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Two fragments of marble sculpture, one found in late fill on the Pnyx and the other in the Athenian Agora, join to form part of a large helmeted head, probably from a Roman statue of Athena. Unusual, wavelike curls escaping from beneath the helmet suggest a date in the mid-1st century a.d. The Pnyx/Agora statue may have been commissioned in Athens during a period of renewed interest in the Panathenaic festival by Athenians who saw the promotion of their city's religious traditions as a way of enhancing their own status and that of their city. Between 1931 and 1937, the American School of Classical Studies exca vations at the Pnyx in Athens turned up some 31 sculpture fragments, including many figurines, a small group of unfinished marble pieces, and what was termed by the excavators a limestone "study piece."1 Almost all the items, ranging in date from Classical to Roman, were discovered in fills.2 Just one fragmentary statuette, part of an unfinished, draped male figure, emerged from a more precisely dated area, Pnyx III, ca. 340 b.c.3 But Rotroff and Camp have shown how extensive the intrusions of Ro man material were in this area too, so it may not be possible to assign even this piece a late-4th-century date.4 In addition to an assortment of unrelated fragments, some marble votive pinakes from the Zeus Hypsistos sanctuary?a Roman development of the 1st century a.d., when the Pnyx no longer functioned as a site for civic meetings?were recovered.5 The 1. Davidson and Thompson 1943, pp. 35-40 (unfinished pieces: pp. 35 37, nos. 3, 6,11; "study piece": p. 40, no. 12). All sculptural finds from the American School's Pnyx excavations reside in the storerooms of the Stoa of Attalos in the Athenian Agora. I would like to thank John McK. Camp and Evelyn Harrison for allow ing me to study and publish these fragments; Olga Palagia for examining them; Julia Shear for discussing Pan athenaic issues with me; the anonymous Hesperia reviewers for comments, corrections, and improvements; Tarek Elemam and Nikolaos Manias at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for technical support; and finally, the staff of the Blegen Library at the American School. 2. Pnyx S 26, first identified as the neck of a sea horse, is actually a now headless griffin protome probably from a 4th-century cauldron grave monument (Davidson and Thompson 1943, p. 35). 3. Davidson and Thompson 1943, p. 35; Camp 1996, p. 41; Rotroff and Camp 1996, pp. 274-275. 4. Rotroff and Camp 1996, p. 270; Rotroff 1996. 5. Zeus Hypsistos: Forsen 1993, 1996. ? The American School of Classical Studies at Athens This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 05:15:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms |
