Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Cresphontes.
The gallery
Mérope, Act IV, Scene 2 (illustration to Voltaire's tragedy)
Antoine-Jean Duclos, after Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, 1783
This copper engraving by Antoine-Jean Duclos after a design by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune illustrates the climactic recognition scene (Act IV, Scene 2) of Voltaire's tragedy Mérope (1743), the most celebrated dramatic retelling of the Messenian saga of Cresphontes. The Heraclid Cresphontes, who had won Messenia by his trick with the lots and made Stenyclerus his seat, is dead before the play begins, murdered with his elder sons by the usurper; his widow Merope, forced into the tyrant's house, raises a weapon over a young stranger she takes for her husband's killer, only to be stopped at the last instant by the old retainer Narbas, who reveals the youth is her own surviving son Aepytus. The image captures the suspended axe and the cry of recognition that turns the avenging blow aside and sets in motion the slaying of the usurper and the recovery of Cresphontes' kingdom.
Portrait of Sophie Friederike Seyler as Mérope
Anton Graff, 1775
Anton Graff's oil portrait, now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, shows the actress Sophie Friederike Seyler in her celebrated stage role of Mérope — the widowed queen of Messenia, wife of the murdered Heraclid king Cresphontes and mother of the avenger Aepytus. The Cresphontes story survived chiefly through this character: stripped of direct ancient images, the king's myth lived on in the long line of Merope tragedies (Maffei, Voltaire, and their German adaptations) that dominated the eighteenth-century stage. Graff captures the grieving, resolute mother whose vengeance, in the dramatic tradition, restores her dead husband's house, making this one of the rare painted depictions of a figure from the Cresphontes legend.
The actor Jean-Baptiste Brizard playing Narbas in Voltaire's Mérope at the Comédie-Française
Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, 1765
This watercolour portrait by Louis Carrogis Carmontelle records the actor Jean-Baptiste Brizard in the role of Narbas in a 1765 Comédie-Française production of Voltaire's Mérope, the tragedy that kept the Messenian myth of Cresphontes alive on the European stage. Narbas is the faithful old shepherd who, in the dramatic version of the legend, rears the infant son of the slain king Cresphontes in secret exile and returns to halt Merope's hand at the moment she would have killed her own avenging son — the role that anchors the recognition and revenge restoring the Heraclid line in Messenia. The drawing testifies to the enduring theatrical afterlife of Cresphontes' otherwise rarely depicted myth.