Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Aepytus.
The gallery
Illustration to Voltaire's "Mérope", Act IV, Scene 2
Jean-Michel Moreau (designer); Antoine-Jean Duclos (engraver), 1783
This copperplate engraving, designed by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune and cut by Antoine-Jean Duclos for a luxury edition of Voltaire's tragedy, illustrates the climactic fourth act of "Mérope" (1743), the most celebrated dramatic retelling of the Aepytid revenge myth. In the play the widowed queen Merope, believing the young stranger before her to be her son's killer, is on the point of striking him down before she learns he is in fact Aepytus, the surviving son of Cresphontes whom Polyphontes had hunted since infancy. The recognition turns vengeance into reunion, and the prince goes on to slay the usurper and recover Messenia. Moreau stages the moment in the grave neoclassical idiom of the late eighteenth century, with columned hall and antique drapery, giving visual form to the ancient story preserved in Apollodorus and Pausanias.
Illustration to Voltaire's "Mérope" (Œuvres complètes, Théâtre)
Jean-Michel Moreau (designer); Antoine-Jean Duclos (engraver), 1784
Engraved by Antoine-Jean Duclos after a drawing by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, this plate accompanied "Mérope" in the third (Théâtre) volume of the great Kehl edition of Voltaire's complete works, published by the Société littéraire-typographique. Voltaire's tragedy dramatizes the legend of Aepytus, youngest son of Cresphontes and Merope of Messenia: spared from the massacre in which the usurper Polyphontes killed his father and brothers, the boy is reared in secret and returns grown to avenge his house. The high-emotion confrontation between mother and unrecognized son made the play a fixture of the eighteenth-century stage, and book illustrators such as Moreau translated its theatrical pathos into the restrained classical settings seen here, anchoring the obscure Heraclid prince of myth in Enlightenment visual culture.