Memnon was the king of the Ethiopians, the great black king of the dawn, who came to Troy with his army to help his uncle Priam and who was killed by Achilles in single combat. The story is told in the Aethiopis, the third poem of the Epic Cycle (the first three of which are the Cypria, the Iliad, and the Aethiopis), and the Aethiopis is now lost. We have only the summary of Proclus and the references in later writers. But the Memnon story is one of the most colourful episodes of the Trojan War cycle, and Memnon himself became one of the great figures of the late classical and Hellenistic cult, with a famous sanctuary at Egyptian Thebes, a colossal statue (the Colossi of Memnon) at Thebes that became one of the seven wonders of the Roman tourist trade, and a continuing afterlife in late antique and medieval literature. He is one of the few Greek heroes whose cult centred in Egypt rather than in the Aegean.
The Son of Eos
Memnon was the son of Eos, goddess of the dawn, and Tithonus, prince of Troy, brother of Priam. The story of Tithonus is the central myth of Memnon’s ancestry. Eos had fallen in love with Tithonus, and she had asked Zeus to grant him immortality, but she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus lived forever, but he grew older and older, and his body withered, and his voice dwindled, and finally he turned into a cicada (or, in some sources, a grasshopper), and Eos wept for him. The myth of Tithonus is one of the most poignant in the Greek tradition, and the Tennyson poem of the same name (1860) is the most-read modern treatment.
Memnon is the son of this union, and his mother Eos is the figure whose grief at his death is one of the great set-pieces of the cycle. After Memnon is killed at Troy, Eos weeps for him, and her tears are the morning dew, and her wings are the rosy dawn. The story is told in Aethiopis and was a famous subject of Greek and Roman art: Eos carrying the body of Memnon, Eos weeping over the corpse, Eos asking Zeus to give her son the gift of immortality in death.
Memnon at Troy
According to the Aethiopis, Memnon came to Troy with a great army of Ethiopians and Susians (Susa, in southwestern Iran, was the eastern ally in the standard geography). He arrived in the eleventh year of the war, the year after the death of Hector, and he joined the Trojans as a major ally. The Aethiopis tells the story in the standard formula: Memnon was the son of Eos and Tithonus, he was the king of the Ethiopians, he came to Troy with ten thousand troops, he fought the Greeks, and he was killed by Achilles.
The Memnon story has two famous moments. The first is the duel with Achilles, which is told in the Aethiopis in the standard form of the great single combat. The two fight, both are brave, both are helped by the gods, and the duel goes on for some time, with the gods weighing the fates in the balance (this is the Aethiopis’s main innovation, and it is the source of the Latin word aethiopis, “of an Ethiopian”). At the critical moment, Zeus weighs the souls of the two heroes on his golden scales, and the scale dips for Memnon. He is killed.
The second famous moment is the death of Antilochus, the son of Nestor, who tries to save Memnon from Achilles, and who is killed in the attempt. Antilochus had been one of the ephebes, the young heroes of the Greek side, and his death is the hinge of the Aethiopis: it is the death of a Greek youth at the hands of a Trojan ally, and the death is what Achilles avenges in killing Memnon. The story is the model for the more famous Patroclus story (Achilles’ friend is killed, Achilles avenges him by killing Hector), and the Aethiopis is, in fact, the older of the two: the Iliad’s Patroclus story is itself modelled on the Aethiopis’s Antilochus story. (The Antilochus story is also told in the Odyssey, in Book XI, where Odysseus meets Antilochus in the underworld and praises him as one of the best of the Greek dead.)
The Immortality of Memnon
After Memnon is killed, his mother Eos comes to Zeus and begs for her son’s immortality. Zeus grants it, and Memnon is taken up to the Elysian Fields. The Aethiopis tells the story, and the immortality is one of the standard Greek examples of the apotheosis of a non-Olympian hero. The story has a particular resonance in Egypt, where Memnon was identified with the great cult of Amenhotep III at Thebes. The colossal statues of Amenhotep III at Thebes, the largest of which is the Colossus of Memnon (about 18 metres high), were called Memnon by the Greeks, and they were reputed to sing a mournful note at dawn. The Greek tourist-guide author Strabo (c. 64 BCE – c. 24 CE) describes the singing, and the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211 CE) is reported to have restored the voice of one of the statues by a partial restoration.
The identification of Memnon with the Theban colossi is a case of the Greek tradition fitting itself around an older Egyptian reality. The statues are of Amenhotep III, who died in the fourteenth century BCE, and the Greek identification with Memnon is the standard reading. The story of the singing is a Greek reading of a natural phenomenon (the slight movement of the cold stone in the morning sun, which would produce a low noise) combined with the story of Eos weeping for her son. The combining of Egyptian and Greek traditions is one of the most beautiful examples of cross-cultural myth-making in the ancient world.
The Cult of Memnon
The cult of Memnon was panhellenic, and it had a particular centre in Attica and in the Peloponnese. Strabo reports a sanctuary of Memnon in the deme of Ptoion in Boeotia; Pausanias reports a sanctuary at Aegina and at Tiryns; the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia reports a cult at Tanagra. The sanctuaries were especially important in the years after the Persian Wars, and the cult of Memnon at the Ptoion in Boeotia was, in some readings, a place of refuge for the Boeotian Greeks during the Persian Wars. The cults had little to do with the original Aethiopis story; they were a kind of post-Persian or post-Macedonian imperial cult, in which the great black king of the dawn became a symbol of the alliance between Greece and the East.
Memnon in the Roman and Modern Worlds
In the Roman period, Memnon was a familiar figure, partly because of the Theban colossi and partly because of the post-Cicero fashion for the Trojan cycle. Ovid retells the story in the Metamorphoses (Book XIII), and Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica (fourth century CE) gives a full and detailed account of Memnon at Troy. The black king of the dawn became a kind of tragic figure in late-antique art, and the image of the weeping Eos carrying the body of her son became one of the standard scenes of Roman sarcophagi.
The modern reception of Memnon is less prominent than that of the other Trojan War figures, but he is a fixture in the modern encyclopedic literature on Greek myth, and he appears in the Percy Jackson series, in the God of War franchise, and in many other modern retellings of the Trojan cycle. The Tennyson poem “Memnon” (1855) is the most-read modern literary treatment: the speaker addresses the statue in the Egyptian dawn, asking whether the immortal pain of the stone is the cost of the immortality that was given to the son of Eos. The poem is one of the great Victorian meditations on mortality and its alternatives.
A Note on Reading the Myth
The Memnon story is unusual in the Greek tradition in that the primary sources are lost. We have only the Aethiopis summary, the references in the Odyssey and Iliad, the late summaries, and the Roman and later treatments. This is a different kind of evidence from the Iliad or the Theogony, and the modern reader should be aware that the Memnon of the tradition is a partial figure, refracted through later sources. The colossi at Thebes, the Tennyson poem, the Pausanias references: these are the sources we have, and they should be read with the knowledge that the Aethiopis itself is gone. The loss is one of the great losses of Greek myth, and the surviving traces are a partial recompense.
For more, see the Achilles profile, the Trojan War guide, and the Helen of Troy page.