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Michael W. Taylor, The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in Fifth Century BC Athenian Art and Politics2. Salem: Ayer, 1991. Pp. xxi + 115, incl. 37 plates. ISBN 0-88143-113-3. US$25.
Taylor sets out to analyse the significance of the Tyrannicides' statues set up in the Athenian Agora, and their subsequent influence on art and literature throughout the fifth century. Chapter 1, 'Athenian Laws and Customs Regarding the Tyrannicides', factually establishes the fame of Harmodios and Aristogeiton and the public honours paid to them and their descendants. Chapter II, 'The Statue Groups of the Tyrannicides', looks briefly at the evidence for the first 'Antenor' group stolen by Xerxes and for the replacement by Kritios and Nesiotes. It is anomalous that neither here, where arguably most relevant, nor in the later chapters tracing visual influence, where most needed, does this monograph offer a single illustration showing the statues' appearance.1 Nevertheless, Taylor does show that the statues were a 'tangible symbol of Athenian liberty ... an heroic image which was ever present and ready for emulation' (p. 19). This is an important premise for what is essentially his main thesis in the fourth chapter, that the representations of Theseus on vases between about 470 and 450 BC were deliberately composed after the pattern of Harmodios or Aristogeiton.
First, however, Taylor offers in Chapter III, The Tyrannicide Scolia and Epigram', discussion of the elevation of Harmodios and Aristogeiton to a heroic, even Homeric, level by the associations of the words and images used in the skolia. Most times when Taylor quotes texts in the original he provides an English translation,...