Papers of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (5.1886-1890)

118

SCULPTURES FROM IKARIA.

rest on the shoulder of the figure directly in front, but the stone is too
much damaged to show the action with certainty.29

X.—Two marble slabs with reliefs on both sides {Fig. 6): height,
0.63 m.; width at base of slab A, 0.63 m., of B, 0.58 m. In the top
of each slab is a dowel-hole, placed at about an equal distance from each
end. The two slabs must have formed part of a balustrade or rail-
ing, visible from both sides. A is an end slab, as is shown by the tree
which appears on each side, in one ease being the beginning of the
the series of reliefs, in the other, the end. Looking at the side upon
which the relief of A forms the beginning, we see a representation of
Heraldes and the Muses; ITerakles, with club and himation or chlamys
(lion-skin ?), standing in the centre of slab B with a female figure on
each side; before slab A are three female figures,30 the central one
holding a musical instrument resembling a mandolin. Upon the other
side of the slabs is represented a sacrificial procession of nine figures,
four on slab A, five on slab B: the foremost figure is leading a goat
beneath the tree. This relief is so much damaged that only the lower
portion of the figures is preserved. The work has great historic and
mythologic interest, as being the only extant representation in sculp-

* [The explanation of this scene is to be sought in the class of reliefs treated by
Lowy, Jahrbuch arch. Inst., U, pp. 109-11. They are characterized by a low altar
(eV^apa ' x^ovlols 5e Kal i]po:(ri tV^a/jay, vTrox&ovloiS he fiodpovs Kal fieyapa, PoRPIIYR..,_De
antro nymph.) usually rounded above, by adorants, and at times by a female much
larger than these, with pitcher and patera ready to pour a libation, as in the relief
of the Villa Albani figured by Lowy ; cf. Mitth. Inst. Alhen, tv, pi. xvi; Rosciier,
Lex. Myth., p. 40G; etc. These habitually stand before the altar, behind which is a
hero or god to whom the libation is to be made. Sometimes the female is omitted,
as in the Theseus relief of the Louvre, and in that from the Mesogaia described by
Milchhofer, Mitth. Inst. Alhen, 1887, p. 293. In ours, we see the iaxdpa, the ador-
ants, and the colossal female, but, in the mutilated state of the relief, there may be
question whether the adorants have their hands in the usual attitude, or the female
is provided with a libation-vessel. Yet her right arm is certainly raised, and that of
the figure before her is bent upward from the elbow. (Our artist, by the use of a
magnifier, has seemed to see more than I can feel wholly certain of.) A peculiar
feature is that two adorants are in front of the female and are walking past the altar
and beyond it (not over it, as appears clearly, since the feet and a portion of the legs
are concealed by the altar). The theory that the colossal female sometimes repre-
sents a priestess (Zoega, as cited by Lowy) receives some support here by the posi-
tion of her left hand seemingly resting on the shoulder of the adorant before her.—
A. C. M.]

30 [The conspicuous absence of the chiton poderes in the third figure on the right,
in a, seems to me to preclude, for this period, the idea that this figure was intended
for a Muse. I think it a male.—A. C. M.]