Fifth-century literature continues to present us with personification at all levels, and it can sometimes be difficult to tell where to draw the line between rhetorical device and a figure which the ancient audience would have taken more seriously. When Euripides’ Cyclops declares that ‘‘Wealth is the only god for the wise’’ {Cyclops 316), we may be right to laugh at his cynicism, but there is a little evidence that Wealth {Ploutos) had a place in the Athenian cult of Demeter. Conversely, Pindar’s address to Quiet {Hesychia) - ‘‘Kindly Quiet, daughter of Justice who makes cities very great, you who hold the sovereign keys of councils and of wars... ’’ {Pythian 8.1-4) - exhibits several formal features of the hymn genre, suggestive of real cult status, and yet the fact that Quiet appears nowhere else in literature or art gives grounds for suspecting that she is here the product of poetic license. The most important development in classical literature as far as personification is concerned, however, is drama. Personifications feature in the dialogue of both tragedy and comedy, but most significantly a number actually appear as characters on stage. In surviving tragedy we see just three - Might and Force in the Prometheus Bound and Madness in Euripides’ Madness of Heracles - but many more must have had a part in lost plays. Several are included in Pollux’s list of tragic characters requiring ‘‘special masks’’ {4.141-2): a river, a mountain, Justice, Death, Madness, Frenzy, Arrogance, the Indos river, City, Persuasion, Muses, Seasons, Deceit, Drunkenness, Sloth, Envy. In comedy personified characters play an even more important part. Aristophanes has Just and Unjust Arguments debating at length in the Clouds, while a character called The People has a central role in the Knights, as does Wealth in the Wealth, which also features Poverty; in the Peace, Peace is attended by Vintage and Festival, and the silent Sovereignty and Reconciliation appear in Birds and Lysistrata respectively. Several lost comedies humorously elaborated on the old idea of the poet’s relationship with his Muse: ‘‘Cratinus created the fiction that Comedy was his wife and wished to leave the marital home and bring a suit against him for ill-treatment...’’ {scholium on Knights 400; see Sommerstein 2005). Such characters may be purely inventions of the playwright to suit the dramatic circumstances of the moment, but the fact that personifications were presented in physical form must have helped to give them substance in the popular imagination, as must the increased range of personified figures to be found in fifth-century vase-painting. These enjoy a particular vogue in the work of the Meidias Painter and his circle around 420-400 BC, which is busy with female figures accompanying Aphrodite with names like Happiness, Play, Lawfulness, Harmony, Persuasion, Good Fortune, Fair Fame, Health, Freedom-from-Toil; to these we might add the youthful winged males, duplicates of Eros, labeled as Desire, Yearning, and even Sweet-Talk. These figures have often been dismissed as superficial decorative devices, contributing to a general ‘‘feel-good’’ atmosphere, but close study reveals that they are carefully chosen and arranged to convey sophisticated messages, playing an important part in the development of allegory in Greek art {Borg 2005; Shapiro 1986). Personifications also begin to appear in free-standing sculpture, as we already seen in Agorakritos’ Nemesis and Naukydes’ Youth, although they are only identifiable where a specific cult context is known.
In three cases of cults which are first attested in the fifth century the personification is closely associated with an Olympian deity. The first also has some small mythological pedigree of her own: Persuasion {Peitho) appears briefly in Hesiod {Works and Days 73-5) alongside the Graces as Aphrodite’s assistants in the creation of Pandora, whom they endow with the power of seduction. Inscriptions attest that Persuasion and the Graces were worshiped together on the islands of Paros and Thasos in the hellenistic period, while a single inscription from late fifth-century Thasos gives us a ‘‘sanctuary of Persuasion’’ alone (IG xii 8.360). Another ‘‘sanctuary of Persuasion’’ is located in the agora at Sicyon in the Argolid, though Pausanias’ account (2.7.7-8) of the purification ritual enacted there may indicate that the sanctuary was dedicated to Apollo and Artemis ‘‘the Persuaded’’ rather than Persuasion herself. Most other evidence, however, puts Persuasion in close association with Aphrodite, the two even appearing in one or two locations as a single deity, ‘‘Aphrodite Persuasion.’’ Most extensively documented is the cult of Persuasion at Athens, where she is worshiped alongside Aphrodite Pandemos, ‘‘of All the People.’’ A small sanctuary on the southwest slope of the Acropolis can be identified as that of Aphrodite Pandemos and Persuasion on the basis of Pausanias’ mention of their statues (1.22.3) and of several inscriptions found in the vicinity. It is a matter of debate how early either goddess became established there: an ancient tradition attributes the establishment of Aphrodite Pandemos’ cult to Solon, which is not entirely implausible, but Persuasion was probably a later addition, arriving in the late sixth century (Pirenne-Delforge 1991) or towards the end of the fifth (Stafford 2000:121-9). We have unequivocal evidence for Persuasion’s cult status from the mid-fourth century, when state sacrifices to her are mentioned by Isocrates (Antidosis 259) and Demosthenes (Prooimia 54). The importance of persuasion as a concept in the classical period can certainly be demonstrated by a study of fifth-century literature (Buxton 1982), which naturally tends to emphasize its rhetorical aspect, but in vase-painting, as in cult, Persuasion personified consistently appears in the company of Aphrodite, bringing to the fore the more erotic side of her character. That this ‘‘seductive’’ aspect was important in cult is further suggested by Plutarch’s assertion that Persuasion is one of the five gods invoked by those getting married (Roman Questions, Moralia 264b), and that she and the Graces used to be worshiped after marriage ‘‘so that couples might persuade each other to do what they want, and not fight or be contentious’’ (Advice to the Bride and Groom, Moralia 138d; Stafford 1999).
