the stoa poikile - The American School of Classical Studies at Athens

252 LUCY SHOE MERITT
wooden panel paintings which would be attached to the wooden framework fastened
to the walls; the cyma reversa crowned member would then serve as the top of the
dado of the wall. The material, the stronger of the two in use in the building, might
reasonably have been chosen for the orthostates below the Aeginetan courses above,
with the wooden string course in between. Such a string course would have had only
the depth of the 0.17 m.-O.19 m. cutting, and presumably the Aeginetan block above
it would have been directly on the Peiraeus block for the principal width of the block,
extending to the outside of the wall. An ell-shaped stone course would have had to
be fitted over the wooden string course. This solution is awkward construction and
unlikely.
Recalling that the epistyle of the main order of the building was of the same
material, the Peiraeus stone, one might think of the interior epistyle carried by the
Ionic columns as a possibility for these blocks, since a cyma reversa is the appropriate
crown for an Ionic epistyle. The cuttings on the top would then receive wooden ceiling
beams and fillers between them. Without any evidence for the spacing of the interior
columns, attested only by the single tiny fragment of shaft and another of base, the
span is completely hypothetical. Considering, however, the date of the building, it is
impossible to guess whether the interior epistyle would have been of stone or wood;
the latter seems to most who have considered the question more likely.
The top course of the walls of the building might also be thought to have been
treated with the alternate material, not so much for strength as for decorative effect,
but it has already been shown that what is quite clearly an epikranitis exists in the
beautifully painted course of Aeginetan stone with its Ionic crowning moulding and
Ionic ornament.
There remains in the hypothetical stoa to which all this material appears to
belong one further position to which these cyma reversa crowned blocks may be
assigned. We go back to the fundamental fact that the one member known positively
to be of Peiraeus stone is the epistyle of the Doric order (above, p. 244). The other
most significant fact about that epistyle is its unparalleled elaboration, the hawksbeak
added to the top of the taenia. Is it possible, then, that the cyma reversa crowned
the epistyle backer which would certainly have been of the same material as the
epistyle itself ? In a normal Doric order of the period of this building the backer
would have been crowned merely by a very slightly projecting fillet. But here we
have what must be one of the earliest cases in which an Athenian architect had
experimented with a combination of the two orders, one of the first attempts to put
Ionic columns inside a Doric facade. There was no precedent (so far as we know)
for the treatment of those other elements of the building which would be visible
with the interior Ionic columns. The epikranitis of the wall of the stoa we have
seen combined the Doric high fascia with an Ionic ovolo (above, pp. 250-251). There
may have been a temptation on the part of a man who was such an innovator as to
use Ionic columns to think of the space inside the outer Doric columns between them