’ De laude Constantini, which was delivered orally in 336 in Constantinople in front of Constantine himself and a religiously mixed audience of notables, agrees on the matter of scale and also supplies more detail.Footnote 18 This description was then incorporated — at points verbatim but also with some omissions and additions — into Eusebius’ contemporary Vita Constantini. When the religious polemic is stripped away, these are the main reported facts:
• Constantine commissioned representatives to visit the temples in every city and province. (De laud. Const. 8.2–3; Vit. Const. 3.54.5–6)
• Parts of the temple buildings were despoiled, at least their ornamental doors and gilded ceilings.Footnote 19 (Vit. Const. 3.54.2)
• Local pagan priests were ordered to bring all statues out of the temples into public view. (De laud. Const. 8.3; Vit. Const. 3.54.6)
• Gold and silver statues were publicly scraped; the precious metals were purified through fire and confiscated; the useless cores were left behind. (De laud. Const. 8.1–3; Vit. Const. 3.54.4–7)
• The rest of the statues, made of bronze, were bound and taken away. (De laud. Const. 8.4; Vit. Const. 3.54.7)
• At some point [in Constantinople?], some of the confiscated bronze statues were hacked to pieces, melted down and converted into trivial objects.Footnote 20 (De laud. Const. 9.6)
• Many other bronze statues [presumably those of the finest craftsmanship and acceptable subject matter] were preserved and displayed in every public space in Constantinople; the new capital was filled throughout with these temple spoils. (Vit. Const. 3.54.2–3)
Constantine also confiscated the treasuries of votive offerings and the temple estates,Footnote 21 but Eusebius focuses on the spoliations that were most ideologically resonant. That Constantine took statues from the temples and used them to adorn his capital cannot be disputed, and we know from later sources that Constantinople was indeed filled with imported ancient statuary. It is sometimes assumed that the city acquired these artefacts piecemeal over the course of decades or centuries, but there is virtually no evidence for their importation after Constantine. And there is no good reason to doubt Eusebius’ eyewitness claim that the city was already filled with former temple statues in the 330s. Recall, too, Zosimus’ report that the ancient statues at the Senate House were but a fraction of Constantine’s ‘universal temple spoliations’.Footnote 22
Even more eye-catching, Eusebius reports that some of the temple statues were publicly abused and destroyed. This has nothing whatever to do with either fiscality or urban adornment (presumed by some to be the only motives). Why would Constantine have ordered something so viscerally shocking? The impact of the Great Persecution (303–313, but also renewed in some form by Licinius in the early 320s) cannot be overstated. Christians, especially in the east, had witnessed their religious buildings, objects and books burned and destroyed; they had witnessed their loved ones, without regard for age or sex, captured, mocked, abused, mutilated, flayed alive, burned at the stake, or subjected to any number of other atrocities. When a Christian emperor conquered the eastern provinces in 324, in a massive civil war that was framed on both sides as a contest between the Christian god and the traditional deities, everyone must have been expecting retribution in kind, but Constantine did not do that exactly.Footnote 23 Instead, while his pagan subjects were left unmolested, he subjected their lifeless ‘gods’ to the same indignities that Christian bodies had suffered: captured, bound, flayed, mutilated, burned and humiliated. Unpleasant though it may be, this was a stroke of political genius that may have averted social chaos in the east, because Constantine’s Christian subjects had their natural human thirst for vengeance slaked, and his pagan subjects were undoubtedly relieved that merely their religious objects were mistreated, not also their own bodies. Constantine, meanwhile, was able to occupy the moral high ground, to demonstrate once and for all that the pagan ‘gods’ were impotent, to annex the temple wealth and to acquire many beautiful and famous works of art that could instantly monumentalise his new capital. This was a unique historical occurrence — no other emperor undertook anything remotely like it — and it supplies the historical context for Palladas’ ekphraseis on the gods transformed.
II
Palladas’ preserved output in the Anthology of more than 150 epigrams includes at most ten or eleven ekphraseis. These form a thematically coherent unit, but they are now to be found scattered in Books 9 and 16:Footnote 24
• Anth. Gr. 9.180–3: Tyche, formerly a temple goddess, has been converted into a tavern-keeper.
• Anth. Gr. 9.441: a bronze Herakles, formerly worshipped, is now lying prostrate at a crossroads, defeated and enslaved.
• Anth. Gr. 9.528: statues of the gods, after converting to Christianity, are saved from the fire and conversion into bronze coins.
• Anth. Gr. 9.773: a bronze Eros has been melted and converted into a frying pan.
• Anth. Gr. 16.194: a bronze Eros has been melted and converted into a frying pan.Footnote 25
• *Anth. Gr. 16.207: a gentle Eros holds in place of his weapons a dolphin and a flower, symbolising mastery over land and sea.
• Anth. Gr. 16.282: coins depict Nike bringing victories to the Christ-loving city.
• [Ep. Bob. 51: an emperor is erecting a bronze Scylla near the sea; she should be restrained first.Footnote 26 ]
Let us briefly consider each of these (except for Anth. Gr. 16.207, which will be analysed more fully in Sections III–IV).
Tyche converted from a temple goddess into a tavern-keeper
Καὶ σύ, Τύχη, λοιπὸν μεταβαλλομένη καταπαίζου,
μηδὲ τύχης τῆς σῆς ὕστατα φεισαμένη·
ἥ πρὶν νηὸν ἔχουσα καπηλεύεις μετὰ γῆρας,
θερμοδότις μερόπων νῦν ἀναφαινομένη.
νῦν ὁσίως στένε καὶ σὺ τεὸν πάθος, ἄστατε δαῖμον,
τὴν σὴν ὡς μερόπων νῦν μετάγουσα τύχην. (Anth. Gr. 9.183)
So, Fortune, you, too, are mocked for being transformed [or moved],
and at last you have not been spared your own fortune.
You, who formerly possessed a temple, keep a tavern in your old age;
now exposed, you are a bar-wench to mortals.
Now lament reverently your suffering — you, too, most changeable daimōn —
now translating your own fortune, just like that of mortals, from there to here.
