Hogarth, David G.; Smith, Cecil Harcourt [Contr.]: Excavations at Ephesus: the archaic Artemisia: Text (London, 1908)

The Goddess. 333

below on objects supposed by Poole to be " urns," do not quite reach the
hands, but terminate in distinct spreading tops (pi. lii, no. 17). The hands
in this instance, as in many others, have the fingers spread out, and cannot
be supposed to be grasping anything.

The intention of the coin-engravers seems, then, not to have been
always the same. Sometimes they evidently understood the lines in question
to be fillets ; sometimes, perhaps, to be props ; sometimes to be objects held
in the hands, e.g., sceptre and torch, as on the Mytilene-Perga alliance
coins cited above, but indeterminate wands in the Pergamene type, also
cited. Sometimes they treated them schematically in a way which suggests
nothing in particular, making them converge towards the feet ; sometimes
they made them rest on bulging objects serving no obvious purpose; sometimes,
lastly, they omitted them altogether. There are, moreover, two or three
types, not yet specified, in which these lines do not appear as independent
features, but as surviving, in other concomitant accessories of the cultus-statue.
Such are the Aspendus type (B.M.C. Lycia, etc., pi. xxii, 7, n), where they
seem to be confounded with, and merged into, the columns of the distyle shrine
containing the two figures : and the curious Anemurian type (B.M.C. Lycaonia,
etc., pi. vii, 7), where they survive perhaps in the lower outlines of a kind
of frame surrounding the figure, and suggestive of a veil. The representation
in this case recalls the appearance of the seated terracotta images of Mother
and Child most frequently found at Ephesus in the Croesus stratum (p. 315,
fig. 92). The Anemurian series, it may be observed further, shows other
evidence of type-variation and probably degradation. The hands of the
statue now hold boughs, now are empty, now even are non-existent (see
No. 11 in the British Museum Anemurian series).

It is possible, of course, that the variety, discrepancy, and obscurity
observed in the treatment of these lines may be explained, at any rate partially,
by varieties in the actual cult-statues erected in different localities. Artemis
Ephesia may have been, and probably was, portrayed differently from Artemis
Claria, or Leucophryene, or Anaitis, or Pergaea. But a glance at the coin-
series of individual cities, e.g., Ephesus itself, Pergamum, Perga, etc., will suffice
to rob this argument of much of its plausibility, since in respect of the particular
features in question the representation varies in one and the same locality. On
the whole, therefore, the most reasonable inference appears to be that these lines
represented no visible or existent feature of any statue, but were a traditional
survival, preserving some feature of cult-representation no longer understood,
and therefore susceptible of diverse interpretation.