Amyclae

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Five kilometers south of Sparta, on a low limestone rise above the right bank of the Eurotas where the valley begins to broaden toward the sea, stands a chapel of Agia Kyriaki. The chapel is medieval; the hill it crowns is not. Dig beneath it and the layers run back through Roman votives, through the painted terracottas and bronze nails of the Archaic precinct, through Geometric and Early Iron Age ash, and down into the Bronze Age — to a settlement on the southeastern slopes already old when the first Greek-speakers came into Laconia. This rise is Amyclae — Greek Amyklai — and what was built and rebuilt on it for more than a thousand years made it the second sanctuary of the Spartan state, behind only the precinct of Artemis Orthia and the war-temple of Athena on the city’s own acropolis.

The town beneath the cult

Amyclae was older than Spartan power over it, and the memory of that priority never left it. Tradition held the place a town of the pre-Dorian Achaeans — one of the last to hold out, taken late and with difficulty into the orbit of the incoming Dorian Sparta, and absorbed not by erasure but by incorporation. When the Spartan state organized itself into its constituent villages, Amyclae was counted among them, the only one set apart from the cluster of four on the Eurotas terraces and admitted from the south. A festival, a hero’s tomb, and a god’s image came in with it, and Sparta did not dismantle them; it adopted them, and over centuries made the adopted cult more central than almost anything native.

The hill itself carries occupation deep into prehistory. A large Early and Middle Helladic settlement spread on the southeastern slopes, and from the late thirteenth century BCE the summit shows ritual activity — the deposits of an open-air cult that persists, without the break one might expect, from the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age and on into the historical sanctuary. There are no Mycenaean buildings on the crown; the place was a holy ground rather than a palace, and the palace itself has only lately been found, the administrative center of Bronze Age Laconia identified at nearby Aghios Vasileios. That long continuity of offering — the same hilltop receiving the same kind of devotion across the great rupture that ended the palatial world — is one of the strongest cases in Greece for continuity of cult through the so-called Dark Age, and it makes Amyclae a place where the deep substratum of Greek religion lies unusually close to the surface.

The columnar god

What stood at the center of the precinct was, even to classical Greeks, an antique and arresting thing. The cult image of Apollo was not a carved body. It was a tall pillar of bronze — by Pausanias’s reckoning some thirty cubits high, a colossus on the order of fourteen meters — finished at the top with a head and fitted with hands and feet, but with no articulated trunk, no shoulders, no human contour between the crown and the base. Onto this columnar god were set a helmet, a spear in one hand, a bow in the other. It belonged to a kind older than the kouros and older than the idea that a god’s statue should look like a beautiful man: an aniconic or barely-iconic form, a worked pillar with a face, of a sort that survived in only a handful of the most conservative Greek sanctuaries. By the Periclean age the Greeks themselves found it strange — venerable precisely because it did not resemble what statues had come to be, a thing handed down rather than designed.

The Throne of Apollo

Around this image, in the middle of the sixth century BCE, the Spartans had a great framework built. They commissioned it from Bathycles of Magnesia, a sculptor out of Ionian Asia Minor, and it was called the Throne of Apollo — though it was less a seat than an enormous architectural casing, a marble and metal canopy of throne-form enclosing and exalting the standing pillar at its heart. Bathycles raised it about 550 BCE, and on finishing it dedicated, among the works, the Graces and an image of Artemis Leucophryene, a goddess of his Ionian homeland. The structure ran, by the ancient measurements, to a height answering the colossus it framed, and every visible surface carried sculpture.

The only sustained account is Pausanias’s, in the third book of his Description of Greece, and it is at once the throne’s salvation and its puzzle. He walks the eye across panel after panel of relief and figure in the round — the Graces and the Seasons set as supports before and behind; Echidna and Typhon on one flank, Tritons on the other; Poseidon and Zeus bearing off Taygete the daughter of Atlas and her sister Alcyone; the labors of Heracles, the rape of the daughters of Leucippus, scenes from the Trojan cycle and the Calydonian hunt, dances and processions of gods. He gives names and adjacencies but rarely the layout that would let a draftsman set them in space, and so the Throne has resisted every attempt at full reconstruction. Generations of scholars have drawn it — as a tetrastyle baldachin, as a tiered podium, as an open exedra — and each drawing is a different building. What is certain is that Bathycles wrapped an ancient Laconian pillar-god in the most lavish Ionian sculptural program of its age, and that the join of the two — archaic native image, cosmopolitan archaic art — was itself the monument.

At its base, the sources say, was the tomb. Beneath the altar of the god — for the throne’s lower structure served as a great altar — lay the grave of Hyacinthus, the Laconian youth whom the precinct honored before and beside Apollo, and into whose burial the offerings to the dead were made on the festival’s first day. The arrangement is exact and strange: the buried mortal below, the standing god above, one altar serving both. Hyacinthus’s own story — the discus, the wind, the flower marked with the cry of grief, the wind Zephyrus who in one telling turned the throw — belongs to the youth himself and is told under Hyacinth. What concerns the place is the architecture of the cult: that a hero’s tomb sat literally under the god’s altar, and that the year’s chief rite moved between the two.

The Hyacinthia

The festival that gave the precinct its rhythm was the Hyacinthia, held each year in the Spartan month Hyacinthius, in the early summer, and reckoned the gravest fixed obligation of the Laconian calendar after the Carneia. Its shape is preserved chiefly through the later compiler Athenaeus, who quotes the local historian Polycrates and the grammarian Didymus, and the structure they describe is a deliberate descent and ascent across three days.

