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

288

THE MANTINEIAN BELIEFS.

chief divinities, the action bounded on one side by Helios, rising with
his steeds, and, on the other, by Selene descending to the realms of
night. The base of the Athena Parthenos was similarly decorated
with scenes portraying the birth of Pandora. Fortunately for us, the
so-called Lenormant statuette in the British Museum, giving a free
copy of the Athena Parthenos, has on the base an imperfect rendering
of this scene; but, imperfect as it may be, it shows that the decoration
in relief occupied only the front of the base, and did not extend round
the four sides. This, moreover, we should naturally have surmised
before, inasmuch as it could not have been intended that the visitors
should walk round the back of such sacred statues, generally placed
toward the west end of the cella, without sufficient space left free at
the back for proper appreciation of a relief on the base.

Among extant bases, I would specially draw attention to one deco-
rated with reliefs representing pyrrhic dancers,4 now in the Acropolis
Museum at Athens, to which my attention was drawn by Mr. Loring
of King's College, Cambridge, and the British School at Athens. I
shall have occasion to recur to these reliefs for further comparison
with the works under discussion. For the present, I merely wish to
point out that, though this base belonged to what must have been a
much smaller group of figures than ours, as the figures in the relief,
cut into the solid stone of the base, are less than half the size of our
Muses, it is still instructive as showing sculptured decoration similarly
disposed only on the front side.

The most important light, however, upon the disposition of these
slabs and the base which they ornamented, is thrown by the important
discovery at Lykosoura in the autumn of 1889 of the temple-statues
of Damophon of Messene by Messrs. Kabbadias and Leonardos. The
temple and the statues there found are beyond a doubt those described
by Pausanias (vni. 38). The date of these works cannot be far re-
moved from that of Praxiteles. Now, there were four statues on this
base, while there wTere three on that of Mantineia. By computation,
the width of the Lykosoura base would be about eight metres, and on
this ratio, a base for only three statues would be about six metres wide.
Four slabs of the dimension of our Mantineian reliefs would measure

4Beule, L'Acropole d'Athines, n, pis. in and iv; Raxgabe, Antiq. Iiellen., pi.
xxi; vide, also, Michaelis in Rhein. Mux., xvn. 217, and Mittheil. d. deutsch. Arch.
Instit. Athen, i, 295. The inscription is published CIA, n. No. 1286.