TFBT: Metopes at Thermon, Temple C, with Kathryn R. Topper

 Just participated in a wide-ranging and fascinating presentation at a CHS Online Open House | Metopes at Thermon, Temple C, with Kathryn R. Topper.  She offered lots of insights and things to think about.  You must watch this presentation. Here is the link.  

Here are a few random notes. 

Topper suggested a correspondence between men hunting animals and men chasing after women.  The iconic visual representation of that being Peleus wrestling down shape-shifting Thetis.  She also showed parallel images of a man chasing a woman with two spears and guy about to stab (penetrate) a boar with two spears.  Someone asked what does it mean when the boar gashed the man in the thigh? Topper explained that it was rejection of the marriage paradigm.  [It is also a euphemism for castration!]

The temple was decorated with a metope of the sisters Chelidon and Aedon. Their story is essentially the story of sisters Procne and Philomela.  Procne was given in marriage to the Thracian King Tereus.  [You know how they are.]  She bore him a son Itys.   Only to discover that Tereus had raped and mutilated her sister Philomela.  The two sisters get revenge by cooking up the boy and feeding him to his father.  Eventually the gods turn everyone into birds and they fly their separate ways.  Topper commented that this is a ritualized returning to the father’s womb.  I am going to have to rethink the cannibalism of Cronus and Thyestes. 

She suggested that the three naked women on one metope were the daughters of Proitos; the Proetides.  Their myth is about the madness that over came them when they were impious towards Hera and refused to participate in the rite of passage that would have made them eligible for marriage.      Personally, I would have assumed that three naked women would represent a triad of goddesses. 

I thought it odd at this point that there was no connection between the mortals on the metopes and the location of the temple. The temple is located in western Greece, north of the Peloponnesian Peninsula and the Gulf of Patras.   Aedon’s story takes place in Colophon in Lydia, far across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor.  The Proetides myth takes place far to the south in Tiryns, one of three Mycenaean strongholds in the Argolid,   Generally, the mortals associated with a temple represent some local myth and with a temple of this age a foundation myth for the area.

She reminded us that Medusa was once a beautiful maiden seduce by Poseidon in a field of flowers.  We discussed off camera that her monstrous features came about because of a curse by Athena; a late tradition.  I pointed out a similar “bed of roses” in Hera seduction of Zeus on Mount Ida and that the head of the monstrous Medusa on slide 20 was actually the Aegis.  After Perseus cut off Medusa head and turned several enemies into stone, Athena attached the head to her tasseled breastplate called the Aegis.

Jack asked if Medusa ever got her revenge on Perseus.  Topper answered no.  But, as I thought about, not only did neither of her sons; Chrysaor and Pegasus avenge her, but most of her descendants were actually slain by Perseus’ descendants.  Most famously Heracles slew her grandson Geryon. 

As to the Perseides killing the brood of Echidna (Medusa’s granddaughter); there is no crime (sin) in killing strangers or monsters.  The Furies would only care if you kill a family member.  Which would suggest that they should have been all over the Procne and Philomela story like they were in the case of Atreus and Thyestes.  It strikes me this is why the gods turn them all into birds.  The gods can’t deny the Furies their prerogatives of retching revenge on the family, but they can turn them into birds before the “Kindly Ones” arrive therebye stopping the cycle of violence the house of Atreus was so famous for.  

Topper also suggested that what started the cycle of violence in the Chelidon and Aedon/ Procne and Philomela story was Procne violating the marriage paradigm by inviting her younger sister to come live with her and her husband.  (Hmm, that sounds like a really bad idea in the first place.)  By violating the marriage paradigm, they become young girls in the chorus of again, animal-like feral women, maenads, the Theban bacchantes on Mt Cithaeron who ribbed their children limb-from-limb..