William Martin Leake, who passed through Corinth sometime before 1830.

[hawkwing_lb]

For your reading pleasure, this is the fruit of my afternoon's labour - an afternoon spent tracking down online the work of the below-mentioned William Martin Leake, and then interpreting and verifying the information held in the three or four pages where he speaks about a bluff in Corinth relevent to my interests, and the column fragments he came across there.

In 1830, William Martin Leake, a Fellow of the Royal Society, published a book in three volumes on his travels in the Morea, as the Peloponnese was then known. In it he remarks upon the remains of a temple, which he presumes to have been dedicated to Apollo. Actually, he remarks upon two: but the first[1] is certainly that of the Temple of Apollo as drawn by James Stuart in 1751 and Luigi Mayer in 1775.[2] The second, for which he gives the certain evidence of column drums and column fragments, is certainly close by, if not hard upon, the site of the Asklepieion. "At a short distance to the northward of this ruin [the Temple of Apollo]," he says, "on the brow of the cliffs overlooking the plain and bay of Lechaeum, there is an artificial level, on which I remarked the foundations of large building, and some fragments of Doric columns."[3]

He informs us that by his calculations, which he bases upon the dimensions of the shafts and the fluting, he reckons the temple to have been a hexastyle of approximately 75 feet in breadth[4]: in modern measurements, approximately 22.8 metres. The temple of Asklepios is less than half so wide, and not so long, so if Leake is to be believed, a structure considerably more massive was also to be found in the vicinity.[5] Leake does not distinguish the column remains on which he bases his calculations from the foundations and other remains upon the bluff, and I believe it is plausible to hold that it is the temple of Zeus mentioned by Pausanias which lies immediately adjacent to the Asklepieion at the south, upper side, and not the gymnasium.

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[1] Leake, W.M., Travels in the Morea Volume III, London 1830, 245

[2] Mayer, Luigi. Views in the Ottoman Empire Chiefly in Caramania:a part of Asia Minor hitherto unexplored; with some curious selections from the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus, and the celebrated cities of Corinth, Carthage, and Tripoli: from the original drawings in the possession of Sir R. Ainslie, taken during his embassy to Constantinople, 1803

[3] Leake, W.M., Travels in the Morea Volume III, London 1830, 247

[4] Leake, W.M., Travels in the Morea Volume III, London 1830, 248. For more on Leake's Doric temple, c.f. Leake, W.M., Peloponnesiaca: A supplement to Travels in the Morea, London, 1846, 393-395.

[5] Leake also makes mention [249] of seven standing columns which he implies are nearby, and which he ascribes to the temple of Athena Chalinitis mentioned by Pausanias as being beside the theatre [Desc.Gr. 2.4.1], but in the absence of any geographical marker in relation to the features of the landscape which can definitely be identified from Leake's description (to whit, the Temple of Apollo and the Asklepieion bluff), it seems overly generous to ascribe to these any position in relation to the sanctuary of Asklepios.

Comments

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

go thesis, go!

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

*shares Hefeweissbier*

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

It must have been so exciting, to be discovering so much about the ancient world...

Bet you got a buzz when you were tracking this reference down, too! I love the feeling you get when you finally find out some elusive fact that helps support your case...

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

The problem of garnering supporting evidence when a) the evidence went walkabout before excavations began, and b) no excavation has taken place in the field next door...

Me, I discovered that Mr. Leake considers "within half a kilometer" to be "at a short distance." Also that he is incapable of giving distance or direction. (Would "west a bit" or "east a bit" have been so hard?)

But now I want to read the whole of Travels in the Morea, so it wasn't a terrible way to spend a Friday afternoon.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

They did things differently then, I suppose.

I've just finished reading a couple of books about the excavations at Knossos - one was devoted to the Central Palace Sanctuary (a great account, as site reports go!!) and another devoted to the Little Palace. It made all my existential angst about the schedules imposed by commercial archaeology go completely out the window - it was terrifying to think how much information was lost in the original excavations by Evans, McKenzie et. al.

But I still can't think too badly of the likes of Evans and Greenwell or whoever - they did what was acceptable at the time, and we wouldn't be where we are today if it wasn't for their efforts and mistakes.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

They really did.

My supervisor's a Bronze Age Aegeanist, and I got a raft of undergrad on Crete. They have some of the best published sites anywhere now... but Evans' excavation at Knossos, and his interpretation thereof...

Well. At least he published? We must give him this, as against Schliemann the bulldozer. :P

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

That wager system he used in his excavations was terrifying...

Yes, there's quite a few people out there who haven't published. I can hold my head up now - it took me fifteen years to get my thesis published, but at least I got it done eventually.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

*is having to track down archived notebooks from unpublished excavations at Epidauros*

*thinks forty-eighty years is more than long enough to write up a paper or an excavation report*

*is not so very much with the impressed*