Problems in Periclean Buildings

by G. W. Elderkin

This entrance like its predecessor was perhaps used by the Arrephoroi. If it was the entrance especially reserved for them, then the Caryatids may very appropriately be regarded as statues of Arrephoroi. They adorn their own porch. To such an identification the objection may be made that the Caryatids are fully developed forms whereas the Arrephoroi were girls between the ages of seven and eleven (Bekker, Anecdota Graeca, I. p. 202, s. v. ἀρρηφορεῖν) but a structural necessity for heavier, fuller forms justified the license of the architect. The Caryatids are called κόραι in the building inscriptions.[3]

The interpretation of the Caryatids as Arrephoroi is confirmed by a scene (Fig. 5)[4] on an archaic amphora which also makes possible a better understanding of the Porch as a whole. The amphora which is now in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston is published by De Ridder in B. C. H., 1898, p. 467 and pl. VI, and by Caskey in Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, Vol. VII (1909), No. 38. In the scene on the neck of this amphora appears a priestess followed by four maidens who bear upon their heads a long chest. De Ridder compares the four maidens with the Athenian Canephoroi. Certain suggestive points may be noted. The maidens are four in number. Ancient writers with the exception of Pausanias tell us that there were four Arrephoroi at Athens.[5] The front of the Caryatid Porch consists of four. Nor do comparisons stop here. The architrave which the Caryatids (Arrephoroi) carry may be compared with the long chest which the maidens bear on their heads, and the discs on the architrave with the discs which ornament the chest. The discs on the architrave are usually explained as a substitute for a frieze, but the logic of such substitution is quite unclear. They are simply the ornaments which decorated the mysterious burden of the Arrephoroi.

The ceremony in the course of which the Arrephoroi carried the chest may have had to do with a cult of the heroized dead. Tradition has it that Erechtheus who was closely associated with Athena was buried in the Erechtheum. The discs on the box and on the dress of the bearers suggest those which were found in such numbers in the Mycenaean shaft-graves.[6] But whatever the character of the ceremony, it had to do with the cult which was housed in the Erechtheum.

The amphora just referred to is a Boeotian fabric, but that fact does not nullify the importance of its bearing upon the problem in hand. The Boeotian potter may have appropriated the scene from an Athenian source. The comparative study of this amphora, the archaic pedimental sculpture and the Caryatid Porch seem to justify the following conclusions. The Caryatid Porch is a bold translation into marble of the Arrephoroi and the disc-covered chest they carried upon their heads to the joint temple of Athena and Erechtheus. The maidens are a particularly appropriate adornment of the porch which was reserved for their living prototypes. The corresponding entrance of the Pre-Persian joint temple was also used by the Arrephoroi and may have had Caryatids in place of columns. If so the later temple reproduced a feature of the earlier temple just as the equally unique sculptured drums of the earlier Artemisium at Ephesus were reproduced in its successor. In a word the Caryatid Porch is not an arbitrary creation but is related in thought to the cult of the temple.

III
THE ERECHTHEUM AS BUILT

The present plan of the interior of the Erechtheum offers a number of difficulties. Those of a general character may be considered first. Within the cellae of Greek temples, the interior cross-wall is regularly at right angles to the axis of the main entrance and not parallel to that axis as in the west cella of the Erechtheum. The accepted plan of the cella compels an orientation east and west instead of north and south for its two chambers. The want of harmony in the proportions of the western chamber and the porch which admits to it is hardly to be expected of an architect of the fifth century. He might perhaps be justified by the theory that he labored under restrictions imposed by a complication of cults were it not for the fact that the contemporary architect of the Propylaea planned without regard to sanctuaries (cf. Furtwängler, Sitzb. Münch. Akad., 1904, 375). The feeling which the north porch creates is that it was intended to be the entrance to an interior of larger dimensions than those of the present plan.

Difficulties of a specific nature are encountered when one endeavors to find in the plan certain details of the Chandler inscription (I. G., I, 322). A satisfactory parastas cannot be located. It was an interior wall of some sort. The word προστομιαῖον the official name of one of the chambers in the west cella has been derived from προστόμιον which is conjectured to have been the curb about the sacred well (Petersen, Die Burgtempel der Athenaia, p. 101). But one naturally asks why the room of the sacred well was not named from στόμιον. The φρέαρ (στόμιον) was the important object of cult in the room. It is the θάλασσα which is mentioned by Herodotus, and the φρέαρ by Pausanias, while nothing is heard about a well-curb. The natural interpretation of προστομιαῖον is the room in front of (πρό) the * στομιαῖον, i.e., the room of the στόμιον. Now the derivation of * στομιαῖον (which does not, to be sure, occur in extant records of the temple) from στόμιον is as simple as that of Πανδροσεῖον from Πάνδροσος. It is the entirely problematical προστόμιον which renders improbable the derivation from it of προστομιαῖον.

There is another possible source of difficulty to be noticed. The inscription mentions four doors, 8¼ x 2½ feet, for which there is no place in the outside walls. These then must have been placed in the interior walls. According to the present plan which shows a closed wall between the shrines of Athena and Erechtheus these two double-doors must have been in the western cross-wall where they could hardly have admitted to a single room (Fowler and Wheeler, Greek Archaeology, p. 148, fig. 115). This obliges us to suppose a division of the middle chamber into two parts and thereby presents a difficulty to those who believe that the word διπλοῦν in the description of Pausanias refers to the entire western part of the Erechtheum. For the western cella would then consist of three instead of two chambers.