Early Visitors
Early visitors to the site provide some excellent views and thoughts that
visitors today have lost. They were able to approach the valley on
horse or on foot, obtaining vistas that only those modern visitors who
stay for more than the usual afternoon are able to see. Their visits
were not as restricted, though their knowledge of the archaeology of the
site was not as well informed as we are today. It is no wonder that
in some of their accounts and sketches their imagination ran rampant.
Above all, the desolation of the place is emphasized. No human habitation
was visible in the entire valley and only a single tree grew in the plain.
The Temple of Zeus at Nemea (by F.A. Cooper,
Steve Miller, Stella Miller and C. Smith) contains numerous excerpts from
these accounts as well as a large quantity of sketches. I have recounted
some of these accounts here in hopes of drawing more interest to the site.
In 1766, Richard Chandler, William Pars, and Nicholas
Revett were sent by the Society of Dilettanti in London. Chandler
records:
The ruin is naked, and
the soil round about it had been recently ploughed. We pitched our tent
within the cell, on the clean and level area. The roof, it is likely,
was removed soon after its fall. A wild pear-tree grows among the stones
on one side; but our cook found it necessary to shelter his fire with bushes
of mastic to prevent its being extinguished by the sun. We were supplied
with milk and lambs from a mandra or fold in the valley, and with water
from a fountain, once named the Adrastean, at a little distance from the
slope of the hill.
Byron’s friend Sir William Gell visited the site
four times, once on a mission from the Society of Dilettanti. In
1805 he made the following observations:
We descended to the deep
Nemean plain… As there was no place in the vicinity where we could obtain
shelter for the night, we reserved for the next day our examination of
the temple, and proceeded an hour and a half further to the village of
Kutchukmadi, at which we arrived after traversing some vineyards and olive-groves.
The country about this place is remarkable for its humidity; and I believe
that all the inhabitants, without a single exception, were afflicted with
violent colds and coughs, as in England, which surprised me the more, because
coughs are unusual in this southern climate.
The next morning we returned
to the temple at Nemea, of which three columns only are standing…
The temple was hexastyle and peripteral, and is supposed to have had fourteen
columns on the sides… The capital of the exterior column has been shaken
out of its place, and will probably ere long fall to the ground. The lowest
part of the cella remains; the columns have fallen in such regular order
that the temple evidently appears to have been destroyed by the sudden
concussion of an earthquake, rather than by the lingering and desultory
decay of revolving time.
I have not seen in Greece any Doric temple, the columns of
which are of such slender proportions as those of Nemea. The epistylia
are thin and meager, and the capitals too small for the height of the columns…
I found no fragments of marble amongst the ruins; but an excavation would
probably be well repaid, as the temple was evidently thrown down at one
moment, and, if it contained any sculptured marbles, they are still concealed
by the ruins…
The plain exhibits a
very even surface; it is surrounded by barren hills of a dark and melancholy
hue, the highest of which, at the north-east extremity, has a flat summit,
and is probably that which was called Apesas by the ancients…
Nemea is more characterised
by gloom than most of the places I have seen. The splendour of religious
pomp, and the busy animation of gymnastic and equestrian exercises, have
been succeeded by the dreary vacancy of a death-like solitude. We
saw no living creatures but a ploughman and his oxen, in a spot which was
once exhilarated by the gaiety of thousands, and resounded with the shouts
of a crowded population…
The forest, which supplied
Hercules with his club, could not at present furnish a common walking stick.
There is not a single tree in the whole plain, and only a few bushes about
the temple.
A few months later, the famous W.M. Leake visited Nemea on April 24, 1806. He recorded the following account.
We… descend into the plain
of Nemea; entering which… there is a tjisme, or Turkish fountain, now without
water, and near it a natural source, probably the Adrasteia. At the foot
of this spot, before we arrive at the temple of Jupiter, I find some vestiges
of the Nemeian stadium. The circular end is the only part of which
the form is well preserved; this made me suppose it at first a theatre;
but the parallel sides of the stadium, although almost levelled by the
continued effects of the rain-water from the mountain, are still perfectly
traceable…
On my former visit to
Nemea, we searched for the stadium nearly in the same situation without
recognizing it… The tree columns which Chandler found here are still
standing, amidst a vast heap of ruins… The slenderness of the columns
is particularly remarkable, after viewing those of Corinth; it is curious
that the shortest and longest specimens, in proportion to their diameter,
of any existing Doric columns, should be found so near to one another.
