the excavation of the athenian agora twelfth season: 1947

EXCAVATION OF ATHENIAN AGORA, 1947 153
between the western and the middle room a tiny chamber was built in later times, and
a doorway was cut through its eastern wall to give access to the middle room. A
terracotta drain leading from this small closet toward the Great Drain suggests that
the addition was a wash-room.
Little of the furnishings of this small building remained. At the foot of both
the east and west walls of the east room are traces of benches built of rough masonry
and plastered, conceivably for the reception of wooden cabinets, cases or the like;
these were later additions. Undoubtedly late, too, was the placing of the large pyra-
midal marble support for a bronze tripod that was found in 1933, standing in the
middle of the east room.3 A little wall plaster still in place at the northwest corner
of the middle room is white spattered with black and lined off with broad red bands.
Several stele beddings were found in place,-one north of the east room, two north
of the middle room and one at the northwest corner of the west room. In this last
bedding the stump of the marble stele still remains,--perhaps a herm or boundary
stone marking the limit of the Agora like the archaic marker immediately to the
northwest which was already buried before the erection of the small building.4 In the
angle between the east and middle rooms stood the marble tile standards of which
mention was made in the report for the season 1946.5
The proximity of the building to the Tholos and the Metroon, and the presence
in front of it of the tile standards and the stelai, suggest, as pointed out in the previous
report, a public character for the building; it has therefore been labelled on the plan,
Civic Offices."
Little evidence has yet been gathered for the date of construction of the building.
Its foundations consist in large part of re-used material including several fragmentary
inscriptions of Hellenistic date. Stuch material may well have become available
because of damage sustained in the Sullan sack of 86 B.C. A date soon after that
event would not run counter to any other evidence now at hand, and it is indeed
conceivable that the construction of this building was necessitated by the temporary
loss of the Tholos in consequence of damage inflicted in 86 B.C.6 That the building
was destroyed in the Herulian sack of A.D. 267 is put beyond question by a great mass
of broken pottery and other rubbish of that period found overlying its floors.
Neither the Civic Offices nor the west end of the Middle Stoa was rebuilt after
the sack of A.D. 267. Rapidly overlaid by silt and by dumped rubbish, this area was
eventually included in the enclosure of the vast gymnasium complex that was set down
in the middle of the Agora area in the fourth and fifth centuries.
A foretaste of what awaits us to the south was given by the discovery in a dis-
turbed context near the southwest corner of the Middle Stoa of a fragment from the
3 Hesperia, IV, 1935, p. 387.
4Hesperia, VIII, 1939, p. 205; Supplement IV, p. 107.
5 Hesperia, XVI, 1947, p. 200.
6 Hesperia, Supplement IV, pp. 135 f.