The North-West Stoa of the Athenian Agora

Abstract

The stoa investigated by the Americans in the N.W. corner of the agora of Athens has won with good reason a notable place among ancient monuments, both as a subject of topographical controversy and as an interesting architectural type. I should like to turn to it again for a short time and in particular to examine at greater length than was possible in a brief review C. Anti's theory of its genesis, given in Chap. IX of his Teatri Greci Arcaici. As the non-committal name given to it in my heading shows, I should like for the present to steer clear as far as possible of the difficult problem of its identification. Anti confidently assumes that the building was the Stoa Basileios; indeed his theory of the origin of the type depends partly on the correctness of this assumption. But the identification has been the subject of a good deal of dispute; even H. A. Thompson, while putting forward with sober confidence his view that the stoa is both the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios and the Basileios, admits in the end that ‘an element of uncertainty must persist’. I accept Thompson's view, but certainly not with sufficient confidence to use it as a corner-stone in building up any theory. It is very distracting when one finds that whereas Anti links up his Royal Stoa with oriental palaces, A. Rumpf looks the other way in space and time and regards his Royal Stoa (a building of very different type—the spacious hypostyle hall west of the North-West Stoa and north of the temple of Hephaestus) as the Stammutter of the Roman basilica. ‘They ran away in opposite directions, and vanished to the east and to the west.’ Both of course use the name Basileios to support their identifications. One may perhaps be excused for giving up the riddle for a while and concentrating on the architectural form of the North-West stoa as we undoubtedly have it.