Find of Week One

The object chosen as find of the week, in reality was already exposed toward the end of last year's campaign in the Basilica that replaced the Temple of Apollo Klarios. The latter had been built under Augustus, but during the Flavian period it was also dedicated to the Flavian Imperial House and in A.D. 102-103 was provided by a local aristocratic family with marble wall veneer and with a colonnade or peripteros composed of 6 by 11 columns. It was unknown, but for a long time believed, that this peripteros might have replaced an older Augustan one, possibly damaged by an earthquake. Yet, the fact that all columns and capitals of the peripteros recycled in the Christian early fifth-century A.D. basilica are clearly of Trajanic date, whereas the walls of the naos or actual temple, which it surrounded are most likely Augustan, caused some doubt about the presence of an external colonnade during the original phase. The object chosen as find of the week is nothing else than an Augustan half-capital with adjoining smooth half-column (see left picture), which must have projected 0.35 m from the antae (projecting side walls) on the front of the pronaos. A quick control of the stone platform containing material from the first excavations in the basilica's apse ca. five years ago, lead to the discovery of no less than two other identical Ionic capitals, this time, however, attached to fluted columns, again projecting 0.35 m from a wall into they were incorporated. Moreover the stone platform contained also ashlars with 0.35 m projecting smooth and fluted half-columns. As it is almost excluded that nothing of a potential Augustan peripteros was preserved, one has to reconstruct the Augustan Temple of Apollo Klarios as a simple naos of which the facade of the pronaos was shaped as a pseudo-peripteral naos (this means with attached half-columns instead of free standing ones) with smooth half-columns projecting from the antae and fluted half-column on either side of the door, all columns being crowned by Ionic half-capitals. The pseudo-peripteral temple originated from southern Italy as a mixture between a Greek peripteros and an Italo-Etruscan podium temple. At Sagalassos, the podium was absent, as was also the case in the mid-Hellenistic Temple of Leto at the Letoön in Xanthos (Lycia), which has a pseudo-peripteral arrangement at the back of its naos.