What Makes an Aristogeiton?

by Martha C. Taylor

Hesperia, Volume 95, Issue 2
Page(s): 167-217
Stable URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/992381
Year: 2026
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ABSTRACT:

Scholars have identified many allusions to the Tyrannicides monument of Kritios and Nesiotes in vase painting. This article argues that the majority of these proposed allusions cannot stand—not only because the “Harmodios blow” predates the Tyrannicides but also because scholars’ identifications of “Aristogeiton” allow many discrepancies from the original figure and ignore his most distinctive attribute, a scabbard. Attention to this attribute reveals a series of vase paintings, originating before the creation of the Tyrannicides statue group, in which a scabbard-bearing hero pursues a perfidious woman, womanly man, or female animal. Aristogeiton may be understood to belong in this group: his scabbard puts the absent Hipparchos in the place of a woman or unmanly man and reasserts the masculinity of Harmodios and Aristogeiton—and through them, that of all free Athenian males.