This is merely the most illuminating of four related epigrams (Anth. Gr. 9.180–3) that describe a recent transformation of Tyche from a temple goddess into a tavern-keeper or waitress, akin to a prostitute in the ancient mind.Footnote 27 The Palatine lemma to this epigram declares that it is ‘on the temple of Tyche that had become a tavern’, and this marginal comment has conditioned subsequent readings.Footnote 28 However, as with the other Palladan lemmata, this is merely a Byzantine inference based on the epigram itself. Noel Lenski, in an unpublished argument from 2011, has made a much better case that these epigrams pertain rather to a statue that had been incorporated into a monument that is still partly extant in Istanbul, the so-called ‘Gothic Column’.Footnote 29 This same monument was described in the sixth century by John Lydus, who was ignorant of its history but who provides two observations that were based on autopsy: (1) it bore a Latin inscription on its base, which he translates (but which also survives and records a dedication to Fortuna Redux for victory over the Goths); (2) it was standing in the vicinity of a tavern.Footnote 30 One can be confident that this Fortuna monument was erected in the new capital to commemorate one of Constantine’s two victories over the Goths (328/329 or 332).Footnote 31
Palladas’ epigrams allow us to refine the picture. The Tyche that sat atop the monument was one of those cult statues that had been confiscated from the temples and used to adorn Constantinople, for Palladas indicates that she had formerly presided over a temple (line 3). Furthermore, the monument existed in the context of a tavern from its very inception, for Palladas refers to the translation of the statue from temple to tavern (line 6).Footnote 32 And if there is any question about when precisely Palladas made his observations, one may note the emphatic repetition of νῦν (‘now!’) in each of the final three lines, including the claims that Tyche has been ‘now exposed’ (line 4), that is, removed from her temple, and ‘now moved’ (line 6). Palladas was a contemporary witness to this transformation in the late 320s or early 330s.Footnote 33
Finally, Tyche is being mocked in the first line. It would not be surprising if patrons of the tavern occasionally laughed at Fortune’s misfortune, but interestingly Eusebius claims that Constantine erected former cult statues in Constantinople precisely for the purpose of mockery and amusement.Footnote 34 One may be forgiven for thinking that this claim misconstrues the emperor’s motives, which surely pertained to providing the city with impressive monuments that would put it on par with Rome. However, it is entirely possible that both objectives were in play simultaneously: this monument was part of a design to make the city physically grand, but a door was probably being left open for people to draw their own conclusions about the pagan ‘gods’. Note that, in Anth. Gr. 9.180.4, Palladas says explicitly that Tyche was now ‘not a goddess’ (οὐ θεά).
Bronze statues of the gods converted into ChristiansFootnote 35
Χριστιανοὶ γεγαῶτες Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχοντες
ἐνθάδε ναιετάουσιν ἀπήμονες· οὐδὲ γὰρ αὐτοὺς
χώνη φόλλιν ἄγουσα φερέσβιον ἐν πυρὶ θήσει. (Anth. Gr. 9.528)
After becoming Christian, ‘owners of Olympian palaces’
dwell here unharmed; for no melting-pot will put them, too,
in the fire to tally a life-giving follis [i.e. bag of bronze coins].
Bing has suggested that ἐνθάδε in line 2 means not ‘here’ but ‘there’, that is, on Mount Olympus, and the idea is that even the distant gods have converted to avoid a terrible fate.Footnote 36 As a result, he believes that the epigram is not ekphrastic at all. That approach may be sustainable for the first two lines, but it is difficult to find the sense in these celestial beings scrambling to avoid the melting-pot and conversion into a follis (line 3). The epigram is more naturally taken to be about bronze statues of the gods that stand ‘here’, where the poet observes and describes them. In fact, the adverb has a strongly epitaphic quality: ἐνθάδε κεῖται (‘here lies’) is a ubiquitous dactylic formula in Greek grave inscriptions. This impression is deepened by the poet’s choice of stichic hexameter, which is otherwise unattested among his epigrams, but was the original metre of inscribed epitaphs.Footnote 37 Palladas then inverts the epitaphic expectation that he has created: not ‘here lie’, but ‘here live’.
By converting to Christianity, these statues avoided the melting-pot and conversion into bronze coins. Since only the imperial government could mint coins, they were obviously in the government’s possession. And conversion into coin was apparently a fate suffered by some of the statues that were confiscated under Constantine.Footnote 38 What precisely Palladas means by claiming that these statues had undergone a religious conversion is uncertain.Footnote 39 But at the very least, this must be a comment on the emperor’s religion and the religious character of his capital.Footnote 40 It should also be noted that the dilemma presented in the epigram — either conversion or destruction — was, mutatis mutandis, the same one that Christians had faced during the Great Persecution. The mirrored circumstances suggest retribution.
Bronze Eros converted into a frying pan
Χαλκοτύπος τὸν Ἔρωτα μεταλλάξας ἐπόησε
τήγανον, οὐκ ἀλόγως, ὅττι καὶ αὐτὸ φλέγει. (Anth. Gr. 9.773)
A bronze-smith has transformed Eros and made
a frying pan, not irrationally, because it, too, burns.
Χάλκειόν τις Ἔρωτα μετήγαγεν ἐκ πυρὸς εἰς πῦρ,
τήγανον ἁρμόζων τῇ κολάσει κόλασιν. (Anth. Gr. 16.194)
Someone has translated bronze Eros from fire into fire,
forging a frying pan, fitting punishment to punishment.
These two distichs echo the language of ‘transformation’ and ‘translation’ in the Tyche series. Bing makes the nice observation that they invert an Anacreontic metaphor in which Eros himself is a bronze-smith rather than the raw material upon which the smith works.Footnote 41 Like others before, he also finds a plausible setting in Alexandria in 391, citing Socrates Scholasticus’ claim that the captured Alexandrian statues were melted and converted into pots and other quotidian items.Footnote 42 On the face of it, this may seem an impressive correspondence, that is, until one realises that precisely the same thing had already occurred during Constantine’s much broader assault on pagan statues in the 320s (from which Alexandria, however, had been exempted). In words spoken before Constantine, Eusebius revels in the fact that the objects of pagan worship did not foresee their own humiliation: ‘Which of the heroes ever divined the melting through fire and conversion of the lifeless from useless statues into everyday uses? Which of the gods ever mentioned the breaking of their statues into pieces, with ridicule, and their melting?’Footnote 43
One point of interpretation may be added. In Anth. Gr. 16.194, Palladas notes that Eros’ demise through fire and transformation into a frying pan fitted punishment to punishment. In one register, the choice of a frying pan is fitting for one who was melted in fire (‘from the frying pan into the fire’, as it were, or vice versa). In a second and more literary register, after a lifetime of punishing others with his torch and fiery arrows, Eros is now fittingly tortured in the flames. But in a third and deeper register, I suggest, Constantine’s public punishment of pagan statues was retribution for the torture and murder — often through fire — that his predecessors had inflicted on Christian bodies. This was punishment matching punishment.Footnote 44
Bronze Scylla should be bound
In Scyllam Constantinopolitanam in circo
Frendentem Scyllam metus est prope litoris oram
sic sisti, Caesar: vincula necte prius.
nam potis est virtus spirantis fallere aeni,
ut prius astringat, navita quam caveat. (Ep. Bob. 51)
On the Constantinopolitan Scylla in the Hippodrome
There is panic that gnashing Scylla is being erected thus,
near the shoreline, Caesar. Bind her with restraints first!
