CLASSICAL ARCHEOLOGY 225 



Athens, assisted bj^ the Archaeological Institute of America, from 1889 

 to 1893. The temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia, from which the 

 frieze was brought in 1812 to the British Museum, lay several miles 

 from any town, and no indications have been found near it of any such 

 complex of buildings as at Epidaurus or the Argive Heraeum, but the 

 ground immediately about the temple has been searched by the Greek 

 Archaeological Society. The French have investigated the site of 

 the temple of Ptoan Apollo in Bceotia. The American School of 

 Athens had the honor of uncovering the remains of what seems to 

 have been the earliest site of the worship of Dionysus in central and 

 southern Greece — Icaria in Attica, the home of Thespis, who was 

 long considered the mythical founder of the drama, but who has 

 assumed a clearer historical personality since these excavations. 

 The ancient seats of wealth, culture, and power at Mycenae and 

 Tiryns were excavated by Dr. Schliemann. He dug also at Orcho- 

 menos, in Bceotia, where the work was resumed last spring by Pro- 

 fessor Furtwangler, of Munich, who found interesting objects of a 

 very early age, including specimens of the same early (non Greek, 

 non Phoenician, non Egyptian, non Assyrian, non Cyprian) writing 

 which covers thousands of tablets discovered in the palace at Cnos- 

 sus, in Crete. The temple of L,ycosura and its surroundings, which 

 was called by ancient tradition the oldest town of Peloponnesus, has 

 been excavated by the Greeks. The site of Corinth is in process of 

 excavation by the American School. 



At Athens more or less archeological digging has been done since 

 it became the capital of the new Greek kingdom, from 1834 on. 

 Gradually the summit of the Acropolis has been cleared of rubbish 

 and from buildings of the Frankish and Turkish times, and the im- 

 portant structures on its slope — the Theater, the Odeum of Herodes 

 Atticus, the Asclepieum and the Stoa of Eumenes — have been either 

 brought to view, as the Theater and the Asclepieum, or have been 

 cleared, as the Odeum. In the city of Athens systematic excava- 

 tions have been difficult or impossible. When the seat of govern- 

 ment was fixed there, seventy years ago, the site of the ancient city 

 was covered by the Turkish town. Low, mean houses these were, 

 and little money would have been needed for the purchase of a large 

 district ; but the Greeks then had no money to expend for archeo- 

 logical purposes. If modern Athens had been built at the Piraeus, 

 as some urged on other accounts, the solution of the archeological 

 problem would have been easy ; but the value of the land in the city 

 has increased about as rapidly as the Greek government's means for 



