Text of Pausanius:
"[10.25.9] The Trojan women are represented as already captives and lamenting. Andromache is in the painting, and near stands her boy grasping her breast....In the painting is also Medesicaste... [10.25.10] Andromache and Medesicaste are wearing hoods, but the hair of Polyxena is braided after the custom of maidens. [10.25.11] The artist has painted Nestor with a cap on his head and a spear in his hand. There is also a horse, in the attitude of one about to roll in the dust. Right up to the horse there is a beach with what appear to be pebbles, but beyond the horse the sea-scene breaks off. [10.26.1] Above the women between Aethra and Nestor are other captive women, Clymene, Creusa, Aristomache and Xenodice.... [10.26.2] Beyond these are painted on a couch Deinome, Metioche, Peisis and Cleodice. Deinome is the only one of these names to occur in what is called the Little Iliad; Polygnotus, I think, invented the names of the others. Epeius is painted naked; he is razing to the ground the Trojan wall. Above the wall rises the head only of the Wooden Horse."
Andromache is the wife of Hektor and their child is Astynax. Pausanius comments: "This child Lescheos says was put to death by being flung from the tower, not that the Greeks had so decreed, but Neoptolemus, of his own accord, was minded to murder him." In Polygnotos' painting, either Astynax has not yet been killed although is mother is already taken captive, or it is a different child who is represented. On the Sack of Troy vase by the Brygos Painter, Neoptolemos is depicted swinging the child by the leg. On the Kleophrades Painters' vase, Astynax is already dead.
Medesicaste is "another of Priam's illegitimate daughters, who according to Homer left her home and went to the city of Pedaeum to be the wife of Imbrius, the son of Mentor." Iliad 13.170 I took the hooded figures from a white-ground krater in the Vatican by the Phiale Painter. The colors of the clothes on this vase are light red-brown and a deeper purple-brown.
I've depicted Polyxena with long loose hair in contrast to the hooded matrons, which also may be seen on a lekythos depicting Polyxena in Toledo. Pausanius says. "Poets sing of her death at the tomb of Achilles, and both at Athens and at Pergamus on the Calcus I have seen the tragedy of Polyxena depicted in paintings." She is depicted also in vase painting, but more prevalently in black figure and Archaic red figure than during the Classical period.
I've drawn Nestor as an old man, with a cap like Hermes', but without the wings. He seems to be guarding the captive women. The horse is a composite from several vases where foreshortening is attempted. The pebble beach is similar to the ground of cups by the Sotades Painter, both in London (D6 & D7). Pausanius' description is ambiguous as to where the sea would lie in the picture; I have excluded it, but perhaps it would lie the very bottom of the composition.
Pausanius comments on the source of Polygnotos' inscriptions naming the captive women: "Now Stesichorus, in the Sack of Troy, includes Clymene in the number of the captives; and similarly, in the Returns, he speaks of Aristomache as the daughter of Priam and the wife of Critolaus, son of Hicetaon. But I know of no poet, and of no prose-writer, who makes mention of Xenodice. About Creusa the story is told that the mother of the gods and Aphrodite rescued her from slavery among the Greeks, as she was, of course, the wife of Aeneas. But Lescheos and the writer of the epic poem Cypria make Eurydice the wife of Aeneas." I have taken their figures from various sources, including the a name vase by the Penelope Painter in Chiusi and a skyphos by the same (but of a different mood) in Berlin.
Epeius occurs in the Iliad 23.664 and Odyssey 8.493; where he constructed the Trojan Horse with Athena's help. Polygnotos must have associated this character with the wooden horse in his placement of him at the wall--verifying his role in the descruction of Troy. Polygnotos must have purposefully juxtaposed a live horse about to role over with the image of a horse that caused Troy's fall. The groups of captive women adjacent to the crumbling wall and deceptive horse must reflect the consequence of the battle.
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