The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

inscription is in the form of a heading followed by a text arranged in two columns. The
heading (lines 1-7) records the names of a board of commissioners and their appointment
to compile a report on the state of construction of the building. The columnar text details
the incomplete parts of the building, and the materials lying on the site and inventoried by
the commissioners. The beginning of the first column (lines 8-39) concerns unfinished
parts “of the temple” (line 8), such as the wall blocks, wall-capital, and epistyle “at the
corner towards the Cecropium” (line 9). 546 The text continues with the following four
lines:
All the rest of the work round about begins
with the Eleusinian stone against which the
zw~ia (are to be fastened), and three blocks of it
have been placed under the present commissioners.
(IG I 3 . 474 [fr. II, col. I, 40-43]) [85]
Lacey Caskey translates the term zw~ia, which is the plural nominative of zw|~on, as
“figures.” 547 The Eleusinian stone against which (pro&j w{i) these zw~ia were to be
placed has been identified with the bluish-black limestone of the frieze of both the cella
and the north porch of the Erechtheion, specifically, its smooth background blocks. 548 Of
284, 285 and 319 respectively; Fragment VII was found in an excavation east of the Propylaea on the
Acropolis in 1835: Caskey, 319.
546 Caskey, “The Inscriptions,” in Paton, ed., The Erechtheum 301, identifies the corner of the temple
towards the Cecropium with the southwest corner of the Erechtheion, on the basis of evidence that, in other
parts of the inscription (col. I, 58, 63, 83), the Porch of the Maidens, which is built against the west end of
its south wall, is referred to as the prostasis that looks “towards the Cecropium.” On the basis of additional
literary and epigraphical evidence, Ferrari, “The Ancient Temple” 21, understands the reference of the
inscription to the corner of the temple towards the Cecropium to mean the northwestern corner of the
archaic temple of Athena Polias, which has been identified with the poros temple discovered by Wilhelm
Dörpfeld in 1885 to the south of the Erechtheion. Central to Ferrari’s thesis is the argument, 17, that the
Pandroseum, Cecropium, and Erechtheion were parts of the temenos of the temple of Athena Polias, which
was sacked in the Persian attack of 480 B.C., but once repaired, continued to stand and function until the
second century A.D., when Pausanias (1.27.1) described it; based on this argument, she suggests, 21, that
the Erechtheion was “an ornate and elegant appendage to the temple of the Polias.”
547 Caskey, “The Inscriptions,” in Paton, ed., The Erechtheum 289.
548 For a discussion of the dark stone used for the blocks that formed the background of the frieze of the
Erechtheion, see J. M. Paton, “Notes on the Construction of the Erechtheum,” in Paton, ed, The
Erechtheum 181, n. 4; L. T. Shoe, “Dark Stone in Greek Architecture,” Hesperia Supplement 8 (1949) 347-
348; also B. S. Ridgway, Prayers in Stone. Greek Architectural Sculpture Ca. 600-100 B.C. (Berkeley,
277