Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic ArtHyde, Walter Woodburn
History
Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art
Hyde, Walter Woodburn
Olympics; Sculpture, Greek; Sports -- Greece
A better alternative can be found. In describing the Leonidaion (V,
15.2), Pausanias says that this building stood “outside the sacred
enclosure at the processional entrance into the Altis ... separated
from this entrance by a street; for what the Athenians call lanes,
the Eleans name streets.”[2335] Now Doerpfeld has shown that inside
the West Altis wall and parallel to it—just south of the base of
Philonides’ statue—is a line of bases ending in the later South wall
of the Altis, so that this West wall and row of pedestals form a _cul
de sac_ (see Plan B).[2336] It is clear that no such row of statues
would have been placed leading up to a dead wall; therefore these
statues must have stood there before the wall was built, and must once
have formed the eastern boundary of a broad street skirting the eastern
side of the Leonidaion, which was twice as wide as later, when the wall
cut off half its breadth and made it a “lane,” though the older name
“street” was retained. The later Roman enlargement of the Altis is
well known. The long row of pedestals to the south of and parallel to
those already discussed as standing along the line of the South Terrace
wall, westward of the base of Telemachos, once constituted the southern
boundary of the “Processional Way” (ὁδὸς πομπική), which ran from the
Leonidaion to where it debouched into the Altis at its southeastern
corner. Originally outside the Altis, they were later, together
with the road itself, included in it. The pedestals, then, in the
above-mentioned _cul de sac_, and also the fourteen (among them that
of Metellus Macedonicus; see Plan B) that adorned the south side of
the Processional Way, may be the remains of some of these last statues
mentioned by Pausanias.
THE SECOND EPHODOS OF PAUSANIAS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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