Memnon. a hero of Greek mythology, son of Tithonus and Eos (the Dawn), who led to Troy a host of Ethiopians to aid his step-uncle Priam after the death of Hector, slew Antilochus, Nestor's son, in single combat, and was himself slain by Achilles. Various legends are told of his supposed rule at Susa, where he was said to have built the acropolis, and of his vassalage to the Assyrian Teutamus. His corpse was removed from the battlefield by Eos, whose early tears for her son are by mortals called dewdrops, and his followers the Memnonides were turned into birds. Memnon is chiefly a post-Homeric hero, and attained his greatest celebrity in very late times, when the Greeks discovered the two famous colossal statues of Amenoph III. standing in front of his now vanished temple on the left bank of the Nile at Thebes, and regardless of history dubbed the eastern one Memnon. It is an imposing throned figure, originally about 60 feet high, carved in breccia, but broken in ancient times and repaired with sandstone blocks. Its special peculiarity, which procured it the name of the 'Vocal Memnon' and the honour of forming one of the seven wonders of the world, was the property of emitting a metallic sound, like the snapping of a chord, especially about sunrise, whence the imaginative Greeks concluded that it was the voice of Memnon hailing his newly-risen mother the Dawn. Considerable difference of opinion has prevailed as to the real cause of this phenomenon, which has been variously ascribed to the artifice of the priests, who struck the sonorous stone of which the statue is composed, to the passage of light draughts of air through the cracks, and to the sudden expansion of aqueous particles under the influence of the sun's rays. This remarkable quality of the statue is first mentioned by Strabo, who visited it in company of Aelius Gallus about 18 B.C.; and upwards of a hundred inscriptions of Greek and Roman visitors incised upon its legs record the visits of ancient travellers to hearken to Memnon when he
Softly sings beneath the Libyan hills,
Where spreading Nile parts hundred-gated Thebes, from the ninth year of Nero, 63 A.D., to the reign of the Emperor Severus, when it became silent. Amongst visitors whose names are recorded are the Emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina. Septimius Severus also visited the statue, and is believed to have restored it in its present shape; for Juvenal mentions it as broken in half (dimitto magicæ resonant ubi Memnone chordæ), and no notice of it occurs under the Pharaohs or Ptolemies (see Edinburgh Review, July 1886).—The name of Memnoneum was given to the sepulchral quarter of Thebes, and there were Memnonea at Abydos.—Besides the mythical Memnon two historical personages of this name are known—one a Rhodian commander of the mercenaries of Artabazus in the war against Artaxerxes-Ochus, who subsequently fled to Macedon, and afterwards entering the Persian service defended Persia against Alexander (336 B.C.), and finally died at the siege of Mitylene (333 B.C.): the other a Greek historian, who wrote a history of Heracleia Pontica in 16 books, which have been epitomised by Photius.