Memnon in the Middle Ages: The Reception of a Homeric Hero

Abstract

Memnon, the mythic king of Ethiopia killed by Achilles during the Trojan War, had a double or fused identity in classical antiquity: both Asian and African for Greek and Roman writers because of his parentage and because of the geographical indeterminacy of ‘Aithiopia’ and of ‘India’, but definitely black-skinned for Roman writers. How was this figure received in medieval texts and images? This paper tracks Memnon through three textual genres from the twelfth to the fifteenth century – commentaries on Ovid, catalogues of famous men, histories of the Trojan War – and charts the ways in which his classical identity was overlaid and transformed by pro-Trojan sentiment, chivalric heroization and Christian sacrificial thinking.