the attic stelai - The American School of Classical Studies at Athens

THE ATTIC STELAI 221
usually made of wood. On Delian chests, see Deonna, De'los, XVIII, pp. 235 ff. For
representations of chests in vase-paintings, see the red-figured pyxis published by C.
Clairmont in A .J.A., LVII, 1953, pp. 92-94 with references (especially W. von Massow,
Ath. Mitt., XLI, 1916, pp. 3-10).
These writers have assumed that the kibotos of the Greeks was a box, large or
small, which had a hinged lid that might be raised, or closed and made fast; this was
what the Romans called the arca. A second sort of storage box was presumably introduced
later by the Romans; it was the armarium (7Tvpyto-Ko9 in late Greek), or upright
cupboard or cabinet, having doors placed vertically at the front. A fine large cupboard
of this sort is shown in a frescoe from Herculaneum in the National Museum at
Naples,66 but Miss Richter has found no evidence of the use of this sort of cabinet
by the Greeks, and she concludes, " Here. .. the Romans made an important original
contribution ... .n 67
However, there is a 1940 dissertation from Wiirzburg, by E. G. Budde, Armarium
und KL(AnO63, which would contest the purely Roman character of the armarium; one
of its contentions is that the cupboard or cabinet appeared in Greece as early as the
fifth century B.C. As literary evidence for Greek cupboards with vertical doors Budde
cites Plato's Symposium, 215, which describes busts of Silenos: "when their two
halves are pulled open, they are found to contain images of gods." 68 Actually there
is nothing here to specify doors,69 and Budde himself, following Panofka, refers us to
certain German peasant wood carvings, the " Niirnberger Kapseln," for comparison,
although here the upper half of the body was removed and the lower half split to
reveal a scene inside.70 The silenos figure may indeed have opened in this way, but it
will take much 1nore than this to establish the existence in fifth-century Greece of an
upright cupboard.
The kibotoi listed in our inscription are of primary importance to Budde's argument,
for he assumes that they could not be described as dithyros (I, 227), tetrathyros
(I, 228), and thyridotos (V, 16), unless the ' doors ' were set in a vertical plane.
Nevertheless he rejects, for reasons which are not altogether clear, the interpretation
of Dorpfeld 71 which would make the kibotoi standing in the arsenal of Philo open
with doors at the front or sides rather than by lids at the top. Indeed, D6rpfeld's
suggestion is not compelling; it seems more likely that since the chests of Philo were
made to hold sails they would be similar to other Greek chests for storing clothes.
66 Richter, op. cit., fig. 343; cf. fig. 340.
67 Ibid., p. 145.
68 Loeb translation by W. R. M. Lamb.
69 He might perhaps have cited the bronze horse of Republic, 359 d, which was said to have
" little doors," through which the body inside could be seen, since chests and coffins were often
made on the same plan.
70 Arch. Anz., XLVIII, 1933, p. 390, fig. 1.
71 Ath. Mitt., VIII, 1883, p. 164.