Caryatis

In ancient Greek religion Artemis Caryatis[1] was an epithet of Artemis that was derived from the small polis of Karyai in Laconia;[2] there an archaic open-air temenos was dedicated to Carya, the Lady of the Nut-Tree, whose priestesses were called the caryatidai, represented on the Athenian Acropolis as the marble caryatids supporting the porch of the Erechtheum. The late accounts[3] made of the eponymous Carya a virgin who had been transformed into a nut-tree, whether for her unchastity (with Dionysus) or to prevent her rape.[4] The particular form of veneration of Artemis at Karyai[5] suggests that in pre-classical ritual Carya was goddess of the nut tree[6] who was later assimilated into the Olympian goddess Artemis. Pausanias noted that each year women performed a dance called the caryatis at a festival in honor of Artemis Caryatis called the Caryateia.[7]

For the genus of moths, see Caryatis (moth). For other uses, see Carya.

Notes
  1. Diana Caryatis, noted in Servius scholium on Virgil's Eclogue viii.30.
  2. References to Karyai are collected in Graham Shipley, "'The other Lakedaimonians': the dependent Perioikic poleis of Laconia and Messenia" in M.H. Hanson, ed. The Polis as an Urban Centre and as a Political Community, (symposium) Copenhagen 1997:189-281.
  3. Virgil, Eclogues 8.30 and Servius' commentary; Athenaeus 3.78b; Eustathius of Thessalonica, commentary on Homer, 1964.15, call noted in Pierre Grimal and A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, s.v. "Carya".
  4. Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1999:227.
  5. The feminine plural of the placename suggests an archaic "sisterhood of Karya"; see William Reginald Halliday, ed., The Greek Questions of Plutarch, 1928:181; Jennifer K. McArthur, Place-names in the Knossos Tablets: Identification and Location, 1993:26.
  6. Compare dryads and the ash-tree nymphs called meliai.
  7. The festival is attested by Hesychius, s.v. "Caryai".


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.