The columns of Nemea are more than six diameters high, or as slender as
some examples of the Ionic… The extant architrave of the temple of
Nemea being so low, and the capitals of the columns proportionally small
and narrow compared to the height of the shaft, the impression on many
spectators will be, that the whole building was inelegant and meagre, compared
to the Doric buildings of Attica, Aegina, and Phigaleia: but it would be
unjust to come to this conclusion upon the view of a mere fragment.
In every thing relating to architecture the ancients were much more learned
than the moderns, and external effect was of course one of their most important
studies. They considered particularly the circumstances of position;
and proportions which might have secured approbation in the midst of a
city, and surrounded by smaller buildings, might not have been thought
suitable to a solitary edifice in a narrow valley, surrounded by hills
like the Bathupedios Nemea. These refinements of art we cannot well
suppose to have been the accompaniment of a very early period, and they
furnish an argument therefore against the remote antiquity of the temple
of Nemea, though the Nemeian games… were extremely ancient… There
is no information in history which can lead to any well grounded opinion
as to the time when the temple of Jupiter, which undoubtedly existed here
from an early period, was rebuilt in the form of which the ruins still
exist; but I am inclined to ascribe it to the same half century, between
the end of the Persian war and the beginning of the Peloponnesian, which
gave rise to so many of the buildings of Attica, and during which Pindar
conferred an honour, more lasting than the temple, on several of the victorious
athletae of the Nemeaian Games…
The pear-tree mentioned
by Chandler still grows within the ruins of the cell of the temple…
The English traveler E.D. Clarke paid a visit to the site in 1801. His record of the visit follows.
We then came to the Ruins of the Temple of the Nemeaean Jupiter, which becomes a very conspicuous object as the plain opens. Three beautiful columns of the Doric order, without bases, two supporting an entablature, and a third at a small distance sustaining its capital only, are all that remain of this once magnificent edifice… A poor village, consisting of three or four huts… bears the name of Colonna; probably bestowed upon it in consequence of these Ruins. One of its inhabitants, coming from those huts, joined our company at the Temple. He told us that there were formerly ninety columns all standing at this place; and the other inhabitants of his little village persisted in the same story… We observed the wild pear-tree mentioned by Chandler so many years before, still growing among the stones on one side of the Ruin.
In July 1813, the Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg visited Nemea and later wrote about it in personal correspondence.
Surrounded by grotesque mountain ridges, the small valley of Nemea lay spread out peacefully and isolated before us. In contrast to most Greek temples, the Sanctuary of Zeus rose not on a mountain-top, but rather in the depths of the earth… Three fluted columns had withstood the ravages of destruction and rose upwards as delicate and slender entities. They were of Doric order whose capitals had a small echinus and were in quite different proportions to any I had seen heretofore.”
The English artist, William Page, painted scenes of Nemea during his visit
there, probably in 1820. On the back of one watercolor depicting
the temple, he wrote:
It was a calm, beautiful evening… I seated myself on a block of marble in the centre of the most prominent heaps of rubbish, to take a general survey of this scene of desolation and to watch the last beams of expiring light gradually becoming fainter and fainter behind the surrounding hills… these are dark and rocky in the surface, yet less bold in their outline… The site was profoundly melancholy as well as from its tranquil features, as from the contrast between the present state of so celebrated a spot, Not a single village, house or living creature was to be seen – not a tree or a shrub… Never in any spot was the feeling of desolation so profoundly brought into the mind.
Richard A. Farrer published A Tour in Greece in 1882. He had visited Greece in 1880 and preserved a visit to Nemea in his account.
Nemea, a very pretty spot… No town grew up at this place; it
was simply a hieron containing a sacred grove, temple, and stadium.
The whole stood in a little smiling valley, watered by a winding brook,
enjoying perpetual solitude, except when gay multitudes from Cleonae assembled
to witness the prowess of the athletes…
The racecourse is… cut right into the hill. Nothing
can be stronger than the contrast between this stadium and that other at
Delphi where we so lately stood. There the surroundings are snowy
peaks, sheer precipices, pine-forests, and sea; here, all are gentle as
in an English landscape – a narrow prospect of low grassy hills bounding
a fertile plain covered with grass, corn, and aromatic shrubs.
Of the temple, three pillars are erect and a small part of
the cella walls. These columns exhibit Doric architecture at its
lightest, as those of Corinth show it at its heaviest development.
So graceful are they as to suggest an Ionic edifice, and it is almost a
surprise to discover on a nearer approach the simple, unornamented capitals.
