Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Marpessa.
The gallery
Apollo and Idas Fighting for Marpessa
Attributed to the Pan Painter, c. 480-470 BC
On this Attic red-figure psykter (a wine-cooling vessel) in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich, the earliest surviving depiction of the myth unfolds in vivid combat. The god Apollo and the mortal hero Idas seize the Aetolian princess Marpessa between them, each refusing to yield her. According to Homer's Iliad, Idas alone among men dared draw his bow against a god for the sake of his bride; here the painter freezes that audacious confrontation, which Zeus would soon interrupt to let Marpessa herself choose her husband. The scene captures the central scandal of her story: a woman desired by an immortal who nonetheless preferred a man who could grow old beside her.
The Judgment of Jupiter
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, 1814-1815
Painted by the young American artist Samuel F. B. Morse (later famous as the inventor of the telegraph) during his studies in London, this ambitious neoclassical canvas in the Yale University Art Gallery stages the decisive moment of Marpessa's myth. Zeus, enthroned, arbitrates the quarrel between Apollo and the mortal Idas, who have come to blows over the princess. Rather than ruling himself, the king of the gods commands Marpessa to choose between her two suitors. The composition, indebted to the grand-manner history painting Morse absorbed under Benjamin West, dramatizes the rare instance in Greek myth in which a mortal woman is granted authority over her own fate against a god's desire.
Apollo and Marpessa
John Flaxman, c. 1790-1794
This marble relief by the English neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, held by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, renders the abduction with cool linear restraint. Apollo, the radiant god of the lyre and prophecy, strides forward attempting to carry off Marpessa, the Aetolian princess he loved. Flaxman, celebrated for the clarity of his outline drawings after Homer, translates that purity of line into low relief, reducing the violent struggle to elegant, balanced contours. The work belongs to the era's revival of Greek myth as moral and aesthetic ideal, isolating the instant of pursuit before Marpessa would reject the god in favor of the mortal Idas.
Idas and Marpessa (from A Book of Myths)
Helen Stratton, 1915
This pen-and-ink illustration by the British artist Helen Stratton appeared in Jean Lang's A Book of Myths (1915), a popular anthology of classical and Celtic legend. Working in the romantic, decorative idiom of the golden age of book illustration, Stratton depicts the lovers Idas and Marpessa together, the moment the princess casts her lot with the mortal who carried her off rather than with the courting god Apollo. The image gives visual form to the heart of the tale as Lang retold it: Marpessa's wise refusal of an immortal lover, fearing he would abandon her when age dimmed her beauty, and her choice of a love that would share her mortality.