For the excellence of the breathing bronze has the power to deceive,
that she may bind [i.e. hold fast] the sailor before he is on his guard.
This is a Latin translation, produced in the late fourth century or very early fifth, of a lost Greek original.Footnote 45 It describes a large bronze Scylla that is attested in other sources to have been on the spina of the Hippodrome in Constantinople (a stone’s throw from the sea).Footnote 46 The Greek original was clearly composed after the foundation of Constantinople (324). It was also presumably included in the fourth-century anthology that served as the Greek source for Ausonius and the Bobbio poets and appears to have been in existence before 350 (see above, n. 2). Palladas is the only Greek epigrammatist whose activity can be located in this window — indeed, the only serious Greek epigrammatist, other than Gregory of Nazianzus, whose existence is attested between the second and sixth centuries. Moreover, this one is thematically consistent with Palladas’ other ekphraseis: this Scylla was another of the bronzes that had been imported into Constantinople in the 320s, spared and given a transformed existence in a different spatial and ideological context. It seems likely that the emperor addressed in line 2, who was ostensibly responsible for the statue’s placement, is Constantine. And that the poet urges him to bind Scylla (line 2) — an idea evoked again in line 4 (astringat) — recalls Constantine’s reported binding of the bronze statues that were led away from the temples.Footnote 47 If any of them required restraint, surely it was this monster.
Bronze Herakles lying at a crossroads, defeated and enslaved
Τὸν Διὸς ἐν τριόδοισιν ἐθαύµασα χάλκεον υἷα,
τὸν πρὶν ἐν εὐχωλαῖς, νῦν παραριπτόµενον.
ὀχθήσας δ’ ἄρ’ ἔειπον· «Ἀλεξίκακε τρισέληνε,
µηδέποθ’ ἡττηθεὶς σήµερον ἐξετάθης;»
νυκτὶ δὲ µειδιόων µε θεὸς προσέειπε παραστάς·
«Καιρῷ δουλεύειν καὶ θεὸς ὢν ἔµαθον.» (Anth. Gr. 9.441)
I marvelled at the bronze son of Zeus in the crossroads,
formerly the object of cult, now lying prone.
Outraged, I said, ‘Averter of evils, child of three nights,
unconquerable one, have you been laid prostrate today?’
At night, the god, smiling, stood beside me [scil. in a dream] and said,
‘Although a god, I, too, have learned to serve the times.’
A bronze Herakles was lying prostrate at a crossroads. Bing plausibly detects an allusion to Herakles at the crossroads of virtue and vice.Footnote 48 But what of the statue? We are at a serious disadvantage in comparison with Palladas’ original readers, but perhaps this was a statue depicting Herakles reclining in exhaustion after his labours, moved under Constantine to a crossroads in Constantinople.Footnote 49 Ideologically, such an image would have had great potential for communicating Constantine’s victory over the pagan gods and their subjugation. In any case, as in some of the other epigrams, Palladas draws an explicit contrast between the statue’s former and current circumstances (line 2). And the conclusion is revealing. The narrator — ostensibly Palladas himself — is initially indignant, but the Herakles of his dreams stands (while the narrator reclines) and responds with smiling resignation: though a god, he is a slave to the times. Of course, Kairos was also a god, so Palladas was being clever. It is presumably also relevant that Euripides has Herakles acknowledging that he is now a slave to fortune (or Tyche).Footnote 50 And in context, Καιρῷ offers implicit wordplay with ΧΡ — that is, Constantine’s victory symbol, taken by at least some contemporaries to refer to Christ — suggesting that Herakles was now a slave to the emperor and perhaps also his god.Footnote 51 One may note that, according to Christ, ‘No one can serve two masters’.Footnote 52 And yet, with one conventional turn of phrase, Palladas has subjected Herakles to at least two masters, perhaps three or four, including Christ himself. The Herakles of his dreams was surely smiling, at least in part, at the poet’s Alexandrian cleverness.
There is a known Constantinian statue assemblage in Constantinople that exhibits some striking points of correspondence with this epigram. At the most prominent triodoi in the city, where the Mese split into two branches, was a site known to middle Byzantines as ta Amastrianou. The toponym evidently derives from its statuary, which had been taken in whole or in part from Amastris in Paphlagonia, including a prominent Apollo described as pankratēs.Footnote 53 Also present in the Amastrianon was a reclining Herakles (and perhaps one or more other reclining statues, but the descriptions are garbled).Footnote 54 The Patria Constantinopoleōs refers to a ‘Lord of Paphlagonia’ (evidently the Apollo) and another statue that was lying down — thus presumably the same reclining Herakles — and that was ‘the slave of the Paphlagonian from Amastris’. In view of the confused state of the sources, one would not want to press a claim. But was this Apollo (the ‘Lord of Paphlagonia’) recast at the Amastrianon as Constantine — perhaps with characteristic ambiguity as to whether it was the emperor or Christ — with a reclining Herakles defeated and enslaved at his feet? This would make sense of Palladas’ clever observation that the prone and defeated Herakles in the triodoi was enslaved to Καιρῷ, that is, ΧΡ.
Nike and the Christ-loving cityFootnote 55
Νῖκαι πάρεσµεν, αἱ γελῶσαι παρθένοι,
νίκας φέρουσαι τῇ φιλοχρίστῳ πόλει.
ἔγραψαν ἡµᾶς οἱ φιλοῦντες τὴν πόλιν
πρέποντα νίκαις ἐντυποῦντες σχήµατα. (Anth. Gr. 16.282)
Here we are, Victories, the laughing maidens,
bringing victories to the Christ-loving city.
Those who love the city crafted us,
stamping images befitting the victories.
