Face of a one-eyed king

Press, 23 September 1983, Page 18

Face of a one-eyed king

British experts working with ancient skullbones from a royal tomb have constructed what they believe is a good likeness of the battle-scarred face of King Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, Associated Press reports from Athens.

Their portrait of a rugged Greek warrior with a livid scar in the right eye socket was presented to an international conference attended by more than 1200 leading classical scholars.

“We don’t claim this is a 100 per cent likeness, but we think it’s as close as you can get to how King Philip looked shortly before his death,” said Dr John Prag, Keeper of Archaeology at Manchester Museum.

The new research is expected to help convince some scholars who still doubt that the tomb, found in 1977 in Vergina, Greece, truly is the last resting place of the king who unified the Greeks in the fourth century B.C. and forged one of the greatest armies the world had ever known. The stone tomb chamber found beneath a 10-metre high earth mound was crammed with gold, silver, and ivory, including the solid gold funerary casket that contained cremated bones showing damage to the right eye. According to ancient historians, Philip’s right eye was gouged out by an arrow while he was besieging the northern Greek city of

Methoni in 354 8.C., 18 years before he was assassinated.

“The bone damage was compatible with a wound caused by a missile striking from above,” says Richard Neave, a medical artist from Manchester University who applied forensic techniques to rebuild the skull.

“This is scientific confirmation of my conviction that King Philip was the occupant of tomb two at Vergina,” says Professor Manolis Andronikos, the Salonica University archaeologist who excavated the tomb.

He took plaster casts of the burned skull pieces, which were used as the basis for the reconstruction. They revealed bone dam-

age to the right eye socket and cheekbone caused some time before death. The artist rebuilt the soft tissue of the face in clay, using standard proportions established for depth of facial tissue, and produced a wax cast, made up in south European skin and hair tones.

“It’s not the serene, idealised ancient portrait of a great king, but what Alexander the Great’s father might have looked like after a day’s hunting,” Dr Prag says. Ancient portraits of Philip, in marble or clay, show a bearded hero with a thick neck and fleshy features. Only a nick above the right eyebrow refers to the eye wound.

Philip is described as a charm-

ing, hard-drinking soldier, an unwearying commander in the field, who fought tenaciously, and was quite disfigured with old wounds by the time of his death. He was King of Macedon — now northern Greece and southern Bulgaria and Yugoslavia — in the middle of he fourth century B.C. He unified the often distrustful and divisive Greek states and built a powerful fighting machine with the aim of conquering Asia Minor. However, he was assassinated at his daughter’s wedding feast in 336 B.C. on the eve of his expedition. It was left to his son, Alexander, to lead the Greeks against the Persians and found an empire that stretched from northern Greece to India.