Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T13:43:00.774Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Megalithic Temple at Buto: Herodotus II. 155

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Extract

‘In this city of Buto there is a sanctuary of Apollo and Artemis. The particular temple of Leto, which was described as the place of the oracle, is itself, I found, large and has a stair ten fathoms in height. But in what was visible to me, the most astonishing thing was this: there is in the enclosure there a temple of Leto, wrought from a single stone in respect of height as well as of length, and each wall equal to these [stones]. Each of these [stones] is of forty cubits. And for the covering in of the roof there is another stone imposed, having a supertecture (?) of four cubits’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1896

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 It is surely obvious that and refer to the same things, that both therefore signify the stones, and that cannot mean anything but ‘equal to these stones.’ The attempts which have been made to avoid this, e.g. by the rendering ‘each wall is equal in these respects’, viz. height and length, are desperate in grammar. Neither do they touch the main difficulty, that the meaning thus violently extracted is itself absurd.

2 Pollux, cited by Blakesley, who however himself recommends the other interpretation.