The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods by Scully Vincent;

Author:Scully, Vincent;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2013-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

Zeus’ most fully expressive sites are therefore not usually to be found on mountain summits, unless in a hollow upon them as at Hymettos. His temples will be so placed as to cause the observer to experience the bowl of the sky. A moment’s reflection upon the sites of Hymettos and Dodona can also make us understand how that kind of sky is not felt on a broad and bound­less plain, where the sky, however close to the earth, cannot be seen as a definite shape. At night, under the stars, it may sometimes be felt as a dome, but even in optimum daylight conditions, when, that is, it is defined by sailing clouds, it can only be read as a continuous plane which extends horizontally above the earth and never meets it at a convincing boundary. Such a boundless world of continuous horizontal planes, the world of the prairie, was unsym­pathetic to the Greeks on both aesthetic and philosophical grounds. It is an indefinite ambient of continuous flux and change, the world alike of the horse nomad and of modern history. But in the Greek view the world was by rights bounded and definite, and this is the world they em­bodied in Zeus.

The setting of the Temple of the Olympian Zeus in Athens is characteristic, using as it does the deepest part of the arc of the valley between the Acropolis and the hills to the east. (Fig. 254) We can legitimately consider this temple now since it was laid out on its present founda­tions in the late sixth century, even though it was not completed until the second century a.d.19 The Corinthian columns now standing are Hadrianic, as is the entire temenos wall and its propylon. Some large unfluted drums of the sixth–century columns have been found, but no bases, which has led some observers to believe that the original temple, though planned like an Ionic dipteral pavilion, was in fact Doric.20 With the understanding that the original columns would have been shorter than the present Corinthian ones and that we furthermore have no idea where the original propylon, if any, was intended to be, we can, I think, still treat the ar­rangement as it now stands as one which had been generally characteristic of Zeus’ sites. True, when we enter through the Hadrianic propylon which is placed on an exact cross–axis with the east front of the temple and in a temenos wall which is exactly parallel to the temple’s long side, we are taking part in a regularized space experience which was generally uncharacter­istic of archaic planning and which may have occurred first in the earlier campaigns of building at the sanctuary of Poseidon at Sounion or at the Temple of Aphaia on Aigina, about 513–500 b.c. Such regularization has special effects and meanings which can best be discussed later. Yet when we move toward the temple as the arrangement now stands we are impressed, I think, by its general appropriateness for the site as a whole.

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