THE MARATHON BOY & THE SATYR

Author: * DIonysia Xanthippos - 7 Posts on this thread out of 206 Posts sitewide.
Date: Mar 24, 2006 - 23:06

Boy from Marathon Bay. Bronze. Height 4 ft, 3 in. Late 4th c BC. Athens, National Museum.

Satyr Pouring Wine. Roman marble copy of a lost bronze by Praxiteles, 370-360 BC. Height 44 in Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Praxiteles' mistress and model, the courtesan Phrynê (she posed for his famous Aphrodite of Knidos) once asked her lover to give her one of his statues. And not just any statue, but the one he felt was most beautiful. Pausanias, the famous traveller and writer of the "Guide to Greece," wrote that the sculptor,

"lover-like, agreed to give it to her but refused to say which one he thought the most beautiful. So Phrynê had her slave rush in yelling that a fire had broken out in Praxiteles' studio, and most of his works had perished, though some had been saved. Praxiteles started to rush out the door, crying all his work was wasted if the flames had reached his Satyr and his Eros. But Phrynê told him to stay and not be afraid; he hadn't really lost a thing; he had just been tricked into telling her which of his works were the most beautiful. So Phrynê chose the statue of Eros. " (Pausanias, "Guide To Greece," I.20. 1-2)

I, too, feel torn between Eros and a Satyr, between Love and Lust - at least in deciding who and what the Boy from Marathon might be. But since Praxiteles' Eros has not survived, except perhaps in a splendid marble torso from a Roman copy, we are left with a satyr. With more than one, in fact. For several marble copies of satyrs said to be by Praxiteles exist. The satyr I've chosen here, in two different copies, is:

Plaster cast of a marble Roman copy of a lost bronze by Praxiteles from the Beazley Cast Collection, Oxford.

THE WINE-POURING SATYR (above, right; and directly left).
This naked boy with luxuriant wavy hair decorated with ivy berries and tied with a band over his forehead looks so much like the Marathon Boy in face and form and pose that, except for his pointed goatish ears, he looks like an identical twin. Though the original bronze or marble statue is lost, this marble [Roman?] copy (above,rght), somewhat worse for wear - his flesh is much abraded, and he's lost his arms and lower legs, resides in Baltimore, in the Walters Art Museum. Without his marble arms and legs, we can't tell if he was able to stand up on his own, without some sort of support.

However, in this plaster cast (left) from a different marble copy, we can see that to steady and strengthen his legs and lower his center of gravity his Roman copier had to resort to a stump up the rump. (Sorry, I do not have the height of this piece.) It looks as if he also masculinized or "Romanized" the young satyr by beefing up his torso and squaring up his face until he looks years older - old enough to shave.

So why show this copy? One reason is to show that even with all his limbs and extra weight, his counter-weighting (contrapossto) is still so finely balanced that even in marble no pillar or tree-trunk is needed to support his two extended arms. ("Contra-possto" or "contra-posto," by the way, does not mean "against a post.") Still less so would the four-foot marble copy of the pouring satyr shown above. (The loss of his arms and legs was surely not due to his lack of a tree trunk as a crutch to lean against.) Therefore neither would the original bronze satyr copied by these marble knock-offs need any external prop or support.

Which shows why the Marathon Boy needs no post or tree trunk.
Unlike Praxiteles' Apollo Sauroctinos ("The Lizard-Killer"), which in bronze needs only a slender tree trunk, a mere sapling, for the lizard to crawl upon, the bronze boy from Marathon, even with his right arm extended straight out at 10 o'clock, needs no support of any sort, not even for pictorial or narrative reasons.

DOES THIS MEAN OUR MARATHON BOY MAY BE GANYMEDE?
I can imagine that Aulus Servius, while seeing these photos and reading the above, may be grinning from ear to ear to think all this supports his seeing the Marathon boy as Ganymede, the young boy abducted by Zeus and brought up to Mt. Olympos to be his lover and cupbearer and server of wine to the gods.

In the plaster copy of the Pouring Satyr, we can all but see the missing jug or pitcher (oenichoe) in his right hand and in his left a phiale -- a shallow stemless dish used for drinking wine. And it is tempting, especially after a drink or two, to see a similar pitcher and phiale held by the Marathon Boy. And then to see him as Ganymede. But it's a bit of a stretch to see how, with his right arm held straight out at 10 o'clock, the wine could stream from that height and sharper angle into the phiale on his left. So Ganymede remains in the running, perhaps, but has yet to cross the finish line and win the crown.

Hermes, too, is still a strong candidate. And so are others, including Eros. Which brings us back to the story about Phrynê and Praxiteles.

Athenaeus says that after Phrynê chose the Eros instead of the Satyr, she offered it as a votive gift to Thespiae in Boeotia, where she was born. This made her city instantly famous, the "city being otherwise not worth seeing," says Strabo ("Geography," IX.2.25). So famous was its Eros, especially for gays, that Lucian's companion on their trip to Knidos to visit Praxiteles' Aphrodite said he would rather have gone to Thespiae to see his Eros.

The Thespians weren't able to hang onto their Eros, however. In his "Guide to Greece" (IX.27.3-4) Pausanias tells us the statue was later ordered carted off to Rome by Caligula when he became emperor. Claudius ordered it returned to the Thespians, only to have Nero take it back again to Rome, where it was destroyed in a fire. So the lie told by Phryne's slave boy turned out to be prophetic?