These lines describe coins — ‘stamped’ (line 4) so as to yield a τύπος or ‘impression’ — rather than statues, but otherwise they have much in common with Palladas’ other ekphraseis. The most obviously salient features for identifying the coin-type in view are Nike-Victoria and the ‘Christ-loving city’.Footnote 56 It was argued in 2010 that a very good candidate was a bronze type that commemorated the dedication of Constantinople and was struck at every mint in the empire between 330 and the 337: it depicts on the obverse a personified Constantinople and on the reverse Victoria outfitted like a soldier and standing on the prow of a ship, evoking the land and naval victories that had decided the war with Licinius.Footnote 57 Not only does this type exhibit the two most prominent features of the epigram — Victory and the City — it also accounts for why the images were ‘befitting the victories’ (πρέποντα νίκαις): Nike’s military outfit and placement on a ship, her σχήµατα, perfectly capture the crucial military victories on land and sea.Footnote 58
It is now possible to add two observations that strengthen this identification. First, on the obverse of these coins, a ribbon from the back of Constantinople’s helmet intersects the spear over her shoulder, forming a distinct cross. This was presumably not an accidental indication that she was a ‘Christ-loving city’. Second, four mints — Constantinople, Heraclea, Cyzicus and Nicomedia — produced this type with a slight variance: instead of an obverse legend of constantinopolis (nominative), which appears on all other specimens, the issues from these four mints exhibit constantinopoli (dative).Footnote 59 The apparent explanation for this anomaly is that these four mints were in the vicinity of the decisive events of the war. In fact, Heraclea was on the Thracian side of the Propontis, not far from Adrianople, site of the first land engagement; Cyzicus was on the Asian side of the Propontis, near the Hellespont, where the naval battle had been fought; and it was at Nicomedia that Constantine received Licinius’ formal surrender following the Battle of Chrysopolis.Footnote 60 The dative case employed by these four mints suggests a translation or procession of the victories on land and sea from Adrianople/Heraclea, the Hellespont/Cyzicus and Chrysopolis/Nicomedia to their destination of Constantinople. This is not insignificant, for Palladas writes explicitly in line 2 of the Nikai carrying their victories ‘to the Christ-loving city’ (also in the dative case).Footnote 61 There are multiple elements in the epigram that point to this commemorative bronze type.
Finally on this epigram, it exhibits points of contact with Anth. Gr. 9.528 (discussed above).Footnote 62 The latter describes statues of the gods that had converted to Christianity — and the surprisingly explicit references to Christianity in both epigrams are noteworthy — to avoid conversion into a follis, that is, a bag of bronze coins. The plural coins of the follis explain the plural Nikai of Anth. Gr. 16.282. There is also a certain irony in a Christian emperor melting down statues of the pagan gods to produce bronze coins that depict a pagan goddess bearing her gifts to a Christian city. That irony would not have been lost on Palladas. And it may inform the Victories’ laughter (line 1): they are not only joyous, as often, but perhaps also amused (or is it nervous laughter?) at their altered circumstances.
The images of the gods described by Palladas were transformed in various ways — materially, spatially, ideologically — but the common thread running through these ekphraseis is a forced conversion from a traditional religious valence into something either profane or Christian. And their historical points of contact with Constantine’s capture and transformation of pagan images post-324 are so dense, and occasionally so precise, that they cannot be ignored. Indeed, the epigrams cannot be fully understood without this context.Footnote 63
III
The foregoing is necessary context for assessing the only other extant Palladan ekphrasis:
Γυμνὸς Ἔρως· διὰ τοῦτο γελᾷ καὶ μείλιχός ἐστιν·
οὐ γὰρ ἔχει τόξον καὶ πυρόεντα βέλη·
οὐδὲ μάτην παλάμαις κατέχει δελφῖνα καὶ ἄνθος·
τῇ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν, τῇ δὲ θάλασσαν ἔχει. (Anth. Gr. 16.207)
Eros is naked. He therefore laughs and is gentle;
for he is not holding his bow and fiery arrows.
Nor is it in vain that he grasps in his hands a dolphin and a flower;
for in the one hand he holds land, and in the other sea.
The subject is an image of Eros, presumably a statue. The god is unsurprisingly ‘naked’ (γυμνός), but the adjective surely conveys something additional. The further implication may be that he is ‘unarmed’, since the next line states explicitly that he is not holding his customary weapons.Footnote 64 However, Antonio Corso has suggested rather that the statue was nude in a way that communicated heightened sensuality — a use of the adjective drawn from ancient art criticism.Footnote 65 These are not mutually exclusive interpretations. At any rate, because Eros is naked in some intensified way and is unarmed, he laughs with gentleness and affection. The third line keeps the reader’s gaze trained on the god’s hands, in which he holds a dolphin and a flower. According to Palladas, these attributes are ‘not in vain’; in other words, they are meaningful. In the final line, he then interprets them as indicating mastery over land and sea.Footnote 66
This may appear to be quite straightforward and either charming or banal. Bing describes the epigram as ‘conventional’ and introduces it merely ‘as a baseline’ before exploring Palladas’ more interesting and innovative ekphrastic poetry.Footnote 67 But there are some unusual or even puzzling features that may reward more sustained attention.
To start, Eros is rarely ‘gentle’ and ‘kind’ (μείλιχος). For Hesiod, he was a primordial force alongside Chaos and Earth, a ‘limb-melter’ who overpowers reason in gods and mortals.Footnote 68 Later, he acquired his more familiar lineage from Aphrodite and developed a personality that was bifurcated but usually cruel, violent and tyrannical, representing secret or otherwise unfulfilled or disordered erotic desire.Footnote 69 Eros in this aspect torments bodies and minds with his torch and burning arrows. In one extreme example, he borrows Ares’ sword to perpetrate unspeakable bloodshed, representing those instances in which misaligned or excessive erotic obsession leads to real violence.Footnote 70 When this Eros laughs, it is contemptuous.Footnote 71 And after the Classical period, when he is without his weapons, this is often because he has been captured and bound — an ultimately vain attempt to subdue the god’s ferocious power.Footnote 72
In Palladas’ epigram, by contrast, his laughter is gentle and affectionate. This is the god in his other aspect, representing harmonious and fulfilled erotic love. In art as in life, this is a much rarer occurrence. A fragment ascribed to Anacreon announces the poet’s intention to sing of Eros ‘the gentle’ (τὸν ἁβρόν), while also acknowledging his subject’s darker side as master over gods and mortals.Footnote 73 In a similar vein, the chorus in Euripides’ Hippolytus pleads with Eros to ‘make a measured and harmonious approach’ (μηδ’ ἄρρυθμος ἔλθοις), but this immediately gives way to a description of the god in his more familiar aspect as ‘humanity’s tyrant’ (τὸν τύρρανον ἀνδρῶν).Footnote 74 The proem to Book 4 of Oppian’s Halieutica contains another such request: ‘Please be kind; please come to us with a gentle, mild and measured mien.’Footnote 75 But this prayer, too, is set in the context of an acknowledgement of the god’s more typically violent power. In Apollonius’ Argonautica, after Eros has wounded Medea with his arrow and gleefully rejoiced at her impending agony, he eventually turns ‘gentle’ (ἀγανός) as she is about to meet Jason in private and find her love reciprocated.Footnote 76 A few lines below, when the lovers are face to face, the flame of Eros is said to be ‘pleasant’ (ἡδεῖα φλόξ) rather than cruel, as it usually is.Footnote 77 This is also the god’s aspect in Palladas’ ekphrasis. The image that he describes, in his view at least, represents erotic love realised in harmonious union.
