Annee Lyons
On the Fallen Caryatid
CARYATID (n.) – a female figure serving as a column, bearing weight where a pillar might stand.
Rodin’s fallen caryatid is still holding her stone. She’s crumpled beneath it, but she hasn’t let it go. Her sisters—because caryatids are always in groups, in rows, in repetition—are presumably elsewhere, still standing, still carrying. A caryatid alone is a rupture in the order of things, a crack in the architecture, a collapse.
In conjuring the image of a caryatid, we see her standing tall and propping up someone else’s temple. The six most famous caryatids stood on the north side of the Acropolis holding up the south porch of the Erechtheion, a temple built for the worship of Erechtheus. He was a legendary king of Athens remembered as the father of the Athenians, who called themselves the Erechtheidai, sons of Erechtheus. But, as the story goes, in life he had six daughters: Protogeneia, Procris, Pandora, Oreithyia, Creusa, and Cthonia. These unfamiliar names are the six that were seen standing tall on the Acropolis for millennia, created to carry the weight of marble named for their father.
These sisters were burned into Athens’ memory, their fates bound to the city’s survival, their images locked in stone. After their father sacrificed the youngest, Cthonia, to secure Athens’ victory in battle, two of the others killed themselves to be with her again. These sacrifices and pains echo through the marble pillars and the very soil of the Acropolis, as if the city and its gods demanded these tragic exchanges, these severed ties. In the end, Erechtheus himself fell, struck down by a god’s trident, yet his name lived on in his temple, forever tied to the rock of Athens and its goddess. The image of the caryatids, these six sisters whose names and stories are largely overlooked, embodies this lineage: strength borne of sacrifice, unyielding yet vulnerable to the loss of the others, and a unity disturbed forever by the absence of one.
In the Acropolis Museum, the Greeks say the missing caryatid, trapped in the British Museum, longs for her sisters. Echoing the statues’ original myth, it is a sentimental way to express the Greeks’ anger over the British looting, but even in stone they have been violently separated. When one leaves, the others feel it. The arrangement is disturbed. The burden shifts, imperceptibly at first, and then suddenly it is all you can feel, all you can think about. The ghost-weight of the missing presses onto the shoulders of the ones left behind.
We know this weight. We know the silent negotiations of carrying something together, how it is passed between us without speaking. Our sisters and our mothers know, and we have spent our lives redistributing it—grief, exhaustion, the precise kind of worry that lives inside a family broken and reunited. We are trained early in how to shift weight. How to brace when another starts to buckle. How to recognize the moment when standing up straight becomes impossible.
Rodin’s caryatid has reached that moment. She’s curled into herself, head bent, arms wrapped around the thing that has defeated her. And yet, it isn’t surrender. It’s something more complicated. Because she is still holding the weight she was made to carry. Because her sisters are still standing. And because she knows—though she cannot see them now—that they are waiting for her to rise.
Like many of Rodin’s statues, the fallen caryatid exists in multiple materials, each one altering how we see her. In marble, she is a ruin, heavy and mute, her smoothness an illusion of gentleness, her rough patches are abrasions in stone. In bronze, she is something else entirely. Bronze is fire-made. A sculpture cast in bronze has first been sculpted in wax, then encased in a mold, and finally burned into being. The wax must be destroyed so that the molten metal can take its place: the lost-wax method. Lost, because the original is sacrificed for the piece to exist. The lost-wax method has another name: investment casting. Like in grief, something is taken from us and, in its place, something else is made. The shape of the thing lost remains, but it is no longer soft, no longer living. It must be poured, melted, reshaped. If done correctly, it can last forever. Rodin’s bronze caryatid is not smooth. The surface bears the marks of its making. The imperfections of the mold, the roughness of the wax, all carried through fire into permanence. Bronze is hardened grief. It remembers being molten.
The fallen caryatid looms large on her pedestal in a Parisian garden full of Rodin’s sculptures, but she seems small sitting in the top left corner of his Gates of Hell, nearly lost among the twisting bodies and tormented figures. She is not in agony, only exhausted, endlessly crushed by what she was born to bear. It is no wonder Rodin placed her among the damned. Looking at her, I wonder if this is what happens to the burden if you carry it long enough. If the weight never shifts, if no one comes to take a little of it off your back, do you sink to your knees and never rise again? To be crushed is not a failure. To be burned is not an end. But how much weight can a body take before it is permanently transformed? How much fire before it is something else entirely?
In another version of this myth, the caryatids are not carrying columns. They are mourning women. Their weight is grief itself. Their arms do not lift upward, but fold inward. Their faces are not serene, but stricken. They have no temples to hold up, only each other. If one falls, the others know. The burden shifts, and the fallen caryatid is still holding her stone.
Annee Lyons is a writer from Maryland living in London. After studying Classics at Georgetown University, she earned an MPhil in Ancient History at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and an MA in Film and Screen Media at Birkbeck, University of London as a Beinecke Scholar. Her creative writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Anthology Magazine, Consilience Journal, and elsewhere.