Harmodius and Aristogeiton  

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Harmodius (Ἁρμόδιος / Harmódios) and Aristogeiton (Ἀριστογείτων / Aristogeítôn; both died 514 BC) were two men from ancient Athens. They became known as the Tyrannicides (τυραννοκτόνοι) after they killed the Peisistratid tyrant Hipparchus, and were the preeminent symbol of democracy to ancient Athenians.

Statues and artistic depictions

After the establishment of democracy, Cleisthenes commissioned the sculptor Antenor to produce a bronze statue group of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It was the first commission of its kind, and the very first statue to be paid for out of public funds, as the two were the first Greeks considered by their countrymen worthy of having statues raised to them.

According to Pliny the Elder, it was erected in the Kerameikos in 509, as part of a cenotaph of the heroes. Annual offerings (enagismata) were presented there by the polemarch, the Athenian minister of war. There it stood alone as special laws prohibited the erection of any other statues in their vicinity. Upon its base was inscribed a verse by the poet Simonides: "A marvelous great light shone upon Athens when Aristogeiton and Harmodios slew Hipparchus."

The statue was taken as war booty in 480 BC by Xerxes I during the early Greco-Persian Wars and installed by him at Susa. As soon as the Greeks vanquished the Persians at Salamis, a new statue was commissioned. It was sculpted this time by Kritios and Nesiotes, and set up in 477/476 BC. It is the one which served as template for the group we possess today, which was found in the ruins of Hadrian's villa and is now in Naples. According to Arrian, when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire, in 330, he discovered the statue at Susa and had it shipped back to Athens. When the statue, on its journey back, arrived at Rhodos it was given divine honors.

Several comments of the ancients regarding the statue have come down to us. When asked, in the presence of Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, which type of bronze was the best, Antiphon the Sophist replied, "That of which the Athenians made the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton." Lycurgus, in his oration against Leocrates, asserts that, "In the rest of Greece you will find statues erected in the public places to the conquerors in the games, but amongst you they are dedicated only to good generals, and to those who have destroyed tyrants. Other sculptors made statues of the heroes, such as Praxiteles, who made two, also of bronze.

The statue group has been seen, in modern times, as an invitation to identify erotically and politically with the figures, and to become oneself a tyrannicide. According to Andrew Stuart, the statue "not only placed the homoerotic bond at the core of Athenian political freedom, but asserted that it and the manly virtues (aretai) of courage, boldness and self-sacrifice that it generated were the only guarantors of that freedom’s continued existence."

The configuration of the group is duplicated on a painted vase, a Panathenaic amphora from 400, and on a base-relief on the Elgin throne, dated to ca. 300.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Harmodius and Aristogeiton" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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