Bret Devereaux

Meanwhile, the big expensive statues for pharaohs were all about communicating state power. It's legitimacy artwork, designed to confirm in the viewer that the pharaoh is big and powerful and doing a good job. Once again, nailing the facial features was not a big issue 5/22

The thing is, Egyptian religious practice *did* care about remembrance, but they used inscriptions, not statues for that (because the thing that needed to be remembered was the name). This is going to be a theme: you remember with words, you transmit *values* with statues. 6/22

Ok, so the tradition comes to Greece and they make statues mostly...of gods and heroes. When regular people do get statues in a Greek polis, it is explicitly because they have done something that community values and they express some value the community wants. 7/22

...is a bit of a fib. The public assumed these guys killed the tyrants - after all, we made statues of them - but they didn't, they killed his brother. As Thucydides notes, "So little pains do the commons take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first..." 9/22

"...story that comes to hand." (Thuc. 1.20). Statues have always been about commemorating values, and have never been about teaching history. The statues of the tyrannicides communicated "Athens doesn't like tyrants" not "these two fellows specifically killed tyrants." 10/22

Now, it isn't that we don't have large, publicly funded history teaching tools! We do! They're called museums (and also to an extent, battlefield parks)! But statues are not teaching tools. No history is lost when a statue comes down. 11/22

On the flip-side, that means statues aren't *about* the people they're *of.* The statues of the tyrannicides weren't about Harmodius and Aristogeiton (the two fellows in question), they were *about* the overthrow of the tyrants in Athens. 12/22