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and variety of these dedications we can gauge the importance of the
cult in the sixth century.
The most conspicuous among the finds from the archaic temple is
a marble bowl, supported by four female figures each standing on the
back of a lion and holding the animal's tail in one hand and a a leash in
the other. Rams's heads alternate with the human figures below the
marble bowl. This highly sophisticated group is one of the very earliest
examples in existence of Greek marble sculpture. The marble is Laconian,
but the artist may well have been a Corinthian. The Corinthia
had no marble of its own. We know where this marble bowl stood, for
we have found its base in front of the entrance to the temple. Here
worshippers and priests and other temple servants washed their hands
ceremonially before entering the temple. Although the bowl was destroyed
together with the temple, and its fragments thrown out with
the debris, it seems to have been replaced when the new temple was
built.
In the inscription mentioned in my first lecture in honour of the
orator Nilón, a reference is made to the washing of hands in the forecourt
of the temple close to the place where Nikon's statue was set up.
After the destruction of the archaic temple about 475 B.C., a new
splendid cult house of Poseidon was erected before the middle of the
fifth century B.C. Though somewhat smaller than the temple of Zeus
here at Olympia, it was very similar both in the disposition of its several
parts and in certain details; so much so that it might have been designed
by the same architect, Libón of Elis. Like its Olympia counterpart
it appears to have been decorated with pedimental sculpture and with
carved metopes over the entrance and in the rear. This bulding, though
severely damaged by fire in 390 B.C. and later repaired, remained standing
throughout antiquity and was finally demolished in the sixth century
after Christ, under the Emperor Justinian, to provide material for his
fortress and trans-Isthmian line of defence.
In front of the temple on the east facade we have found the foundation
of the altar of Poseídon which measures 40 m. in length, one of
the longest altars known from ancient times. In front of the altar we
find a deposit of ash and burnt animal bones, and mixed with these a
number of smooth pebbles about the size of hens' eggs. That these
pebbles played a part in the sacrifices to Poseidon we learn from an
area farther east, which during the archaic period was devoted to sa-
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