Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Polyphontes.
The gallery
Mérope, Act IV (illustration to Voltaire's tragedy)
Antoine-Jean Duclos, after Jean-Michel Moreau (Moreau le Jeune), 1783
A copper-plate engraving by Antoine-Jean Duclos after a design by Jean-Michel Moreau (Moreau le Jeune), made for the great Kehl edition of Voltaire's complete works. It illustrates a climactic court scene from Voltaire's tragedy Mérope (1743), the Enlightenment stage version of the Messenian myth: the usurper Polyphonte has murdered King Cresphonte and forced his widow Mérope to the throne, and the action turns on Mérope's recognition of her surviving son (called Egisthe in the play, the Aepytus of the ancient sources), who will avenge his father and kill the tyrant. Polyphonte, the play's antagonist, stands at the heart of the dramatic confrontation. This print appears on the Wikipedia article for Voltaire's Mérope.
Mérope (frontispiece engraving for Voltaire's tragedy)
Antoine-Jean Duclos, after Jean-Michel Moreau (Moreau le Jeune), 1784
An eighteenth-century engraving by Antoine-Jean Duclos after Jean-Michel Moreau, issued in Volume III (Theatre) of an edition of Voltaire's complete works. Like its companion plate, it stages a scene from Voltaire's Mérope, the neoclassical retelling of the Polyphontes legend: in Messene the tyrant Polyphonte rules over the widowed Queen Mérope until her hidden son returns in disguise to overthrow and slay him and restore the rightful line. The composition belongs to the rich tradition of theatrical book-illustration that kept the otherwise rarely depicted Messenian revenge story alive in European art, with Polyphonte cast as the doomed usurper at its center.