Stones of Venice

The mediterranean valleys. Geological changes in historical times

The cult of Pan in ancient Greece

Principles of geology

This interdisciplinary article argues that ancient Greek and Roman representations of Okeanos, Tartaros, and the underworld demonstrate an observational awareness of the hollow underground spaces that characterize the geomorphology of karst terrains in the Mediterranean world. We review the scientific facts that underlie Greek and Roman accounts of karstic terrain in observation-based discourse and in myths, and we demonstrate that the Greek words barathron (pit), limnē (lake), koilos (hollow), and dinē (whirling current) are used with precision in observational accounts of karst terrain. Ancient accounts of the dynamic limnē and barathrum systems characteristic of much karst terrain offer a complex matrix of observation-based and belief-based discourse: at the edge of the barathrum, the imaginative or spiritual realm of the underworld has a material plausibility and the closely observed material world has a plausible potential to connect to a world we cannot see.

Mapping Tartaros: Observation, Inference, and Belief in Ancient Greek and Roman Accounts of Karst Terrain

figures. The position of these figures indicates that they do not serve merely decorative purposes in the composition. The figure to the right probably represents a snake, and the one to the left looks like a fish. A possible interpretation is that we are dealing with the Potnia Theron (‘protector of animals’) motif that Artemis is already identified with in the Iliad. The snake motive is also found in another early dedication. In a group of hand-made miniatures is one oinochoe with an incised snake on the outer face of its handle (Fig. 10 .6). This is obviously a chthonic motive. We have earlier seen that this motif was also found on early dedicatory pottery in the sanctuary of Athena Alea at Tegea (Fig. 6.6), where it can probably be connected with a chthonic feature, perhaps with the fountain of Auge. It would also have been most appropriate if Artemis were accompanied by one of the daughters of Okeanos at a place which in the early modern landscape of memory was called Psili Vrisi, ‘the high spring’. 148 Voyatzis, 1991, 301, MP3. 149 Voyatzis insists on calling these figures fillers. Although hardly satisfactory from the visual sematics point of view, the concept of ‘fillers’ in early Greek art is deeply incorporated into the vocabulary of Classical archaeologists. A theoretical debate about this issue is absent. For examples of alternative approaches to the visual semantics of fillers in a discussion of the 7 century BC Polyphemos amphora from Eleusis, see Osborne, 1988; and Whitley, 1994. See also Osborne, 1998, 57ff. 150 Homer, Iliad 21.470. 151 Voyatzis, 1991, 302, MP9. 152 Oinochoai with handles depicting snakes twisting in a meandering pattern have also been found at Tegea and at Sparta. See Voyatzis, 1991, 86, plate 29; and Coldstream, 1968, 216. Figure 10.7 Bronze hydrophoros from Tegea from the second half of the 8th century BC. Same type as a not so well preserved specimen found at the Psili Korphi Sanctuary.

Jørgen Bakke

Papers

Forty Rivers: Landscape and Memory in the District of Ancient Tegea