A New Join in the Amazon Frieze of the Mausoleum

Abstract

The join is between the right end of 1008 and the left end of 1010, (plate Ia, b). The reason why it has escaped notice is that the Knights of St John, when building the reliefs into the walls of the Castle of St Peter at Bodrum, hacked the slab in two clumsily, destroying several inches of the front surface in doing so. Once the two pieces had been set up in the British Museum, with slab 1009 interposed, and catalogued in that order, the join was unlikely to be recognised, for the subjects do not at first sight appear to connect, and the join even now is not obvious from the front, because of the rough way in which the block was split in two; but when the fractured surfaces further back in the slab are brought together, the correspondence of the contours leaves no doubt whatever that they fit, and thus produce a single, very large, slab, nearly nine and a half feet long, as against the seven feet odd of the next longest survivor, 1022.The new join is of interest partly because it prolongs a continuous run of the frieze (1007 plus 1008) by several feet (plate Ib), giving a sequence of eleven figures, if we include the two legs at the right edge; but chiefly because the composition thus produced regains a significance which the separation of its parts had obscured. The figure on 1008 who wields a club and wears a lion's skin must surely be Herakles: the addition of 1010 on the right shows that this important figure is balanced by another Greek who ought to be equally important, and who is engaged with an Amazon on horseback. Would this not be Theseus? On Athenian vases of a century earlier, a composition not unlike this, of the duel between Theseus and an Amazon, each using a spear, was already established (plate Ic): its prototype may have been in some famous wall-painting, and the designer of the Mausoleum frieze may have drawn his inspiration directly from that or from some version of it in another work of art now also lost to us. The identity of the two Amazons is a separate problem.