The final line disrupts this picture, for the god’s depiction as a powerful master belongs rather to his cruel aspect. As in the poetic precursors just mentioned, even when the prospect of Eros’ gentleness is raised, his tyranny is never far away. But the tension in this case is left unresolved or unexplained. And there is also a puzzle here: why does Palladas conclude that Eros is master over land and sea when he is in fact invoking a long-established tradition of the god’s mastery over air, land and sea (that is, everything)? The realm of the air is indispensable to this trope, which may have its origin in Euripides’ Hippolytus. In an influential depiction, Euripides has a winged Eros flying through the air over land and sea, looking to strike victims mad with his swift arrow.Footnote 78 Oppian once again treads a Euripidean path in the proem to Book 4 of his Halieutica, where Eros is master over the birds of the air, the creatures of the land and the fish of the sea, all of which know his fiery darts of erotic compulsion.Footnote 79 The same trope is present in the Orphic Hymn to Eros, in which the god dominates air, land and sea.Footnote 80 In a Meleagrian twist, air, land and sea all deny parentage of Eros, but all alike hate him.Footnote 81 Α learned reader is left to wonder why Palladas would have omitted any reference to the god’s wings or to the realm of the air.
Here is another puzzle: why does Palladas ignore what is surely the most fundamental register of meaning for the dolphin and flower? Whether or not these could symbolise sea and land in this instance, they certainly communicate a sexual meaning. Arguably, the typical ancient viewer encountering an image of Eros holding a flower would have thought first and foremost not of land, but of the ubiquitous bloom of youthful beauty.Footnote 82 Among the homoerotic epigrams in Strato’s Musa Puerilis, for example, the erōmenos is frequently likened to a flower. To pick out two that are especially relevant here, Strato describes a fourteen-year-old as ‘a sweeter flower of the Erotes’ than younger boys, while Meleager has Eros gathering ‘in his hand’ (χειρί) a garland of ‘boy-flowers’ (παίδων ἄνθος).Footnote 83 But if the viewer was not inclined towards pederasty, the image could have evoked a female sexual object instead, for young women also possessed a bloom. Indeed, in this case, one might be tempted to think more explicitly of her genitalia. It may be useful to pluck just a few examples from among the erotica in the Anthology. In a parody of the Judgement of Paris, Rufinus judges the relative beauty of three vulvas, the first of which is ‘parted like roses by a gentle breeze’.Footnote 84 In a departure from the norm, he also celebrates the charms of a mature woman whose ‘apples’ (scil. breasts) and ‘rose’ (scil. vulva) remain beautiful.Footnote 85 Dioscorides, for his part, spreads his rosy-bottomed lover on a bed and achieves immortality ‘in her blooming flowers’.Footnote 86 A sexual interpretation — whether homo- or heterosexual — of the flower grasped by Eros is very nearly unavoidable.
The same is true of the dolphin. This may be less obvious to the reader, so it is worth documenting briefly that it did indeed occur to the ancients that this creature was phallic in both shape and behaviour. Rufinus, for example, claims to have just traded in homosexual for heterosexual pursuits, concluding that ‘dolphins will feed in the forests of Erymanthus’.Footnote 87 This draws on a tradition pertaining to the state of confusion that prevailed after the Deluge.Footnote 88 But one recognises in context the poet’s own state of confusion after turning his amatory attention from boys to women; he is currently ‘a fish out of water’. Of course, this also barely conceals an obscene joke: the dolphin is standing in for the poet’s erect penis, which is now seeking satisfaction in unfamiliar territory, as it were. If the joke does not register immediately, the untranslatable δενδροκόμης conveys that the forests in which the dolphins will feed are so dense as to be like hair upon the mountains.
Among visual representations, Eros is not infrequently found in the company of dolphins. The most common of these depicts the god of sex riding a dolphin, and it would be difficult to deny that this is phallic.Footnote 89 Indeed, the image is rendered more explicit in some Roman-era intaglio gems that have Eros riding not a dolphin, but a large phallus. In one arresting mosaic floor from a late antique villa in North Africa, an erotically charged Poseidon and Amphitrite preside over a fabulous seascape, at the foundation of which are two Erotes who point their dolphins at an octopus.Footnote 90 These are symbols of Poseidon and Amphitrite respectively, but this is also phallic and vaginal imagery.
There seems to be no extant image of Eros holding a smaller dolphin in his hand, as described by Palladas, but this is borrowed from Poseidon’s iconography.Footnote 91 According to the De astronomia ascribed to Hyginus, this attribute derives from a mytheme in which Poseidon’s dolphin persuades an initially reluctant Amphitrite to accept the god’s offer of marriage (or on another telling, dolphins inform him of her whereabouts that he may find and rape her).Footnote 92 Among the many surviving images of Poseidon holding a dolphin in his hand, the obviousness of the phallic symbolism varies, but in some depictions, at any rate, the creature is positioned so as to give the unmistakable impression of an ithyphallic god.Footnote 93
That this interpretation was obvious to the ancients, too, can be demonstrated from a close comparandum to Palladas’ epigram, preserved in Christodorus’ sixth-century ekphrastic series on ancient statues in the Baths of Zeuxippus in Constantinople (all of them among Constantine’s confiscations).Footnote 94 Christodorus describes a statue group depicting Poseidon and another of his lovers, Amymone, the lovely Danaïd whose name means ‘blameless’ or ‘pure’. These are the most relevant lines:
ἐγγύθι δ’ εὐρύστερνος ἐφαίνετο Κυανοχαίτης
γυμνὸς ἐων, πλόκαμον δὲ καθειμένον εἶχεν ἐθείρης,
καὶ διερὸν δελφῖνα προίσχετο, χειρὶ κομίζων
δῶρα πολυζήλοιο γάμων μνηστήρια κούρης. (Anth. Gr. 2.1.65–8)
Nearby [scil. near to Amymone] appeared dark-haired Poseidon, broad-chested,
naked, hair unbound,
and he was holding out a wet dolphin, bringing in his hand
a suitor’s gift for the purpose of sex with the much-admired maiden.
