Memnon
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Memnon. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
in Greek legend, an Ethiopian hero of the Trojan War. He is mentioned in the Homeric poems, and is thought by certain critics to typify "the eastern sun summoned to oppose the enemies of darkness from the west." Memnon, according to fable, was the son of Tithonus, and Eos, or Aurora, the Dawn. After the death of Hector, he led a host of Ethiopians to the aid of Troy. He wore bright armor made by Hephaestus, and performed prodigies of valor. He was slain at last by Achilles. Several stories are told of the disposition of his body, the most popular being that Aurora bore it through the air to Susa, where it was buried in the Acropolis. The scene of Aurora's journey with the body of her son is depicted on certain early Greek vases, and is supposed to typify the journey of the sun, offspring of the dawn, through the heavens to its resting place in the west.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A king of Ethiopia, son of Tithonus and Aurora . He came with ten thousand men to assist Priam in the Trojan war, where he behaved with great courage, and killed Antilochus, Nestor 's son, at which Nestor challenged Memnon to fight, but he refused on account of the great age of the challenger; but he fought Achilles , who killed him. A statue was erected in his honor, which had the property of uttering a melodious sound every day at sunrise. Tennyson, in his Palace of Art, alludes to this statue thus : "As morn from Memnon drew Rivers of melodies."
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in Greek mythology, a son of Eos (the morning) and Tithonis (= Titan, a name for the sun), represented in the legend as a son of Laomedon and brother of Priam. The famous statue called by the Greeks Memmon, in the sepulchral quarter of Thebes called Memnoneia, possessed the real or imaginary property of emitting a sound like that of a harp at the rising of the sun.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The myth itself stands as Aiton's told it in 1910: Memnon, son of Eos and Tithonus, kills Antilochus and falls to Achilles, a story that came not from Homer directly but from the lost epic Aethiopis. What has faded is the confident solar reading that Aiton offers, that Memnon typifies "the eastern sun summoned to oppose the enemies of darkness" "the nature-myth school that produced such explanations lost its authority in the twentieth century, and the tale is now read chiefly as heroic epic, with Memnon's Aurora-borne body familiar from Greek vase painting. On the statue, the 1900 and 1921 entries pass on an old Greek error: the singing colossus at Thebes is one of two seated figures of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, carved about 1350 BC, and the dawn sound is generally attributed to moisture in the cracked stone as it warmed. The Colossi still stand, and since the 1990s excavation of Amenhotep's mortuary temple behind them has recovered and re-erected numerous further statues from the site.
Written for this edition, 2026.