4. Did you know that Andromeda, the princess rescued by the Greek hero Perseus, was Ethiopian?

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(Note: this lesson breaks down into 2 parts that can work independently).

1. Part 1: What the source material says and what Renaissance Europeans did with it
2. Part 2: Andromeda’s representation on ancient Greek pottery

Part 1: What the source material says and what Renaissance Europeans did with it: Many students know about the Greek hero Perseus — in particular, how he saved princess Andromeda from a sea-monster by turning it to stone with the gorgon Medusa’s severed head. But did you know that Andromeda was an Ethiopian princess? Once upon a time, the Ethiopian Queen Cassiopeia boasted that her beauty, or the beauty of her daughter Andromeda, surpassed even that of the Nereids (goddesses of the sea). The Nereids, offended, complained to Poseidon, the god of the oceans. Thus, as punishment for Cassiopeia’s hubristic insult, Poseidon threatened to destroy Ethiopia via flood or sea-monster (depending upon the version). When Ethiopia’s King, Cepheus, consulted the oracle of Ammon/Amun (in Siwa, Egypt) about how to save Ethiopia, he was told he could only do so by offering his daughter, Princess Andromeda, to the sea-monster Ketos (Gr.)/Cetus (Lat.). Andromeda was, therefore, chained to a rock near the sea, where she waited to be devoured. Luckily for Andromeda, however, Perseus — who had just left the Gorgon Medusa’s lair, located either in northwestern Africa, or on an island near Africa’s northwestern coast — happened to be flying by (with the help of magical, winged sandals). When he saw Andromeda’s predicament, he swooped in to save her from the monster. As a reward for his heroism, King Cepheus allowed Perseus to marry Andromeda. Perseus took his new bride back home with him to Greece (where, incidentally, he and Andromeda became the great-grandparents of Herakles/Hercules).

Cepheus’s identification as Ethiopia’s king is part of the Greek mythological tradition. As for written sources: Sophocles’ lost Andromeda (ca. 450 BCE) and Euripides’ lost Andromeda (ca. 412 BCE) both made Andromeda Ethiopian. Euripides’ version also, apparently, included a famous/notorious scene where Perseus fell in love with Andromeda at first sight — a scene that the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes relentlessly mocked in his Women at the Thesmophoria (ca. 411 BCE) and Frogs (ca. 405 BCE). (Interesting fact: Athenaeus reports that an inebriated Alexander the Great enthusiastically recited a passage from Euripides’ Andromeda at his last banquet before he died (12.537) — maybe the scene where Perseus falls head-over-heels in love?). The Roman poet Ovid appears to have drawn from Euripides in Metamorphoses 4.668-71 (ca. 8 CE) when his Perseus falls in love with the beautiful, Ethiopian Andromeda at first sight, too — while, Ovid’s Heroides 15.35-38 (ca. 25-16 BCE?) praises Andromeda’s great beauty and dark skin. Additionally, Pliny’s Natural History 6.182 (ca. 77 CE), Apollodorus’s Library 2.4 (1^st-2^nd c. CE), and Nonnus of Panopolis’s epic Dionysiaca 2.679 (5^th c. CE) all identify King Cepheus and his family as Ethiopian. Still, though the majority of our sources view Ethiopia as Andromeda’s homeland, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (1.53, 2.643-4, and 3.191-2, ca. 1 BCE – 1 CE?) also claims that she came from India — as does Philodemus of Gadara’s 1st c. BCE Epigram 5.132 — a variant tradition that makes sense, since Greeks and Romans thought Ethiopians and Indians were related. Another variant is reported by Stephanus of Byzantium (6^th c. CE), who says that Cepheus was a Phoenician king of Joppa (and that the city of Joppa was named for Cepheus’s wife Iope) — though other sources report that Andromeda was chained at Joppa’s coast, not that she came from there (e.g., Strabo Geography 16.2 (1^st c. BCE-1^st c. CE); Josephus The Jewish War 3.9.3 (1^st c. CE); and Pliny Natural History 5.128 (ca. 77 CE) — who also says the sea-monster’s bones were brought to Rome from Joppa 9.4.11). Similarly, Herodotus 7.61 (ca. 450 BCE) reports that the Persians claimed descent from Perseus’s son Perses. According to the Persians, Perseus & Andromeda left Perses to be raised by Cepheus, who had no heir, which suggests that Cepheus ruled in the ‘eastern Aegean’, Africa, or further east.