Just as in Palladas’ ekphrasis, the god here is ‘naked’ (γυμνός): ‘unarmed’ perhaps but the accompanying descriptors also suggest a context of heightened eroticism. Furthermore, he is holding a dolphin in his hand. And not only is his dolphin ‘wet’ — a literal-minded reader may wonder both how the sculptor would have conveyed this and what the alternative would be — it is also being offered as a gift to a beautiful and virtuous woman for the purpose of sex. This is not subtle.Footnote 95
The dolphin could indeed be an obvious phallic symbol. As in the case of the flower, this symbolic potential required a context to activate it, but just such a context is supplied by the image that Palladas describes: a naked Eros, god of love and sex, holding a dolphin in one hand and a flower in the other. Why does Palladas apparently ignore the obvious sexual symbolism, not least after he has already commented on the god’s gentle aspect, which signifies harmonious erotic love?
John Tzetzes, in the twelfth century, knew the epigrams of Palladas and seems to have noticed the oddities of this one:Footnote 96
Ὡραῖον νέον μείρακα τὸν Ἔρωτα ζωγράφοι
τοξότην ζωγραφοῦσι τε συνάμα καὶ πυρφόρον,
καὶ πτερωτόν, κατέχοντα δελφῖνα τὲ καὶ πόαν·
τῇ μὲν γραφῇ τοῦ πτερωτοῦ, τῆς πόας, τοῦ δελφῖνος,
κρατεῖν τοῦτον σημαίνοντες ἀέρος, γῆς, θαλάσσης.
Artists render Eros as a beautiful youth,
a fire-bearing archer,
and winged, grasping a dolphin and a plant.
Through the representation of his wings, the plant and the dolphin,
they indicate that he is master over air, land and sea.
Despite the generalising nature of the claim, Palladas’ ekphrasis is the only surviving witness to anything like this, but there are also some key differences. Perhaps most notably, Tzetzes reasserts Eros’ conventional tripartite tyranny, that is, over air in addition to land and sea. He does this by supposing, plausibly, that the god’s wings are a third symbolic element. In another alteration, Tzetzes has Eros holding in one hand a dolphin and in the other hand not a flower, but a plant. Perhaps he discerned that the connection between a flower and the land was tenuous and therefore substituted an entire plant, which is at least rooted in the ground. Note, too, that Tzetzes has ignored the god’s gentle aspect in Palladas’ epigram — a clear indicator of harmonious love — and has given him his weapons back, at least implicitly, as befits the tyrant of unfulfilled desire. The internal coherence of Tzetzes’ version throws into relief the peculiarities of Palladas’ ekphrasis.
Here is yet another potential puzzle. If taken at face value, this epigram would be an unprecedented bit of romantic sentimentality from a poet who — in more than 150 epigrams in the Anthology and another sixty or so new but fragmentary poems in the Yale papyrus codex — does not have a single one that is clearly and straightforwardly erotic or romantic.Footnote 97 In fact, Palladas’ consistent poetic persona — a grumpy old man among other attributes — is the most hostile to sentiment of all Greek epigrammatists. This is the same poet who complains bitterly about his own wife and about the defects and treachery of women en masse (and who considers homosexual acts to be morally repugnant).Footnote 98 What was he doing composing a romantic epigram about erotic love?
Something strange is going on in these four lines. But it is precisely when Alexandrian poetry appears odd, on an initial pass, that one must stop and pay very close attention.
IV
Read in isolation and on its surface, Anth. Gr. 16.207 is uncharacteristic of Palladas’ persona, contains puzzles with no evident solution and finally lacks a point. However, if it is read in the context of his other ekphraseis on the transformation of the gods under Constantine, something more intelligible and interesting emerges. One will notice for starters that there are multiple points of contact. The subject matter is Eros, just as in Anth. Gr. 9.733 and 16.194. These are characterised especially by the burning fire (see also Anth. Gr. 9.528) and here Eros is without his ‘fiery’ arrows. He also ‘laughs’ in the first line, just as the Nikai ‘laugh’ in the first line of Anth. Gr. 16.282. We shall return to the matter of laughter, but another point of contact with Anth. Gr. 16.282 is the key. The victories celebrated on the bronze commemorative coin were victories on land and sea. Part of the message conveyed in this coin is that Constantine, who had reunified the Roman Empire in spectacular fashion, was victorious on land and sea. And this is precisely the curious interpretation that Palladas applies to the image of Eros holding a dolphin and a flower: mastery over land and sea (but not air, of course). In fact, although Constantine could stake a more justified claim than most, ‘master over land and sea’ or ‘victor on land and sea’ was a traditional imperial epithet.Footnote 99 Could this epigram be an ekphrasis of a statue that had been transformed into an expression of imperial ideology?
For the sake of clarity, it may be helpful to separate the layers of interpretation and begin with the foundational stratum. On its original terms, the statue seems to have portrayed the peaceful Eros of harmonious sexual union. At least, this is suggested by the heightened eroticism (if that is what γυμνός conveys) and by the god’s gentle aspect — both of these reflecting Palladas’ interpretation of the image — but also more objectively by the absence of weapons and by the sexual symbolism of the flower and dolphin. But it is plausible that in a secondary register of meaning, the god’s wings, the flower and the dolphin may have offered a subtle reminder that Eros was also master over air, land and sea, that is, the universal tyrant of unrealised desire. This would elegantly capture the fundamental tension in Classical and Hellenistic depictions of this god. In fact, that he holds a dolphin in one hand and a flower in the other is a dynamic expression of this tension: is he bringing lover and beloved together, or holding them apart?