The first day was for mourning. There were no garlands; the diners wore no wreaths and ate plain fare, the elaborate breads and the songs of praise to the god withheld; there was no paean. The offerings went to the dead — to Hyacinthus in his tomb beneath the altar — in the manner due to a hero, not a god. Then the festival turned. On the second day the precinct filled with sound: boys with the cithara and the high voice of the aulos, choirs singing the god, horse-races and the great procession out from the city along the sacred way, dances of the young, women carried in wicker-work carriages, and feasting — public, abundant, with the city’s slaves admitted to the tables and guests received from abroad. The third day is the least described, and the silence of the sources around it has invited the guess that something more restricted, perhaps with the character of mystery-religions, closed the rite. What the ancient writers preserve plainly is the movement: from a hilltop hushed for a dead youth to a hilltop loud with the living god, grief spent and then released into festival.

The Hyacinthia bound the Spartans more tightly than almost any other observance. The Amyclaeans on campaign were said to break off and come home when the season of the festival approached rather than miss it; and on at least one occasion in the long Messenian wars the Lacedaemonians agreed a truce of forty days at Eira purely to keep the rite. For a state whose whole life was ordered to war, the willingness to set down the spear for a festival of mourning and renewal is the measure of how deep the cult ran — deeper, here, than the discipline of Lycurgus that ordered everything else.

The reading and its limits

That sequence — a day of grief for a buried youth, then days of procession, choral dance, and feast for the god — has drawn the modern eye toward a single interpretation: a death-and-renewal rite, a cult of the dying and returning year older than its Olympian frame, with Hyacinthus a pre-Greek divinity of the earth’s growth absorbed into the worship of the incoming Apollo rather than invented by it. The chief piece of evidence cited is the name. Hyacinthus ends in the -nth- that linguists read as a mark of a language spoken in the Aegean before Greek arrived — the same ending that lies in Korinthos, in Tirynth, in a whole stratum of pre-Greek place-names — and on that argument the youth was once a local power in his own right, later subordinated to the Olympian and reduced, in the myth, to the god’s mortal favorite.

The reading is old, careful, and widely held, and the continuity of cult on the hill from the Bronze Age gives it real footing. But it is an inference, not a record. The rite is well attested; its deep meaning is reconstructed. The first-day mourning and the buried hero are facts of the calendar and the precinct; what the Spartans of the classical age took the mourning to mean — whether a seasonal death, a hero’s funeral, or something the categories of the death-and-renewal schema do not capture — the sources do not say, and the schema itself, once applied freely across the eastern Mediterranean, is held now with more caution than it was a century ago. Amyclae is a place where the architecture of belief survives in unusual fullness and its theology in unusual poverty: the tomb under the altar, the columnar god above, the year’s turn from black bread to the paean, all recoverable; the inner sense of them, only guessed.

The dig

The hill was first opened in 1889–1890 by Christos Tsountas, who found the precinct wall and the courtyard; Adolf Furtwängler and Ernst Fiechter worked it in 1904–1907; and in 1925 Ernst Buschor brought the German Archaeological Institute to the summit, the results appearing in the volume of Buschor and von Massow in 1927 that remained the standard treatment for generations. Since 2005 the Amykles Research Project, under Angelos Delivorrias and Stavros Vlizos, has returned to Agia Kyriaki to re-read the monuments with modern technique — recovering and identifying fragments of Bathycles’s Throne, mapping the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age deposits that carry the cult back across the Dark Age, and reconstructing the development of a sanctuary that the trowel keeps making older than the last excavation thought.

Sources and scholarship

The fountainhead for everything visible above ground is Pausanias, whose third book — the Laconian book of his Description of Greece — gives the only sustained walk through the Throne of Apollo and its sculpture; the relevant chapters are hosted in translation at the Theoi Classical Texts Library. The shape of the Hyacinthia descends through Athenaeus, who in his fourth book quotes the otherwise-lost local historian Polycrates and the grammarian Didymus for the three-day movement from mourning to feast; the festival’s gravity to the Spartan state, and the willingness to suspend campaigns for it, is gathered in the older reference literature, including the entry in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The modern excavation tradition runs from Tsountas through Buschor and von Massow to the Amykles Research Project; the synthesis tying the Mycenaean cult deposits on the hill to the historical Hyacinthia is set out by Stavros Vlizos, From Mycenaean Cult Practice to the Hyakinthia Festival of the Spartan Polis (in A. Tsingarida and I. S. Lemos, eds., Constructing Social Identities in Early Iron Age and Archaic Greece, Brussels 2017), with the wider Bronze Age reframing of Laconia and the palace at Aghios Vasileios treated in the Annual of the British School at Athens. The site itself is cataloged in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites on Perseus.

What the hill holds now is the foundation of the throne and the altar, the cuttings in the rock, the thousands of small votive offerings recovered from its slopes, and the literary memory of a colossus and a festival. Since 2005 the Amykles Research Project has re-excavated and re-read those remains — the bedding of the throne, the votive deposits, the sequence of cult running back into the Bronze Age — reconstructing from the stone the arrangement Pausanias only described: a buried youth under an altar, a god standing over him, and a calendar that each year walked the distance from the one to the other. That distance — from the tomb to the paean, mourning measured out and then answered — was the work the site was laid out to perform, and it is what the excavators are still reading off the rock.

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