Kieran HENDRICK
What does it mean when a statue spits blood? Athens
and Augustus reconsidered
An anecdote in the corpus of Plutarch's Moralia (207e) records the following undated
incident: when the Athenians seemed to have done
something wrong, Augustus wrote from Aegina that he
didn't want his anger to escape their notice; otherwise,
he would not have wintered there. It has been proposed,
from the chronology of Augustus' travels in the East,
that this 'anger' must have resulted from an incident in
around 22/1 B.C.E. Therefore this brief notice has been
connected with the claim of Cassius Dio (54.7.1-4) that
during his travels of 21 B.C.E. Augustus deprived the
Athenians of tribute from Aegina and Eretria, because
they favoured Antony, and he forbade them to sell their
citizenship. Dio associates this with an odd event, in
which an unspecified statue of Athena on the Athenian
Acropolis turned from east to west and spat blood. Though
often interpreted as a 'miracle' staged by anti-Augustan
partisans, triggering the anger of Augustus, such a
narrative is based on over-interpretation of the sources,
and it does not take enough account of Dio's historical
method. Since the incident has become a prism through
which the whole history of the dealings of Athens and
Augustus is viewed, when reconsidered it should alter our
presumptions about this period.
The narrative relevance of the spitting statue is as a
portent. In Dio's Histories, portents of statues exuding
blood are extremely common; the two other cases of
statues changing their orientation are both portents of
military disaster. If the event on the Acropolis was
staged as an act of political opposition, the most
plausible statue that could have been employed is the
statue of Athena Nike. Surely, then, the incident took
place ahead of a battle (cf. Dio 46.33.3-4). There is no
situation in late first century Athens in which this
could have any meaning, except the eve of the battle of
Actium: thus it was yet another Athenian portent of
Antony's defeat. Dio's information on Athens in this
period is not very reliable, and it may be that an
anti-Augustan source which he was using had transferred
the statue incident from an Actium portent to Augustus'
'punishment'. Because some had seen a connection between
what happened to the statue of Athena and Augustus'
actions, Dio described them in the same section; an
imperial visit was a narrative opportunity to relate
several chronologically unrelated events in the
provinces.
But anyway, were Augustus' actions a punishment caused by
his anger? More likely they were motivated by his
programme of "moral rearmament" of cities with a great
classical past. The loss of Athenian control over Aegina
and Eretria looks more like the restoration of freedom to
two of the great poleis of the classical period, rather
than his punishment against the Athenians. Similarly,
selling citizenship&emdash;a ghastly perversion in the
eyes of a Roman aristocrat&emdash;was banned. This need
not have brought a serious loss of revenue, since it
seems that in the first century B.C.E. many foreigners
were naturalized as Athenians by participating in the
ephebate, not through purchase.
Abstracts
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