If one now considers the possibility of a propagandistic appropriation of the statue under Constantine, it is a rather simple matter to transform mastery over air, land and sea into mastery over land and sea: one merely needs to ignore the wings. But what of the tension with Eros’ gentle aspect? One must ignore the original sexual symbolism, but the contrasting notions of domination and peace are quite useful. Transposed into an imperial context, these ideas, now political in nature rather than affective, are not in tension at all. It was precisely through mastery over land and sea that the emperor brought peace to his subjects. Indeed, Momigliano has suggested that the combination of these two ideas was a Roman, perhaps Augustan, modification of the Hellenistic tradition of kingly rule over land and sea.Footnote 100
The relevant associations do not end there, for Augustus had adopted Amor — despite the Greek tradition linking Eros with cruelty and political tyranny — as a symbol of the pax Augusta that he had established after bringing civil war to an end.Footnote 101 Like Augustus before him, Constantine had demonstrated mastery over land and sea, resolving decades of intermittent civil war, and had subsequently laid down his weapons and inaugurated a new golden age of peace and happiness over which he would rule as a benevolent civilian lord.Footnote 102 If the line of interpretation pursued here is correct, the Constantinian transformation of this Eros deftly engaged elements of the literary and political tradition. Perhaps most significantly, it was yet another adaptation of Augustan ideology.
This proposed transformation would also conform with a documented Constantinian track record in the realm of images. The reuse of statuary and reliefs in Rome to suit the regime’s propagandistic aims is well known.Footnote 103 The situation in Constantinople is different, both because this city’s archaeological record is much poorer and because the raw material to hand was not a huge trove of imperial portraiture from earlier periods, as in Rome, but rather a mass of confiscated temple statues. Nevertheless, the same impulse is observable in our scant evidence. The most famous of all the statues in Constantinople is the one with a radiate crown, reported by some Byzantine sources to have been an imported Apollo or Helios, but recognised universally to be Constantine (the face may have been reworked, as frequently in Rome).Footnote 104 This statue was erected on a tall pillar and communicated a clear ideological message, generically at least: Constantine reflected the light of the divine.Footnote 105 Another confiscated statue that was modified to alter its message is the Tyche described by Zosimus: she was deprived of the customary lions associated with Cybele, her arms were repositioned into a pose of prayer (orans) and she was promoted as a personification of Constantine’s new capital.Footnote 106 Would it be at all surprising if this was also the fate of an Eros that had been imported into Constantinople, its original message transformed into an expression of imperial ideology?
If one had to speculate, the statue’s likeliest location in Constantinople may have been in the circular Forum of Constantine. This is where the radiate statue held a place of pre-eminence, but the site was also filled with other imported statuary.Footnote 107 If this Eros was indeed in Constantine’s Forum, its new ideological meaning may have been clear from the totality of the images that had been selected and arranged there, much as in the case of the Forum of Augustus in Rome. Of course, there are other possibilities. Were physical alterations made to the statue, as in the case of some others? We cannot know, but it is not impossible, for example, that the wings would have been sheared off. Not only were they a distraction from the statue’s new meaning, this was also a long-standing poetic fantasy, most notably in a tale of Eros’ banishment by the twelve gods, who clipped his wings and dedicated them to Nike.Footnote 108 This alteration, if it occurred, would also add poignancy to Palladas’ conspicuous silence over the god’s wings and the realm of the air. But the clearest way to communicate to viewers what the statue now meant would have been an inscription.Footnote 109
The only remaining puzzle is why Palladas, a gadfly and a Hellene, would have endorsed this transformation of the statue’s meaning. Self-preservation is a powerful motivator, and there are echoes of the emperor’s messaging in the other ekphraseis, too, as well as in several of Palladas’ non-ekphrastic epigrams.Footnote 110 But in all of these, it is possible to detect a subtle undercurrent of resistance. There is plausible deniability, but the undercurrent is there if one wants to see it. In the case of Anth. Gr. 16.207, one can imagine how it would have landed with a cultured pagan reader who chafed at Constantine’s religious policy and mistreatment of divine images. The message of peace and happiness in the first couplet is unobjectionable, but the second couplet is raucously funny (somewhat less so if explained). This is why Eros is laughing. Palladas has given the reader everything required to arrive at the most fundamental register of the statue’s original meaning, and then, in the final line, he delivers the propagandistic interpretation in deadpan. The ideal reader bursts into laughter at this point, because the image of a sensuously naked Eros, who is gentle and holds in place of his weapons a dolphin and a flower, is actually and obviously, in its most fundamental register, an expression of romantic love, seduction and consummation involving the male and female pudenda (or, if one was so inclined, an erect adult penis and a receptive boy in the flower of youth). The concealed joke is doubly funny in this case because, although Constantine was objectively victor terra marique, he (or his planners) did not entirely succeed in erasing an original erotic message that clashed with the emperor’s Christian sexual ethics. The joke is impish and humorous but not, it should be noted, politically subversive.
V
It may be possible to say a little more about this statue. Since the mid-nineteenth century, a strand of art-historical scholarship has maintained that Anth. Gr. 16.207 describes a known late Classical production by Praxiteles, namely, his Eros of Parium. The argument deserves brief consideration here.
Praxiteles was notable, among other things, for his interest in erotic themes and for his gravitation towards gentle and sensuous images. His most famous work was the beautiful Cnidian Aphrodite emerging nude from the bath. Among his other works were several Erotes, including statues for the two most prominent temples of Eros in the ancient world, at Thespiae and Parium. Our most secure, if also imperfect, indication of the appearance of the latter derives from some provincial coins minted in Parium between the mid-second and mid-third centuries (see e.g. Fig. 1).Footnote 111 On the reverse, these coins depict Praxiteles’ statue: a winged Eros with a sinuous body (this artist’s signature) and lacking weapons. His left arm is tightly flexed with its hand sitting at the god’s face or chest in earlier specimens, but at his hip in later ones. This variation in position is striking and suggests that the relationship between the coins and the statue was not intended to be strictly mimetic, perhaps especially in the later issues, which also deviate starkly from classical form. The god’s right arm is only loosely flexed and drifts away from the body, its hand sitting at the level of his waist or upper thighs (this is consistent across all issues). A small herm functioned as a statue support against the god’s right leg.Footnote 112
RPC-online IV.2, no. 9179 (temporary); Antoninus Pius (147–161 c.e.). Reverse legend: deo cvpi[d]ini col gem ivl ha[. (Image files are licensed Public Domain Mark 1.0. Berlin, Münzkabinett der Staatlichen Museen, 18304245. Photographs by Bernhard Weisser. Permalink: https://ikmk.smb.museum/object?id=18304245)
Pliny the Elder says the following about the same statue:Footnote 113
Eiusdem et alter nudus in Pario colonia Propontidis, par Veneri Cnidiae nobilitate et iniuria; adamavit enim Alcetas Rhodius atque in eo quoque simile amoris vestigium reliquit.
By the same artist [scil. Praxiteles] there is also another Eros, which is naked, in Parium, a colony on the Propontis. It is equal to the Cnidian Aphrodite in fame and in what it suffered; for Alcetas of Rhodes was enamoured with it and left on it a similar trace of his erotic love.
