PLATE XXVIII—Shelter-seat
Shelter-seats, arranged in semicircles, of beautiful white marble, were so placed as to avoid sun or wind; they were convenient for converse, or for listening to a reader or a musician.
Plates [XXVIII] and [XXIX] represent the remains of two of these seats at the Hieron; close to the former is seen a large pedestal on which probably an equestrian statue formerly stood.
PLATE XXIX—Shelter-seat
Many shrines and chapels to subsidiary deities existed, as, for example, to Hygieia, Themis, the Egyptian Apollo, Helios, Selene, Epione (the wife of Asklepios), Zeus, Poseidon, Minerva, Hera, Demeter and other Eleusinian deities, Dikaiosyne, Lato, Hypnos, Eileithyia, and others not as yet identified. The diminutive figure of Telesphoros, in his capacity of god of Convalescence, is not seen here so often along with Asklepios on ex-votos and coins, as at Pergamos and some other Temples.
[Plate XXX] represents a number of small figures of Hygieia and of Asklepios from the Hieron.
Every devout Greek who came as a suppliant to Asklepios would find here also a shrine of his own favourite deity.
To those who had been initiated at Eleusis, and whose advanced age or incurable sickness gave little prospect of life, the calm and dignified forms of Demeter, Persephone, and Iakchos would suggest patience and the hope of a pure spiritual after-life, free from all bodily infirmity, “for the Greek or Roman heart ... was as full, in many cases fuller, of the hope of immortality than our own.”[5]
