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The Hieron of Athena Chalkioikos The Annual of the British School at Athens http://journals.cambridge.org/ATH Additional services for The Annual of the British School at Athens: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here I.—Excavations At Sparta, 1907: § 7.—The Hieron of Athena Chalkioikos Guy Dickins The Annual of the British School at Athens / Volume 13 / January 1907, pp 137 - 154 DOI: 10.1017/S0068245400002860, Published online: 18 October 2013 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0068245400002860 How to cite this article: Guy Dickins (1907). I.—Excavations At Sparta, 1907: § 7.—The Hieron of Athena Chalkioikos. The Annual of the British School at Athens, 13, pp 137-154 doi:10.1017/ S0068245400002860 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ATH, IP address: 128.122.253.228 on 24 May 2015 LACONIA. .—EXCAVATIONS AT SPARTA, 1907. § 7.—THE HIKRON OF ATHENA CHALKIOIKOS. (PLATE V.) HISTORY AND NATURE OF THE SANCTUARY. SUIDAS,1 under the heading XUXKIOIKOS, explains as follows : ' The Athena in Sparta ; either because she has a brazen house ; or on account of her (its ?) stability ; or because it was founded by Chalcidian exiles from Euboea.' Hesychius2 adds as synonyms xa\/ci)8dvr], •xaK/civaos. In Euripides3 we find %aX«o7rvXo? as an epithet of the goddess. These variants are in themselves sufficient to contradict Suidas' two alternatives. The noteworthy feature about the sanctuary was its bronze decoration, and thus the name is descriptive of the sanctuary rather than of the goddess. It is not a cult-name, and represents no religious aspect of the goddess ; in fact there is good reason to suppose that it is not even the original name of the sanctuary that crowned the Acropolis of Sparta, but one acquired at a subsequent restoration. The earliest writer using the name is Thucydides.4 In the Damonon inscription,5 on the other hand, which must be dated before 430 B.C., Athena is called UoXiovxo<>, or Guardian of the City, a title which has a much older sound, and is given by Pausanias6 as an alternative 1 Lexicon, sub voce. 2 Ibid. 3 Troades, 1112, and schol.; also schol. ad Hel. 228, 245. 4 i. 134. 5 I.G.A. 79 ; S.M.C. 440 and pp. 175 ff. infra. 6 iii. 17. 2. The epithet xa^K^omos seems to have been at first variable (cf. the references to Euripides and Aristoph. Lysistrata, 1300, 1320), and only subsequently to have been definitely adopted. 138 G. DICKINS name. In imperial times we can distinguish two separate cults of Poliouchos and Chalkioikos.1 The sanctuary is described by Pausanias"2 in his account of Sparta: according to him it was founded by Tyndareus and his sons, but remained incomplete until the time of Gitiadas, a local artist, who made the image of the goddess and the sanctuary itself. The date of the sanctuary, therefore, as known in classical times, depends on the date of Gitiadas, a question which once loomed large as the subject of controversy. Our data are provided by two passages of Pausanias 3 : in one of these he says that tripods with statues beneath them, were set up in Amyclae after the capture of Ithome in the First Messenian war ; in the other, that two of these tripods were the work of Gitiadas, and one of Kallon of Aegina. We know from an inscription * that Kallon worked on the Acropolis of Athens about 500 B.C. The accepted date of the end of the First Messenian war is about 700 B.C. To account for this discrepancy some authorities6 postulated a blunder in the text of Pausanias, while others6 held that Kallon's tripod was added at a later date. The more generally accepted view, however, is that of Schubart" and Brunn,8 that Pausanias confused the capture of Ithome in the First Messenian war with the same event in the Third, and that the date of the tripods, and consequently that of Gitiadas, fell about the middle of the fifth century. Attractive in itself, this view involves, however, grave difficulties. Kallon was a member of the school of Dipoinos and Skyllis, and belongs to the late sixth century in art history ; Quintilian 9 says of him ' Duriora Callonis, minus rigida Calamidis, molliora adhuc Myronis.' It is difficult to imagine him a contemporary of the Pheidian Zeus. Still less does the work of Gitiadas appear to belong to the artistic milieu of the fifth century ; the reliefs of the Chalkioikos, as described by Pausanias, compare closely with the throne of Apollo at Amyclae, the work of Bathykles the Magnesian, 1 Cf. an inscription (S.M.C. 544) referring to separate priesthoods. 2 iii. 17. 2. 3 iv. 14. 2 ; iii. 18. 8. 4 Lqewy, I.G.B. p. 22, No. 27. 5 Walz, Heidelb. Jahrb. 