Classicisms in the Black Atlantic by Ian Moyer;Adam Lecznar;Heidi Morse; & Adam Lecznar & Heidi Morse

Author:Ian Moyer;Adam Lecznar;Heidi Morse; & Adam Lecznar & Heidi Morse [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192543875
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2019-12-19T21:00:00+00:00

Correspondingly, Murgatroyd, Reeves, and Parker in their 2017 translation render this as:

I’m not fair-skinned, but Perseus found Cepheus’ Andromeda

attractive, and she was dark (from darkest Ethiopia)

and white doves often have mates of a different colour,

And black turtle-doves are loved by green parrots.

I have already mentioned that initially I was unsure of Andromeda’s significance for classical academia. One gauge was proposed by the white cultural historian, Adrienne Munich, in her book Andromeda’s Chains:

If one looks under the entry “Andromeda” in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, one is given the terse command: “See Perseus.” As if somehow incidental to Perseus’s story the maiden is an auxiliary, not doing anything in her own right. An object for someone else’s heroic rescue, she is doomed without even the dignity of having her fate a consequence of her own actions…Andromeda apparently deserves no special reference of her own. (1993, 24)

However, even though her feminist interpretation noted Andromeda’s academic subordination to a masculine hero, Munich’s critique of the racial implications of the mythography also seemed to elide the question of how Andromeda’s specifically black and female identities intersected to create a similarly insidious mode of racial invisibility.

In any event, to evaluate properly the historical and artistic significance of the Andromeda myth, I needed to consider closely its narrative content, and arguably perhaps the most direct method was to analyze one of the principal prose accounts—as found in the pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca (c.1–200 ce):

Arriving in Ethiopia, which was ruled by Cepheus, he found the king’s daughter Andromeda exposed as prey to a sea monster; for Cassiepeia, the wife of Cepheus, had claimed to [surpass] the Nereids in beauty…The Nereids were enraged by this, and Poseidon, who shared their anger, sent a sea-flood and a monster against the land. Now Ammon had prophesied deliverance from this calamity if Cepheus’ daughter Andromeda were offered as prey to the monster, and compelled by the Ethiopians, Cepheus had done so and tied his daughter to a rock. As soon as Perseus saw her, he fell in love, and promised Cepheus that he would destroy the monster if he would give him the rescued girl as a wife…Perseus confronted the monster and killed it, and set Andromeda free. Phineus, however, who was a brother of Cepheus and had been promised Andromeda beforehand, plotted against Perseus; but when Perseus learned of the conspiracy, he showed the Gorgon to Phineus and his fellow plotters, turning them to stone on the spot…. Perseus, accompanied by Danae [his mother] and Andromeda [became] king of Tiryns; and Perseus fortified Midea and Mycenae in addition. By Andromeda, Perseus had the following sons…Perses…and later, in Mycenae, Alcaios, Sthenelos, Heleios, Mestor, and Electryon; he also had a daughter, Gorgophone. (Apollod. Bibl. 2.4.3–5)7

In summary, then: Princess Andromeda of Ethiopia was—as appeasement for the blasphemous vanity of her mother the queen—to be sacrificed to a sea monster. Fortunately, she was betrothed to and then rescued by the Greek demigod Perseus, whom she married and with whom she raised many children. Although, as Munich noted,

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