Viscount Marcellus on his “Souvenirs.”
It is important to know the facts with regard to the debris found together with the so-called Venus of Milo, as stated by a second eye witness, the Viscount Marcellus. He wrote his reminiscences on the Venus of Milo in a book entitled Souvenirs, and the second edition of this was reviewed by Lenormant. In answer to some objections of the latter the Viscount published “a last word on the Venus of Milo.”2
In this he enumerates as follows the objects brought away from the cave where the Venus had been found:
“No. 1. The nude upper part of the statue.
“No. 2. The lower draped portion.
“Yorgos, their original owner... gave me at the same time three small accessories of the statue found in a field near by.... These were:
“No. 3. The top of the hair commonly called the chignon, etc.
“No. 4. A shapeless and mutilated fore-arm.
“No. 5. Part of a hand holding an apple.
“The last two objects seemed to me to be of the same kind of marble and of a grain near enough like that of the statue, but I could not tell whether they could reasonably be assumed to belong to a Venus whose attitude I no longer remembered....
“The primates at the same time sent me the three hermae (Nos. 6, 7 and 8) which were still at Castro, and a left foot in marble (No. 9) which had been found in the neighborhood of the field of Yorgos lower down toward the valley where the burial caves are.
“They wished also to give me the inscription found in the same locality which I had already seen in their town. It is the one which commences with the Greek words: ΑΓΧΕΟΣ ΑΤΙΟΥ....
“I here repeat that with this exception I took away from Milo everything which had been taken from the ground with the Venus or near by, and I have no remembrance of having seen there, much less of having received or acquired myself, any other Greek inscription which made mention of a sculptor with a mutilated name, etc. Of course I would be eager enough with anything that might be able to throw light on the discovery, and since in my Souvenirs de l’Orient (I, p. 249) I cite an epigraph of almost no significance I would not wittingly or negligently have omitted any Greek letters near the excavation or relating to its details. Neither should it be forgotten that in fact I indicate only ‘three hermae, some pedestals and other bits of marble debris’ (I, p. 237) as the result of Yorgos’s successive excavations; and further down (p. 48) these same hermae and other antique fragments without ever speaking of any inscription.”
The inscription more completely mentioned by Dumont d’Urville has also been published by Clarac with only a few insignificant variations. He adds the missing B at the beginning, reads I in place of E, and has two Σ’s. It is a votive inscription which has no connection with our Venus. Being of little value, the authorities of the Louvre did not take good care of it and it is now lost. The probable meaning of the inscription is “Bakchios, (son of) Atios the subgymnasiarch (has donated) the arcade and the... [he has erected according to a vow] to Hermes, Heracles,...”
These reports of two eye-witnesses are important not so much for what they contain as for what they do not contain. Neither M. Dumont d’Urville nor Viscount Marcellus mentions the name of the artist of the statue. An inscription is copied by both in which Bacchus, Hermes and Heracles are mentioned, but no reference is made to the name of Agesander or Alexander of Antioch as having been seen on a fragment of the pedestal—an artist who makes his appearance in a mysterious way and whose acquaintance we shall make in the next chapter. Moreover, since other pieces of debris were found either in the cave or in a neighboring field, there is no reason whatever that any one of them, let alone the left hand holding an apple, should have been attached to our statue.
We shall have occasion to refer to these points again.