1845, p. 397 ; Schorn, Sludien der gr. Kunstler, p. 195 ; Thiersch, Epochen der bild. Kunsl, ii. p. 33 ; Sillig, Cat. Artificum ; Hirt, Bottiger's Amallhea, 1. 261 ; Miiller, Aeginet, 101. 6 Welcker, Kl. Schrift. 1833, iii. 533; Bursian,/a/^./ Phil, lxxiii. 513. 7 Schubart, Zeitschr, f. Alt. Wiss. 1845, 2. 8 Brunn, Gesch. der gr. Kilnsller, i. 87. 9 xii. 10. 7. Cf. also Paus. vii. 18. 10, where he is coupled with Kanachos, andii. 32. 5, where he is called a pupil of Tektaios and Angeiion. LACONIA. SPARTA. 139 or with the chest of Kypselos, or the Francois vase. His place seems rather to be among the Orientalising craftsmen, whose work at Sparta fell in the late seventh and early sixth centuries, and is abundantly illustrated by the finds from the Orthia Sanctuary. Moreover the evidence of excava- tion makes the fifth century date of Gitiadas impossible. Exactly corres- ponding to the story of Pausanias, we find in the sanctuary two clearly- defined strata: an early Geometric stratum, and a second 'classical' stratum starting with b.-f. pottery sherds and a few remains of the Orientalising period, and containing bronze statuettes that cannot be later than the middle of the sixth century. We connect these strata respectively with the original foundation and with the restoration of Gitiadas, so that the latter's date must be put back at least a century. Neither Gitiadas nor Kallon, therefore, could have made tripods at Amyclae at the end of the First or of the Third Messenian War. It is more possible that the offering of the tripods had some connection with the Second Messenian War, which probably came to an end about 630 B.C., but even so, the offering must have been made at least eighty years after the end of the war, if both Kallon and Gitiadas were concerned in their construction.1 Another question arises from Pausanias' account of the bronze reliefs in the sanctuary. Gardner and Imhoof-Blumer2 suggest that they were on the dress of the goddess, while Murray3 and Overbeck4 held that they decorated the walls of the shrine. The coin on which the former theory is based does not really afford very strong evidence, since the dress worn by the statue appears similar to that of the lead figurines found at the Orthia Sanctuary,5 which are clearly wearing ordinary dresses. A small bronze statuette of Athena from the Chalkioikos (Fig. 3) resembling a xoanon in shape, shews no traces of bands of relief. On the other hand we discovered a large number of bronze plates, mostly in the last stages of decay, and a great quantity of heavy bronze nails, some still in position through the plates, which seem to prove that bronze plates were applied to 1 Collignon, Hist. Sculpt, grec. i. 228, and Overbeck, Gesch. d. griech. Sculpt, i. 71, are both inclined to favour a mid-sixth century date for Gitiadas, and to connect him with Bathykles and the orientalists. It certainly seems much more probable that the tripods were made by Gitiadas after the Second Messenian War, and the Chalkioikos built afterwards in the beginning of the sixth century. In that case Kallon's tripod was added later. 2 Num. Comm. Pans. p. 58, PI. N 13. s Hist. Gr. Sculpt."- i. 38, 88. 4 Op. cil. p. 228. '" B.S.A. xii. p. 323, Fig. 3 a and c. 140 G. DICKINS the walls of the shrine. None of these shew traces of relief, but doubtless the sculptured pieces only covered a portion of the whole surface, and would be the first to attract the eye of the spoiler. Examples of such decoration are not infrequent in the Orient. Perrotx instances the Gates of Balawat, and in Greece itself we have the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae.2 The custom naturally arises, as Murray3 has pointed out, from the habit of overlaying wood, and is not likely to have originated in a stone country ; its use in the Hieron of Athena is a good example of that strong Asiatic influence in early Spartan art so remarkable in the finds from the Orthia Sanctuary. The locus dassicus for the sanctuary of Athena Chalkioikos in Greek literature is the tragic story of Pausanias as told by Thucydidesi: the flight of the fugitive king to the oiKr/fia, or little shrine, standing in the sacred enclosure ; the mother's condemnation ; the walling-up of the door and slow agony of the dying man ; finally the removal from the enclosure to prevent pollution.5 Afterwards there was the parallel story of Agis.6 In later times we have frequent mention of the enclosure as a parade- ground, or rallying-place from the reign of Archidamus 7 in the fifth, and Agesilaus8 in the fourth century, to the later troubles of the disastrous reign of Nabis.
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