Unlike all the figures we have considered so far, Fair Fame (Eukleia) has no mythological profile in archaic literature and art, but her earliest appearance in cult does link her closely with an Olympian goddess. Pausanias (9.17.1) reports a temple of ‘‘Artemis Fair Fame’’ at Thebes, with a statue by the fourth-century sculptor Scopas, and the goddess’ cult was already well established in Boeotia by the early fifth century according to Plutarch (Aristides 20). He tells the story of a man called Euchidas, who ran from Plataia to Delphi and back in a day in order to fetch new fire, a ritual purification after the final defeat of the Persians; having run 125 miles in a single day, Euchidas promptly collapsed and died, but was honored by burial within the sanctuary of Artemis Eukleia. Even if the anecdote is not entirely reliable, Plutarch is likely to have been well informed about sanctuaries in his native Boeotia. He goes on to comment that ‘‘most people believe Eukleia to be Artemis, and call her by that name,’’ although some say that she is the daughter of Heracles and Myrto, worshiped in Boeotia and Locris; ‘‘there is an altar and statue established to her in every marketplace, and brides and grooms sacrifice to her.’’ On the basis of Plutarch’s generalization, scholars have assumed that a festival called simply ‘‘the Eukleia,’’ attested at Delphi and at Corinth and further implied by the month name Eukleios at Corcyra (a Corinthian colony), was in honor of Artemis. Some details of the Corinthian festival are incidentally supplied by Xenophon’s indignant account {Hellenica 4.4.2) of the massacre which took place on the last day of its celebration in spring 392 BC. The day was specifically chosen by the revolutionaries because they thought ‘‘there would be more people in the marketplace to kill,’’ and many people were killed while watching musical or dramatic competitions. At Athens, on the other hand, Fair Fame seems to be quite independent of Artemis, with a temple of her own which was ‘‘a dedication from the Persians who fought at Marathon’’ {Pausanias 1.14.5); this should be somewhere in or near the agora, although it has not been identified on the ground. Fair Fame appears together with Lawfulness {Eunomia) on a number of vases of ca. 410-400 BC, which provide some support for the suggestion that a joint cult of the two personifications began at Athens in the late fifth century, although it is only in the late hellenistic period that we have firm evidence for this, in the form of inscriptions mentioning a priest and a sanctuary of the pair. It has been suggested that the Athenian cult might have derived from the Plataean one, or that it was influenced by a joint cult on the island of Aegina {Shapiro 1993:70-8), although the latter is attested only by an allusion in Bacchylides to Aegina being guided by Virtue together with ‘‘crown-loving Fair Fame and wise Lawfulness’’ {Odes 13.182-6; ca. 480 BC).
Health {Hygieia) likewise appears in cult before we find her represented in art or literature. Her early history in the Peloponnese is hazy, but we have unusually clear evidence for her introduction into Athenian cult alongside the healing god Asclepius. The event is actually recorded on the early fourth-century ‘‘Telemachus Monument,’’ a stele with relief sculpture and inscriptions {IG ii2 4960), which gives precise years for various stages of the sanctuary’s development, beginning in 420/419 BC: ‘‘Tele-machus founded the sanctuary and altar to Asclepius first, and Health, the sons of Asclepius and daughters... .’’ The stele was found on the south slope of the Acropolis to the west of the Theater of Dionysus, on the site of Asclepius’ sanctuary, which seems to have been substantially developed in the middle of the fourth century. Asclepius’ sons are the healing heroes Podaleiros and Machaon, his daughters usually named as Health, Cure-All {Panakeia), laso, and Akeso {both names related to words for ‘‘healing’’). Pride of place clearly goes to Health, both on the Telemachus Monument and in other textual references to the family, and it is Health whom we see most frequently in art. Her appearance on half a dozen or so Attic vases of ca. 420-400 BC may well be due to her recent arrival as a cult figure, but more significant of her divine status are the seventy or more votive reliefs of the late fifth and fourth centuries on which she features. This category of relief sculpture is by definition from a cult context and the images employ the convention of representing deities on a larger scale than humans, which confirms that Health is regarded as on a par with the god Asclepius whom she accompanies. Some of these reliefs are from the Athenian Asclepieion, and Health’s important role here is further indicated by her pairing with Asclepius in later inscriptions: ‘‘it is the ancestral custom of the physicians who are in the service of the state to sacrifice to Asclepius and to Hygieia twice each year on behalf of their own bodies and of those they have healed’’ {IG ii2 772.913; ca. 250 BC). In addition to the reliefs, the image of Health appeared in sanctuaries of Asclepius all over the Greek world from the mid-fourth century onwards in the form of statues. Art historians divide these into a number of iconographical types, but in all of them Health is a young woman, demurely dressed, with a snake around her shoulders or beside her, which she feeds from a shallow dish: for the first time, a personified figure is made recognizable by something other than an inscription (Stafford 2000:147-71; cf. Stafford 2005d).
World History
