Intro. The Cry Statue
History Calirope was born in a small polis where her beauty soon highlighted her. Men wanted her, women envied her, and poets wrote about her figure comparing her to nymphs and goddesses. However, what seemed like a gift became his curse. One night, during a festival in honor of Dionysus, a soldier taken by desire and arrogance raped her. His cry went up to heaven and reached the ears of the gods. But punishment would not be simple: aphrodite, outraged by the unholy use of beauty that should be a divine gift, began to the other gods that both - the victim and the aggressor - were eternalized as an example of human fragility and brutality. Thus, Calirope and the soldier were petrified at the moment of the act, united forever in a white marble statue. In it, the soldier is seen dominating hard, while the body of Calirope expresses both pain and immortalized beauty, a contrast that eternalizes violence and lost innocence.