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Laconia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2013

J. M. Cook  and
R. V. Nicholls
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Extract

The village of Kalývia Sokhás lies against the base of one of the massive foothills in which Taygetus falls to the plain three or four miles to the south of Sparta (Plate 26, 1). It is bounded by two rivers which flow down in deep clefts from the mountain shelf. The hillside above rises steeply to a summit which is girt with cliffs on all but the west side and cannot be much less than four thousand feet above sea level; this von Prott believed to be the peak of Taleton. Its summit is crowned by the ruins of a mediaeval castle which was undoubtedly built as a stronghold to overlook the Spartan plain; the only dateable object found there, a sherd of elaborate incised ware, indicates occupation at the time when the Byzantines were in possession of Mystra. The location of the other sites mentioned by Pausanias in this region remains obscure, but fortunately that of the Spartan Eleusinion has not been in doubt since von Prott discovered a cache of inscriptions at the ruined church of H. Sophia in the village of Kalývia Sokhás. In 1910 Dawkins dug trenches at the foot of the slope immediately above the village and recovered a fragment of a stele relating to the cult of the goddesses and pieces of inscribed tiles from the sanctuary. The abundance of water in the southern ravine led von Prott to conclude that the old town of Bryseai with its cult of Dionysus also lay at Kalývia Sokhás; but no traces of urban settlement have come to light at the village, and the name rather suggests copious springs such as issue from the mountain foot at Kefalári a mile to the north where ancient blocks are to be seen in the fields.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 45 , November 1950 , pp. 261 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1950

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References

1 Besides the usual abbreviations employed in BSA the following should be noted:

AO: Dawkins, R. M. and others, Artemis Orthia JHS Suppl. Vol. 5 (1929).Google Scholar

SMC: A. J. B. Wace and M. N. Tod, A Catalogue of the Sparta Museum (1906).

SGDI: Collitz-Bechtel, Sammlung griechischer Dialekt-Inschriften.

2 AM XXIX 7 ff.

3 This castle has been briefly described by Ormerod, BSA XVI 64f.Google Scholar; like him I noticed no sign of the ancient remains remarked by von Prott, but note that the bluish marble has been quarried in surface workings, with which slight wall traces of indeterminate date are connected, on the east slope below the castle.

4 The location was not accepted by M. Fr7auml;nkel, and apparently only spasmodically by Kolbe in IG V. i.

5 BSA XVI 12 ff.

6 229: for the reading see JHS XXXIV 62, and below page 266 note 13. 519 should be in honour of a woman, if not to be combined with 582 (as Woodward, BSA XLIII 253Google Scholar). 567: in honour of a woman. 584: for corrections see below page 278. 604: corrections page 278. 607: corrections BSA XLIII 254 f. 608: correction BSA XXVI 111; for the restoration see page 279 note 41. The inscribed tile fragments are embodied in no. 1515; b and i from Magoúla are falsely assigned to the Eleusinion (see BSA XVI 3), c speaks for itself; on a for read (or Nilsson, , Geschichte griech. Religion I, 434 n. 2Google Scholar).

7 In March 1948 Mr. V. R. d'A. Desborough inspected the site and removed many objects to the Sparta Museum, but was not permitted to remain on the spot on account of rebel attacks (cf. the interim account JHS LXVII 39f.). The sketch-plan on p. 262 has been drawn by Mr. R. V. Nicholls.

8 Length from 61 cms. to 103 not out, height on the riser 14 to 36, width front to back 30 to 36.

9 IG V. i 229.

10 For Kymbadeia cf. the Arcadian man's name Pape-Benseler, Wörterbuch, s. v.

11 Cf. IG V. i pl. 3, where no. 458 is securely dated. The looped beta is rare in Sparta; I have not noted an earlier example than that of BSA XXX 217 no. 7, which Woodward considers perhaps first century B.C., but Woodward points out to me that IG V. i pl. 3 no. 649 (dated to the third century B.C. by Kolbe) seems to show the loops of the beta just separated. Cf. also the Attic victor list of 168/4 B.C., IG II. ii 968 = IG II2, 2316.