In sum, ancient Greeks and Romans did not identify Andromeda as a pale-skinned ‘European’ but as a dark-skinned Ethiopian, Indian, or Phoenician. So how come later European and American art & media have consistently portrayed Andromeda as a white-skinned ‘European’? Because of racism. As McGrath 1992: 4-6 documents, most Renaissance scholars dismissed/disbelieved the sources describing an African, Indian, or eastern Andromeda! Arguing that it was impossible for a maiden of incomparable beauty to be ‘black’, they insisted she must reflect ‘white beauty & purity.’ Others ‘re-interpreted’ her dark skin, either as a metaphoric reflection of her parents’ ‘sin’, or as part of an allegory for how ‘material reward’ (Andromeda) spurs on ‘virtue’ (Perseus). Once Renaissance artists started painting Andromeda as a ‘white-skinned beauty’, that image informed future portrayals. (Note: it does seem odd that Renaissance scholars would accept the story of Perseus and Andromeda — full of divinities, magic, and monsters — but find it impossibly unbelievable that a famously beautiful Andromeda could be dark-skinned. Bias often leads to strained, inconsistent thinking!).

Still, before the onslaught of Renaissance (and later) artists who ignored the source-material — either because they embraced the racist notion that feminine beauty required ‘white’ skin, or because they were unfamiliar with the ancient sources so followed the precedent set by other painters — a few earlier artists did portray Andromeda as Ethiopian (or ‘not white’):

Bibliography:

Galer, S. S. January 16, 2019. “How Black Women Were Whitewashed by Art”. BBC.com

McGrath, E. 1992. “The Black Andromeda”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55.1-18.

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Part 2: Andromeda’s representation on ancient Greek pottery:

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Ancient Greek pots consistently portray Andromeda as ‘foreign’ not dark-skinned. Why? Certainly, it could be due to ethnocentric Greek notions of desirability, i.e., the painters could have erased her dark skin (‘Greek-washing’ her) because they found dark-skin undesirable. Yet, remember, Greeks thought Ethiopians were beautiful and exotic — somewhat objectifying, to be sure, but not evidence that Greeks found dark skin ugly or unappealing (as Renaissance scholars did; see above). Further, Greek bias was ethnocentric, not skin-color based; it may have mattered more that Ethiopians were’foreign’ than that their skin color was darker. Thus, making Andromeda look ‘foreign’ could be: a) the more important distinction for a Greek audience; and b) an artistic ‘shorthand’ implicitly acknowledging that Andromeda’s ‘foreign-ness’ included dark skin-color. (After all, Greek potters painted scenes from well-known myths, so could assume their viewers knew Andromeda was Ethiopian). But there are other important factors that modern students should also keep in mind while ‘reading’ the Andromedas of Greek pottery:

1) Greek pots were mass-produced. Though artistic conventions were important to pots’ ‘artistic value & readability’, they were also part of their production/business model: it was best to stick to a formula that you could repeat efficiently/cheaply & that consumers could easily ‘understand’.

