Doidalsas - My Favourite Planet People

Despite Eustathios' artist being referred to as Daidalos, the well-known name of the mythical Athenian artist Daidalos and Daidalos of Sikyon, a sculptor of the Classical period, he became identified as Pliny's Daedalsas, who was now thought to have been a Bithynian. As it happens the name Doidalsas (or one of the variants, see note 1) appears to have some importance in the history of the kingdom. The geographer Strabo related how the city of Astakos (Ἀστακὸς) in Bithynia was founded by colonists from Megara and Athens, and some time later refounded by Doidalsos (Δοιδαλσος). [6] After it was destroyed by Lysimachus (circa 360-281 BC), one of Alexander the Great's successors, it was replaced by the nearby Nikomedeia.

"Next follows the coast of the Chalcedonians, the bay of Astacus, as it is called, which is a part of the Propontis.

Here Nicomedia is situated, bearing the name of one of the Bithynian kings by whom it was founded. Many kings however have taken the same name, as the Ptolemies, on account of the fame of the first person who bore it.

On the same bay was Astacus, a city founded by Megareans and Athenians; it was afterwards again colonized by Doedalsus. The bay had its name from the city. It was razed by Lysimachus. The founder of Nicomedia transferred its inhabitants to the latter city."

Strabo, Geography, Book 12, chapter 4, section 2. At Perseus Digital Library.

Much the same information was given by Memnon of Herakleia, who dated the foundation of Astakos to the beginning of the 17th Olympiad (712 BC) and named Dydalsos (Δυδαλσος) as the ruler after "the Athenians sent settlers there to join the Megarians". [7]

Doidalsas (or a variant) is thought to have been or have become a Bithynian name, perhaps a Hellenized form, and related to the name Daidalos. As elsewhere in Anatolia, Bithynia was inhabited by a mixture of peoples: as well as the Greek colonists, there were also indiginous Anatolians and Thracian immigrants from around the Strymon River who had been ousted from their homelands. [8] The name does not seem to have been very common but appears on a small number of ancient inscriptions, including a few from Bithynia.

The British orientalist William Ouseley (1767-1842) found such an inscription by the side of the road at Sabanjeh (ancient Sophon), near Izmit, as he travelled through Bithynia on 30th August 1812, on his way home from Persia (Iran). Reading the Greek name Ἀρριανὸς Δοιδαλσοῦ (Arrianos, son of Doidalsos) on the low base of an ancient funeral monument, he believed he may have found the gravestone of the historian Arrian of Nikomedeia. He sent news of his discovery and a drawing of the inscription to The Classical Journal in London, but it was not received with the enthusiasm or excitement he may have hoped for. [9]

Ἀρριανὸς
Δοιδαλσοῦ
ζήσας ἔτη
μηʹ.
χαίρετε.

Arrianos, son of Doidalsos,
died in the fourty-eighth year of his age.
Fare thee well.

Inscription TAM IV,1 182 at The Packard Humanities Institute.

So, the hypothetical reconstruction was coming along, with attention shifted from "Daedalsas" and his statue in Rome, to "Doidalsas" and his statue in Bithynia. All that was then needed was to establish a connection between Doidalsas and the "Venus Bathing". It had already been suggested (e.g. by Ennio Quirino Visconti, Karl Otfried Müller and Heinrich Brunn) that it had been the model for the several known Roman Imperial period statues of the "Crouching Aphrodite" type, when in 1897 the French archaeologist Théodore Reinach (1860-1928) published an article in which he attributed to Doidalsas the original statue, and dated it to the mid or late 3rd century BC. [10] Reinach's arguments, based on literary and epigraphical evidence, were applauded by many scholars and his hypothesis accepted. Even recent books and articles have referred unquestioningly to examples of Crouching Aphrodite type statues in various museum as being copies "of a work by Doidalsas". [11]

Doidalsos came to be seen as an artist made "famous" by his Bathing Aphrodite, and it was even believed that "he was a member of the school of Lysippus and the official sculptor of the court of the king of Bithynia Nicomedes I". [12] A further belief circulated, based on another report in the Natural history. Pliny twice mentioned a story in which the people of Knidos in Caria refused to sell the marble Aphrodite of Knidos (Venus of Cnidus) statue by Praxiteles to King Nikomedes, even though he offered to pay off their considerable public debt in return. [13] So it was imagined that Nikomedes may have commissioned Doidalsos to make the Bathing Aphrodite as a kind of consolation.

Among the critics of the constructed story of Doidalsas was the British archaeologist Eugenie Sellers Strong (1860-1943), who had in 1896 already completely rejected the emended Pliny clause and the resulting "Daedalsas", as well as the speculative connection of "Venus Bathing" to the Crouching Aphrodite or Daidalos of Bithynia. She noted that one argument for this was the depiction of the figure on Bithynian coins:

"The current attribution of the Venus lavans se to one Daidalos of Bithynia, known only on the authority of Eustathios (Schriftqu. 2045), which seemed to receive support from the recurrence of a crouching or bathing Aphrodite on Bithynian coins (see Bernoulli, Aphrodite, p. 317), must also be renounced; the type on the coins occurs elsewhere, and belongs to a series whose origin can be traced back to high antiquity (cf. Friederichs-Wolters, p. 571)." [14]

The most serious challenge to the Daedalsas / Doidalsas / Crouching Aphrodite construct came in 1969 from the German archaeologist Andreas Linfert (1942-1996) who had made a thorough reexamination of the available evidence. [15] However, it is not as if Linfert cleansed the Augean stables of academic theory from fanciful conjecture using a patented mixture of pure logic and reason. Although, to the satisfaction of some scholars, he appeared to have sluiced out Doidalsas, he also laid his own speculations, including the idea that Polycharmos made both the statues of Aphrodite mentioned by Pliny. Perhaps this will lead to someone imagining a Rhodian school of Polycharmos.

For scholars such as Jane Francis the apparent demise of Doidalsas was seen as liberating: if he was removed as the purportive author of the Crouching Aphrodite type, then so were the geography, chronology and stylistic interpretations associated with him. This allowed study to be focused on the Crouching Aphrodite statues themselves, to see them in a new light and reevalue them as works of art. [16]

While some continued to refer to Doidalsas and "Doidalsas's Aphrodite" [see note 11], in many cases this may have been merely in keeping with what had become a convention, or as Leonard Barkan put it, "he is simply a philological coinage". [17] For over a century there have also been scholars who have refused to deny the existence of Doidalsas when discussing related matters, perhaps out of professional deference or because they had other fish to fry. Other writers appear to either be ignoring the question or avoiding giving an opinion on it - even those who are often quite free with adjectives such as "Lysippean" and "Praxitelean".

There remain some holdouts who refuse to allow Doidalsas / Daedalsas to be killed off so easily. In 2004 Antonio Corso was still ready to come to his defence:

"Attempts to deny the connection of the crouching type of Aphrodite with the sculptor Daedalsas, and even doubt the existence of Daedalsas (see, e.g., J. Francis, The Roman Crouching Aphrodite. Mouseion 6.3.2 (2002) 211-44) seem unconvincing (see Corso (nt. 125) 11-36, particularly 22-3, with nt. 137)." [18]