Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/75

SlPYLUS AND ITS MONUMENTS. 59 What tends to give colouring to this hypothesis is the fact that on the edge of the plain, near the entrance to this narrow pass, recent excava- tions have brought to light the site of a temple of this goddess, where she was ad- dressed by the name of ~MtjTrjp that to say, the / FIG. 30. Plan of houses. After Dr. Fabricius. s very title given her by Pausanias. 1 Striking though this may be as a coincidence, it fails to carry weight with it. In the first place, the feeble salience of the rock which, according to him, was held as the seat of the great ancestor, was not visible from below. In the second place, even when the path was in its prime, the difficulty of ascent was too serious a drawback to have tempted many people making the experiment. Obviously the throne of Pelops was a conspicuous feature in the 1885. Consult also WEBER, Le Sipylos, pp. 118, 119, and Prof. RAMSAY, Sipylos and Cybele, pp. 35-37. 1 The name of IIAao-T^v^, under which this goddess was worshipped here, occurs in ancient manuscripts. But as neither inscriptions nor coins have it, Sichelis, Din- dorf, and after him Schubert, took upon themselves to replace IlXaon/vj; by ITAaKiav?/. It is now universally acknowledged that the manuscripts were correct, an example which should warn editors to pause ere they tamper with ancient texts ; notably in relation to proper names and local epithets which, though unknown to fame, were none the less current in the districts where they are found HXaKiavTj was a sur- name of Cybele which obtained in the Troad. The temple in question is said to be about an hour eastward of Magnesia, e.g. hard by the statue of the goddess. On its site several bas-reliefs of a votive character have been discovered, represent- ing a woman accompanied by lions, in which it is not difficult to recognize Cybele. On one of the sculptures appears the following inscription, published in the Bulletin de Correspondence hellenique, 1887, p. 300 : MHTPOAOPA AHOAAA Miprpo&opa 'AiroXXZ MHTPI HAA2THNHI ^rpl UXao-Trjvfj EYXHN. fixnv- Another inscription, in very good preservation, mentions the temple in which the votive monuments in question were deposited, along with one Apollonius Skitalas, son of Alexander, who is said to have built or rather repaired it What is wanted here is a squeeze, so as to learn whether the restoration dates from the Seleucidas or the Roman empire.