Memnon
（
Μέμνων).
1.
The beautiful son of Tithonus and Eos (Aurora), was king of the Ethiopians, and came to the
assistance of Priam towards the end of the Trojan War. He wore armour
made for him by Hephaestus at the request of his mother. He slew Antilochus, the son of
Nestor , but was himself slain by Achilles after a long and fierce combat. While the two
heroes were fighting, Zeus weighed their fates, and the scale containing Memnon's sank. To
soothe the grief of his mother, Zeus conferred immortality upon Memnon, and caused a number
of birds to issue out of the funeral pile, which fought over the ashes of the hero. These
birds were called Memnonides, and were said to have visited every year the tomb of the hero
on the Hellespont. The Greeks gave the
 |
|
Weighing the Fates of Achilles and Memnon.
|
name of Memnonium and Memnonia to certain very ancient buildings and monuments in
Europe and Asia, which they supposed to have been erected by or in honour of Memnon. Of these
the most celebrated was a great temple of Thebes, behind which was a colossal statue (called
the statue of Memnon,
τὸ Μεμνόνιον), which, when struck by
the first rays of the rising sun, was said to give forth a sound like the snapping asunder of
a chord. It appears, however, that the statue represented in reality the Egyptian king
Amenophis. The citadel of Susa was also called Memnonion by the Greeks. On the musical
statue, cf. Pliny ,
Pliny H. N. xxxvi. 58;
Pausan. i. 42; and a paper in the
Edinburgh Review for July, 1886.
2.
A native of Rhodes, who had the command of the western coast of Asia Minor when Alexander
invaded Asia. He was an able officer, and his death, in B.C. 333, was an irreparable loss to
the Persian cause.
3.
A native of Heraclea Pontica who wrote an elaborate history of that city, extracts from
which have been preserved by Photius and are separately edited by Orelli
(Leipzig,
1816).