Pliny describes the Parian Eros as nudus. Since it is unremarkable in Greek art for male gods to be nude, he may be using the adjective in the same applied sense in which Palladas employs γυμνός in Anth. Gr. 16.207.1: ‘unarmed’ perhaps but also probably communicating heightened sensuality (as also in Christodorus’ description of a ‘nude’ and randy Poseidon offering his wet dolphin to Amymone; Anth. Gr. 2.1.65–8). Indeed, this effect of the Parian Eros on the viewer was so powerful that, according to tradition, one man threw off all decency and copulated with the statue (as had reportedly happened in the case of the Cnidian Aphrodite, too). For both Pliny and Palladas, this was a notable feature of the image(s) of Eros that they were describing.
K. B. Stark, in the mid-nineteenth century, was the first to propose that the Parian Eros was holding a dolphin in one hand and a flower in the other.Footnote 114 But before the nineteenth century was over, this hypothesis had been called into question by Percy Gardner: ‘On the coins we find no trace of the dolphin or the flower, which according to the theory of Stark the Parian Eros ought to carry in his hands. And although the die-cutters might consider a flower too small an object to copy on the small field of a coin, yet they could scarcely have thought this of the more bulky dolphin.’Footnote 115 But the statue described by Palladas depicted Eros with a dolphin in his hand, so it was also on a small scale. It is true that there are many reverse coin-types representing Poseidon with a small dolphin in his hand, most of these not very plausibly rendered but at least attempted. Of course, if the Parian die-cutters had been unable to depict a flower in the god’s left hand, it would have been of dubious value to attempt the dolphin in his right hand. They may have simply omitted both small attributes (which would have been on a scale of ∼2–4 mm).
While unconvinced by Stark’s hypothesis, Gardner did make a positive contribution, identifying several surviving terracotta statuettes as approximations in miniature of Praxiteles’ Parian Eros. There are variations among these statuettes in the objects held in either hand, but in the specimen published by Gardner the god’s hands, while seemingly posed as if holding something, are in fact empty (Fig. 2).Footnote 116 He supposes that there could have been a flower in the god’s left hand (although he seems to be of two minds on this point). He supposes that the god’s right hand, at the level of his waist, was not holding an attribute. But it appears to this observer that it was indeed grasping something (either imagined or lost) — something thicker than the stem of a flower, plausibly a small dolphin.Footnote 117
Gilded terracotta statuette of Eros (Hellenistic?); H. approx. 26 cm (excluding plinth). Reproduced from Gardner Reference Gardner1883 with the permission of the Journal of Hellenic Studies. The current whereabouts of the artefact are unknown to me.
The case made by some art historians for the relationship between Anth. Gr. 16.207 and Praxiteles’ Eros of Parium, while not certain, is attractive. Of course, if it is correct, these scholars could not have known that Palladas would have viewed the original not in the Parian Temple of Eros, but rather after it had been confiscated by Constantine in the 320s — along with the many other classical masterpieces that he had taken from the temples of the Greek world — perhaps modified, and then put to a completely new ideological use in Constantinople.Footnote 118
VI
Some of Palladas’ epigrams, including his ekphraseis, cannot be understood in isolation from their historical context. Furthermore, if more obliquely than narrative prose, they nevertheless supply an important body of contemporary evidence for the latter years of Constantine’s reign. In the case of statues that were confiscated and destroyed or repurposed, Palladas corroborates Eusebius’s account with remarkable congruity. There are also some tantalising details: a confiscated Tyche was incorporated into the ‘Gothic Column’, which stood in the vicinity of a tavern from its inception; the epigram on the bronze Herakles may shed light on the urban site known as ta Amastrianou; Praxiteles’ Parian Eros may have been among the confiscations — this would be unsurprising in itself — and then erected in Constantinople with a new ideological meaning.
These ekphraseis also shed light on Constantine’s broader agenda. When it comes to the fates suffered by temple statues, Eusebius was only really interested in the gods’ humiliation. He is not wrong about this aspect of the imperial agenda — Palladas corroborates it — but it is not the entire story. At least two of the ekphraseis suggest that the humiliating destruction of some was intended as retribution for the treatment of Christian bodies during the period of persecution (see above on Anth. Gr. 9.528; 16.194). One could infer this from Eusebius’ descriptions alone — gold and silver gods publicly flayed; bronzes bound, mutilated and thrown on the fire — but Eusebius was apparently reluctant to admit it openly, presumably because vengeance is not a very Christian passion.
In the case of the preserved images, too, Palladas augments our understanding. For one thing, the regime was evidently ventriloquising through some of them, erasing their original meaning and using them to express elements of Constantine’s own messaging. These statues were palimpsests. But there also appears to have been an almost literary game afoot in the various manipulations of meaning. It is not always easy to know where the Constantinian game ends and Palladas’ begins, but the Tyche of the ‘Gothic Column’ who was keeping tavern was thereby certainly (and unfortunately) now akin to a lowly prostitute.Footnote 119 The Olympians were converted — either into Christians or into coins. Those coins depicted Nike, who was forced to bring her gifts to a Christian capital. Bronze Eros, as befits his character, was put in the fire, and then repeatedly back in the fire in the form of a frying pan (this perhaps a purely Palladan invention but capturing a very real phenomenon). Scylla was put in a place where she was visible from the sea and could menace the sailors approaching the city. The defeated Herakles was now a slave, lying at a topographical crossroads that may have doubled as the mythical crossroads of virtue and vice. The manipulation of the Eros of Anth. Gr. 16.207 seems to have engaged in ways both intelligent and horrifying with the complex tradition pertaining to this god (even if, in a battle of wits, Palladas was invincible). This must be the sort of thing that Eusebius had in mind when he said that Constantine erected former cult statues for the purpose of mockery and amusement, but Palladas provides a glimpse into what seems to have been a massive ideological programme of playful (re)interpretation in Constantinople. This was, paradoxically, an iconoclasm expressed through images and a cultured barbarism: turning the literary and artistic tradition against itself, both destructive and creative, both reflecting and contributing to Christianity’s complicated relationship with the Classical legacy.Footnote 120 But one thing that both Eusebius and Palladas make perfectly clear is that Constantine’s interest in pagan — or rather ‘classical’ — imagery was in no way an expression of pagan piety. Quite the contrary. This was an emperor who understood the power of images, but who was unmistakably and triumphantly Christian.
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