12 The right-hand piece, which was recovered in 1948, is mentioned JHS LXVII 39.

13 IG V. i 229 seems to be another such kerbstone dedicated by a retiring thoinarmostria. There is no reason to doubt Fränkel's reading or the completeness of the inscription; read and Bourguet, Dialecte laconien 118, considers the mother's. name to have been Mylaso.

14 Mr. Woodward has called my attention to what looks like a lambda cut above the point of omission in the dedicator's name. For the long form, which I have restored after some hesitation, cf. IG V. i 591, where Dodwell noted a sigma in the ninth place in the name before the letter was chipped off.

15 For lunate sigma on Attic stone inscriptions from early Hellenistic times cf. Larfeld, Handbuch, Attische Inschriften 469 ff.

16 A capital of a slightly smaller Doric column, 40·5 cms. square on the abacus with twenty flutes, supports the balcony of a house on the east side of the torrent zone; it appears to have been found before the 1947 flood, and its place of origin is therefore uncertain.

17 The seat in the river bed is half as broad again (c. 63 cms.), and has a low raised fillet at the sides of the seat; it must have been intended as a double seat without much allowance for adult expansion.

18 Diameter at the foot 47 cms., height 58 cms., with a cutting 8 cms. square in the top; the fluted fragment had a diameter of 38 cms. at the foot. For the type Furtwängler, f.Aegina II, pl. 66.Google Scholar

19 Cf. W ace, SMC 113 ff.

20 Homer, Hymni Diosc. Cf. also the statement of Kallias the dadouch that Herakles and the Dioskouroi were the first people to be shown the mysteries of Demeter, and Kore, , Xen. Hell. VI, iii, 6Google Scholar; Plut., Thes. 33, etc. Cf. also the association of the in the Messenian mysteries (IG V. i 1390; for the identification with the Dioskouroi, Kern, in RE X, 2, 1419Google Scholar).

21 Dawkins in 1910 found the legs, up to the knees, of a small bronze figure of a youth standing upon a small coiled up animal, and four bronze bracelets ending in snakes' heads (BSA XVI 14).

22 Cf. Macedonian tombs, e.g. Heuzey-Daumet, Mission archéologique de Macédoine, pl. 21.

23 Neumenios occurs as a magistrate's name on early third-century coins of Taras.

24 Restored in Hesychius s.v.

25 Cf. AO pl. 193, 11.

26 AO 281 f.

27 BSA XVI 12.

28 For the shape of the body cf., for instance, CVA British Museum III, pl. 98, 5 of the second quarter of the fourth century.

29 BSA XIII 172 fig. 2c. The note-books of the 1907 campaign show that in BSA XIII 129 n. 2 (repeated AO 106) the figures for lakainai and two-handled skyphoi have been accidentally exchanged; there were about two thousand skyphoi, and eight hundred aryballoi.

30 Angelona, , BSA XI 83 ff.Google Scholar; Orthia, AO 106ff.; Amyklaion, , AM LII 59Google Scholar, where the hydriai normally have three upright handles (ibid. pl. 15, 32—a form comparatively rare at the Eleusinion).

31 AM LII 58.

32 Cf BSA XIII I28 f.

33 In JHS LXVII 40 I overestimated the resemblance between these forms and that of AO fig. 82 k.

34 Famell, Cf.Cults of the Greek States III, 227.Google Scholar

35 BSA XVI 14.

36 The index of IG V. i shows three examples of names; Woodward also suggests that should be restored on the Verona Dioskouroi relief SMC 113 fig. 14.

37 For column I, line 11, Cf. Diocletian's tariff, where is quoted as a standard unit for asparagus and beans.

38 It was on account of this misleading likeness that I did not examine the new stele more closely.

39 Tod in BSA XXVI III has corrected the misreading of in I.G V.i 584, line 5, and the false emendation in 604, line 3.

40 BSA XIV, opp. p. 123 and IG V. i p. 117 (with revisions BSA XXX 224). Woodward, , BSA XXX 216Google Scholar, has shown that P. M. Pratolaus I was born not later (and perhaps ten or twenty years earlier) than 20 A.D.; the letter forms of Xenokratia's dedication will there fore not permit of hér being his granddaughter.

