Among the papyri buried by the 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius is Philodemus’ Index Academicorum, a chronicle of the early stages of the Academy at Athens. The editions of that text hitherto published (esp. Mekler, Index, 1902; Gaiser, Philochoros, 1982; Dorandi, Filodemo, 1991) differ significantly from each other in certain hardly readable passages, e.g. the 2nd column. I attempted to read thoroughly the passage in question anew. The extant text with minimal emendations led to an interpretation of the text which differs in no uncertain manner from the interpretation put forward by Gaiser.


The column contains two citations, one of which is attributed to Philochorus, and both of which seem to speak about sculpted images erected in the Academy (Gaiser, Philochoros, 1982) This much is uncontroversial. But whereas Gaiser thought the text would be about two statues, one of Apollo, one of Isocrates, made by a sculptor named Boutes, my reading suggests the following: Philodemus cites two passages which mention the same work of art, namely a bust or a herm representing Socrates made by a sculptor called Sotes.


The finding that it is a bust or a herm rather than a full body statue can be deduced from the double appearance of the unusual phrase eikóna prósopon chalkoûn which must be translated ‘an image, viz. a face of bronze’. The finding that the sculptor’s name is Sotes rather than Boutes follows from the fact that on the papyrus the remnants of an omega still can be seen and before that there is space for only one letter. Sotes is the only Attic name to which the remnants can be emended. Furthermore Sotes can be brought into relationship with Sotades, the well-known rhyton-maker. The finding that the represented person is Socrates rather than Isocrates follows from similar palaeographical reasons (especially the spacing in that line, which suggests an omega rather than an omicron in that word) and furthermore abolishes the problem with Gaiser’s reading why Plato of all people should have put up an image of Isocrates: taken what he thought of rhetoric in general. The finding finally that it is two citations from two different sources dealing with the same image rather than citations from one source dealing with two distinct images is perhaps the least compelling of the four, but it can be maintained that it is at least as good as the competing hypothesis.


This bust seems to have been erected rather early after Socrates’ death by Plato. It can be dated earlier than the ‘official’ statue made by Lysippus after 350 BC and is thus unrelated to the latter (since the locus is taken from the 4th book of Philochorus’ Atthis, which covers the time between 403/2 and 359/8 BC). This opens an interesting line of thought. All extant representations of Socrates belong to two ‘types’ (Richter, Portraits, 1965, 109-119). Whereas for the so-called Type B the Lysippean statue can be established as the archetype, for Type A no archetype could be found, especially since the Lysippean statue soon became the standard depiction of Socrates. Could it be that the archetype of the Type A representations is this bust mentioned by Philochorus? In favour of that view one could state that the archetype of Type A should be earlier than the Lysippean statue since the latter soon became so famous that it is hard to imagine how a competing image type could evolve. Furthermore the use of the highly specific phrase eikóna prósopon chalkoûn suggests that this image should be thought of as an image which does not show only tò prósopon but (presumably) the whole body. Finally, all examples of Type A are busts, so that its archetype can have been a bust as well; at least it does not need to have been a full-body-representation. So it is possible that the bust described by Philochorus in the citation is the archetype of the Type-A-images of Socrates.


References:
T. Dorandi (ed.), Filodemo. Storia dei Filosofi: Platone e l’Academia, Napoli 1991.
K. Gaiser, Philochoros über zwei Statuen in Athen. In: Festschrift U. Hausmann, Tübingen 1982, pp. 91-100.
S. Mekler (ed.), Academicorum Philosophorum Index Herculanensis, Berlin 1902 (²1958).
G.M.A. Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks, London 1965.

 

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