308 



GREECE. 



RHAMNUS. 



[MR. RAIKES'S JOURNALS CONTINUED.] 



At the distance of an hour and fifty minutes from Marathon, a 

 space answering with sufficient exactness to the sixty stadia mention- 

 ed by Pausanias, the remains of the ancient Rhamnus are still to be 

 found under the name of Vraso Castro. The ruins of the temple of 

 Nemesis lie at the head of a narrow glen which leads to the principal 

 gate of the town. The fall of the building seems to have been 

 occasioned by some violent shock of an earthquake, the columns 

 being more disjointed and broken than in any other ruin of the 

 kind. The mass of materials and their confusion are so great, that 

 probably the contents of the temple, the statue formed by Phidias, 

 Phidiaca Nemesis*, may be buried under the fragments. (Strabo, 

 lib. ix.) The building must have been inferior in size to those 

 Doric temples which still remain in Attica, and the columns were 

 only fluted in the upper part of their shaft. The diameter at the 

 base measured two feet three inches ; that at the summit one foot 

 ten inches. The intercalumniation at a point where the lower 

 cylinders of two adjacent columns were standing was three feet 

 ten inches. The whole structure was of the finest Pentelic marble. 

 The statue, as we learn from Pausanias, was formed from the Parian 

 marble brought by Datis, for the purpose of raising a trophy ; and 

 therefore with singular propriety applied to the worship of Nemesis, 

 according to the ideas entertained of her office by the Greeks. 



The town of Rhamnus was placed on a round rocky hill, about a 

 quarter of a mile below the temple, surrounded by the sea for two- 

 thirds of its circumference, and separated from the hills on the shore 



* Rhamnus illustris, quod in ea fanum Amphiarai et Phidiaca Nemesis. — Mela. 