2) For black-figure pottery, the artistic convention that men are portrayed as dark-red/black while women are white/paler (see Presentation 1 of Were Ancient Greeks and Romans ‘White’ People?) explains Pot 1‘s (below) white-skinned Andromeda. Simply put, for black-figure pots, you cannot modify ‘skin color’ without disrupting the convention for gender distinction. Hence, in this context, marking gender difference was more important than noting theoretical ‘skin color differences.’ Similarly, if Andromeda is remarkably beautiful (as her myth indicates), the existing convention for depicting ‘femininity’ (pale skin) could also effectively double as an indicator of her ‘beauty’. Though (again) this is a type of ‘Greek-washing’, it does not reflect disgust with, or a dismissal of, darker skin. Black-figure pottery does not present ‘real world’ figures but idealized ones (or idealized ones suited to the pot’s theme/context). Indeed, generally speaking, pots do not try to reproduce ‘authentic’ skin color — unless skin color seems to be the portrayal’s point, e.g., the brief flood of white-ground, black-figure ‘Ethiopian warrior’ vases after the Persian wars (480s BCE), which exploited how white-ground pottery & black-glazed, ‘exotic’ figures could create a striking, aesthetically-pleasing (and sellable!) contrast. Notably, too, these ‘Ethiopian warrior’ figures are called beautiful, kalos (you can see examples of this in the image archive).

3) Red-figure pottery is not the best medium for portraying historic skin-color differences, either. In fact, red-figure pottery usually makes all of its figures ‘red-figure’, using painted details to mark differences. Pot 2 is one of the exceptions to this pattern: though its Ethiopian princess Andromeda is a typical ‘red-figure’ character, her Ethiopian attendants are painted with black glaze. Why the distinction? Andromeda’s paler characterization: a) demarcates her as the scene’s central character: her attendants are harder to discern against the pot’s black-glaze backdrop; b) ‘marks’ her famed beauty; and c) might reflect her ‘class superiority’ over the attendants that flank her. Meanwhile, her ‘foreign-ness’ is indicated by both her exotic, ‘eastern/Persian’ garb and the presence of ‘exotic’, dark-glazed Ethiopian attendants. Pot 3‘s Andromeda and male Ethiopian attendants are all red-figure in appearance (again, as is typical for most red-figure pots). The painted details of the men’s faces & hair tell us they are Ethiopian, while Andromeda’s ‘eastern/Persian’ dress marks her ‘exotic otherness.’ Similarly, for Pot 4, a Campanian, red-figure style product (made by Greeks in southern Italy): the characters are all ‘red-figure’. We can identify Perseus from his cap, winged sandals, & sword; Andromeda wears a beautiful, fancy dress & a diadem (notably, too: for both Greeks & Romans, luxury/wealth & royalty were both coded as ‘exotic & eastern’).

Thus, Andromeda never has dark skin on Greek pots because of the artistic conventions surrounding the depiction of gender difference. Greek pots were never the best medium for denoting real-world skin-color variation. But the convention of making men ‘dark skinned’ & women ‘pale-skinned’ did not so much forbid/complicate the portrayal of ‘real world’ skin-color as reflect how little that specific difference mattered to ancient Greeks (as compared to its importance in today’s world) — unless, of course, recent events meant it would sell, e.g., the brief explosion of ‘Ethiopian warrior’ pots after the Greeks defeated the Persian army (which apparently included some good-looking ‘Ethiopians’). Far from suggesting that Greeks were ‘Greek-washing’ dark-skinned people, the patterns surrounding Andromeda’s depiction indicate a comparative lack of concern about marking skin-color difference on pots (and, perhaps, a far greater concern about marking gender distinctions). Put another way: where we care enough about skin-color that we find ways to either depict or eliminate it as our immediate needs demand, the Greeks did not treat skin-color as a core concern. Satisfied with treating skin-color difference as one of many traits that could be listed under the heading of ‘foreign’, they do not exhibit the same kind of cultural compulsion that we have to constantly, specifically address skin-color. Instead, true to the Greeks’ notorious ethnocentrism, their potters focused on ethnic details to mark foreign-ness/add visual interest to a scene — i.e., all foreigners were equally foreign because of their many differences.

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