14. ERBINNA, THE 'NEREID MONUMENT' AND XANTHUS

Thurstan Robinson

The early 4th-century B.C. Lycian sepulchral monument, the so• called 'Nereid Monument' from Xanthus (Fig. 1), stands today in the , a short distance from many canonical Greek artefacts: the , the frieze from the interior of the Temple of Apollo at Bassai, a Caryatid from the Erechtheion, and part of the frieze from the Temple of Athena Nike at Athens. 1 The 'Nereid Monument' appears in books on Greek architecture and sculpture, where it, and the city where it came from, are called by Greek names. In many texts, the monument is treated as a kind of multicultural jig-saw; it is subjected to a type of reductive analysis where it is disassembled into its constituent parts to see to what extent it is 'Eastern' (Assyrian and Iranian) or Hellenic. It is spoken of as a 'Graeco-Persian' work, and analyses of its peculiar, 'eclectic' style appear in many works on Greek art. There appears to be a general consensus that "the chief importance of this provincially sumptuous work is as a predecessor of the Mausoleum at Halicar• nassus" (Robertson 1981, 14 7). The search for stylistic influence has dominated the quite considerable amount of literature written on the 'Nereid Monument'. Approached from the perspective of Greek art history, it is often treated as an artistic oddity, appreciated mainly for what it inspired. The search for influences is partially responsible for an often in• flexible, antagonistic bi-polarity of Iranian and Hellenic, East and West which can obscure the Lycian identity of the monument.2 We hear of "the play of influences which produced the archaeological monu• ments" of (Le Roy 1989, 21 7); a familiar turn of phrase which is nevertheless somewhat insidious. As Baxendall has noted ( 1985, 58-9) talk of 'influences' implies an unrealistic degree of passivity on

1 For the date of the monument see: Childs 1973; Childs and Demargne 1989, 395-404. 2 See Said 1983, 136. 362 T. ROBINSON

Fig. I. East facade of the 'Nereid Monument' as reconstructed in the British Museum. Photograph, British Museum. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.