The Hephaisteion: Its Date, Interior and Purpose

Subscribe to our E-Newsletter: https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/email-subscribe Follow us on Facebook:   / ascsathens   About the lecture: The Temple of Hephaistos and Athena (Hephaisteion) has been admired by travelers to Greece since Stuart and Revett drew it in 1752. Its interior and the surrounding area were excavated in 1936–1939 by the American School. This lecture presents new findings based on study of previously unpublished context pottery, the Agora notebooks kept in the 1930s, and fresh autopsy of the building and attributed blocks. A late Archaic beginning for the temple is identified, and a new reconstruction of the interior is presented, with no colonnade, but painted murals instead. The deities were not only progenitors of the Athenians, but also patrons of the silver industry. About the speaker: Margaret M. Miles, Edward A. Dickson Emerita Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of California, Irvine, studies Greek architecture and religion, and the origins of ideas about cultural property. She is the author of a study of the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous (Hesperia 1989), The Athenian Agora XXXI: The City Eleusinion (1998), Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate about Cultural Property (2008), and Editor of Cleopatra, A Sphinx Revisited (2011), Autopsy in Athens, Recent Archaeological Research in Athens and Attica (2015), and A Companion to Greek Architecture (2016). She was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, 2008-2014.