WELCKEB'S VIEW OF THE P7NX.

460

a section of German scholars recently attempted to controvert it. The
idea that the bema, which we have described, was an altar of Zeus,
seems to have first occurred to Ulrichs about the year 1842, but he
never developed it to any extent, and he died in the following year.
Welcker, however, to whom he had communicated it, brought it for-
ward about ten years afterwards in a paper read at the Berlin Academy
of Sciences.1 It will be seen from the title-page that he also identified
the place with the Pelasgicum, that is, the Pelasgic fortification (to
TleKao-yiKov Tet^o?), which he took to be a separate and distinct thing
from the Pelasgicum at the Acropolis; but as this extravagant view
has not, so far as we know, been adopted even by any of his country-
men, except Gottling, we may be excused from discussing it. We may
say the same of Gottling's theory,2 which differs, however, considerably
from Welcker's, inasmuch as, though he thought that the place in
question was the Pelasgic fortification in which the Peisistratidae were
besieged, yet he allows that it was subsequently converted into the
Pnyx. But this theory does not appear to have found much favour
even in Germany. Thus, according to Welcker's view, the place was
at once the Pelasgic fortification, and a temenos of Zeus; and accord-
ing to Gottling, the fortress first and the Pnyx afterwards. The
substance of Welcker's paper is: that the building with the bema,
taken since Chandler's time for the Pnyx, was a temenos and rock-
altar of Zeus Hypsistos, also called Pelasgicum; that the site of the
Pnyx cannot be determined from ancient testimony, and that its con-
struction was incompatible with the present remains. It must be
sought in some other part of the town, and probably at the Museium.
The view of the bema having been an altar of Zeus is derived from
some votive tablets found near it, which are evidently of a late Eoman
period;3 and that it is to be referred to the time of the Pelasgi is

1 Der Felsaltar des hochsten Zeus und
'das Pelasgikon zu Athen, bisher genannt
die Pnyx. Eine in dcr kgl. Akademie
der Wissenschaften zu Berlin gelesene
Abhandlung von F. G. Welcker. Berlin,
1852 (75 pp. in 4to).

8 See his ' Pelasgikon in Atheu,' in
Bhein. Mus. 1846, iv. 321; and his pam-
phlet, 'Das Pelasgikon und die Pnyx,'
Jena, 1853.

3 Some of these are in the British
Museum, and have been described in the