41 To the eight attested examples (excluding IG V. i 608) at Kalývia Sokhás may be added IG V. i 1390 and 1498 from Messenia. 1447 is of uncertain origin, but the mystic apparatus and sacrificial victims suggest the cult of the Eleusiniai. The remaining inscription, 589, seems to have been copied by Fourmont a little way south of Amyklai (emend in Boeckh's, lemma CIG I 1446Google Scholar) and should therefore have been set up near the Amyklaion, but the narration of Damos-theneia's titles and virtues appears to have been copied in full from her earlier dedication at the Eleusinion (608), where the opening title (to be restored in 589. 1—2 was in fact appropriate. Tod, (JHS XXXII 100 f.Google Scholar) in reversing his original opinion proposed the restoration in the Eleusinion dedication 606, but this does not tally with the oblique stroke remarked in the fourth place from the end of the phrase in question.

42 IG V. i 589 and 606.

43 I cannot see any alternative reading in lines 10–11 apart from the too immodest one

44 Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft XXXI (1934) 42 ff.

45 Athenian Studies to Ferguson 509 ff.

46 E.g. dekaprotos, agonothete, panegyriarch, and here thoinarmostria.

47 Op. cit. 50 n. 3.

48 Kern Inschr. Magnesia no. 98. 18–21 ( = SIG 3 589).

49 Paus. III, 20, 5–7. Cf. also in the bogus Spartan decree against Timotheos (Bourguet Dialecte laconten 154), and Hesychius s.v. as Wide Lakonische Kulte 119 f.).

50 Kolbe's introduction of the Agroterai into the sanctuary can be dismissed (IG V. i 1515a) since the true reading must be

51 BSA XVI 14.

52 G V. i 213.

53 ADelt XI 28 fig. 20, etc.

54 E.g. IG V. i 526, 529, 530.

55 Cf. F. Poland Geschichte d. griech. Vereinwesens 53.

56 III, 11, 1 ff.

57 See Catalogue under 4 and 5.

58 Catalogue 7–9, 11–16.

59 Catalogue 27–45.

60 BSA XII, 396, XXVII, 202, XXVIII, 9 and 18.

61 BSA XV, 15; AO, 28–31.

62 Catalogue 47–50.

63 De Arch. VII, I.

64 This does not, however, seem to afford any criterion of lateness of date.

65 A little pottery of about the end of the third century A.D. also occurs, but only where there was disturbance in the second building period.

66 A similar date has been suggested by J. Travlos on technical grounds.

67 Levi, Antioch Mosaic Pavements, 406 ff.

68 Syncellus, p. 717, 17 (ed. Dindorf). Cf. BSA XII, 42a; BCH LXXI–LXXII, 394.

69 Cf. Hesperia VII, 449, 454, etc.

70 BSA XII, 431 ff.

71 By inference from Pausanias III, 14, 1.

72 Dimensions given in metres.

73 Cf. BSA XXXIV, 154.

74 P. E. Corbett has suggested that the feet of these cups display a careless device for achieving the effect of ring feet without taking the trouble, and draws my attention to similar feet on black-glazed pottery from Ithaca (BSA XXXIX, 26 nos. 69 and 70). Not dissimilar feet do occasionally occur on coarse black-glazed pottery in Corinth.

75 I am indebted to the B.M. Department of Coins and Medals, Mrs. Shear, Mrs. Varoukha and P. Grierson for assistance and suggestions in attempting to place this unusual piece. of the inscription on the reverse, only the N is certain, but there seems to be definitely only two letters in the lower line, so that does not seem possible. More probably we have a four-letter inscription of the type on the reverse of signed issues of Romanus IV, Nicephorus III and Alexius I. If the piece is a Byzantime imperial issue, and the Christ-type of the obverse strongly favours this, perhaps: or P. Grierson would assign it to Nicephorus Bryennius and will discuss the matter in a forth coming issue of the Numismatic Chronicle. The pretender Nicephorus Melissenus, also, does not seem to be entirely excluded.

76 Cf. BSA XXXIV, 149.

77 On Mycenaean sherds from the Spartan acropolis, see BSA XXVIII, 79.