The Temple at Claros— Part Five

The Temple at Claros— Part Five June 27, 2023

A Via sacra or sacred road went right past this site, and on to Ephesos (which by the way is the Greek name of the city, with Ephesus being the Latin name).

Along the road there would be kora and kore statues, idealized representations of males and females, which may be copying some of the similar statues in Egypt.

 

The statue immediately above is of Aphrodite. Generally, the statues in the nude were of gods, goddesses, or idealized human figures. Actual humans are mostly not depicted this way unless they were buff athletes who competed in the nude.

High status persons sometimes preferred to just have busts, like this one…

And sometimes there would just be free standing smaller columns with interesting capitals like this one

There might also be more honorific columns like this one….

Clearly the one’s closer to the temple reflected higher status of the individual honored, for example this one for Menippus….

The model of the temple of Apollos gives us a small hint at what the temple would have originally looked like when completed….

Just how massive the original was is shown by the size of the drums used to build the major columns, which are much larger than the honorific columns since they had to be weight bearing for the roof and front and rear cornices.

 


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