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THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002

Benjamin H. Weaver
Washington DC

Ritual Disguise in Attic Portraits of Actaeon

Was Actaeon truly transformed into a stag? The question has stirred debate since Antiquity. In modern scholarship, the debate over the hero's transformation has largely focused on a series of Attic 5th century portraits which portray Actaeon wearing a deer-skin (LIMC, s.v 'Aktaion' 26-31). While earlier readers (Marx, 1906) took the deer-skin as evidence of aitiological ritual, more recent scholars have eschewed the "crudely literal" aspect of the skin (Nagy, 1973; Davies, 1989), construing the garment instead as a stereotyped conventional representation of an actual transformation The portraits, however, would seem more than simple affirmations or denials of aitiological cult. In this paper, I will attempt to situate the portraits within several ancient traditions of ritual disguise which emphasize the deceitful semantics of animal skin clothing. I investigate several literary and iconographical representations (e.g. by Longus, Apuleius, and Dionysius) which portray, reminiscent of Actaeon, a central victim threatened with death and dismemberment by crazed human or animal assailants who mistake the skin for the animal it signifies.

I discuss three kinds of skin disguises. The first, represented by Apuleius, is that of the skin worn as punishment. The alleged offender is stuffed in an animal skin and left out for dogs who mistake him or her for a wolf or bear. Disguises of a second type are worn by sacrificial victims whose place is taken, in ritual, by animal substitutes. Here, I discuss certain iconographical correspondences between several of the portraits to a red-figure representation of Iphigeneia. A combination of the first two types appears in Dionysius' Bassarica, in which the deer-skin garment fiting closely to the body of the dead soldier sent to Deriades' camp is apparently (but not quite absolutely) transformed by magic and ritual into an animal's body.