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The Date of the Temples near Kourno in Lakonia

1983; Archaeological Institute of America; Volume: 87; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/504661

1939-828X

Eusebi Garcia Biosca Joan, F. E. Winter,

Archaeology and Historical Studies

The Kourno temples, although known since Boblaye's time and excavated by Le Bas about 140 years ago, have never been adequately published, and were infrequently visited before the construction of the modern road. Both Curtius (1852) and Bursian (1855) judged the buildings to be late work; this view has been echoed by later scholars, who have not attempted to establish a more precise chronology based on detailed stylistic analysis. Stylistically significant elements of the two temples, a small in-antis structure and a somewhat larger peripteros (probably 6 × 7), are here described, illustrated and analyzed. On the basis of affinities with Italo-Hellenistic and Roman Republican work W of the Adriatic, we argue that the Kourno temples must postdate the onset of Roman architectural influence in Greece, but are more closely related to monuments of the period ca. 100-50 B. C. than they are either to Augustan work or to the Tuscan and Doric canons of Vitruvius. They probably represent the revival of a local cult, or cults, as a result of the establishment of independent Koinon of the Lakedaimonians after 146 B. C.; the small temple was perhaps built ca. 100 B. C. or a little earlier, the peripteros some 25-50 years later. There is no sign of Roman Imperial construction on the site; nevertheless, the temples were probably still in use, and the townsite to the S inhabited, when Augustus reorganized the Koinon under the name of "Free Lakonians." The Augustan Koinon comprised 24 cities, of which six had apparently ceased to exist in Pausanias' day; if the Kourno townsite was one of these six, attempts to identify it with any settlement mentioned by Pausanias are fruitless.