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

THE ATTIC STELAI 233
basic structure was a perfectly symmetrical frame with four legs of equal length,
to which was added at one end a curved rest so constructed that it could be fixed in
place by means of pegs fitting into sockets made in the frame. The conjecture that
such head-rests were often removable, and so could be considered separate items of
furniture, finds support in the bronze beds of a later period which have been found at
Priene and in the Boscoreale treasure.'49 These pieces have metal frames which are
exactly alike at head and foot; resting lightly on the leg-tops at one end is a separate
head-rest which is attached by two dowel pins which fit into small holes made both in
the rest and in the center of the top surface of each leg piece.150 K. G. Vollmoeller, in
describing the stone beds of an Euboean tomb belonging to the fourth or third century
B.C.,1 5 assumes that the head-rests were made as separate pieces, and that they were
fixed in place by a ridge which fitted into a corresponding groove in the bed frame.
There is then no reason to assume that an epiklintron was a chair simply because
it appears alone in furniture lists. It was an elbow- or head-rest which could be fitted
onto couches and beds, or removed, at will. This is the explanation of the term in
Aristophanes, Eccl., 907; according to the old hag's taunts the girl will eagerly throw
away the epiklintron of her couch in the hope of being crushed by her lover, only to
be disappointed in his performance.
Price. In our inscription neither the price nor the amount of the sales tax for
the epiklintron is preserved. However, the Delian inscriptions offer one clear price
and some indirect evidence. In I.G., XI, 2, 163, lines 64-65, it is recorded that two
epiklintra were bought for the beds for 3 drachmas 4 obols, or 1 drachma 5 obols
each; I.G., XI, 2, 144, line 66, mentions a payment of 12 drachmas for wood for the
epiklintra and feet of an unknown number of beds.
DOORS
In the Attic Stelai doors are listed among the items of furniture. This is not
irregular, for apparently doors were treated as movable pieces of property. Kent 152
has noted that in the Delian inventories of the hieropoioi buildings were regularly
listed 'with a door ' or 'without a door '; he shows also that in an Attic lease inscription
of 306/5 B.C. the doors and roof tiling did not belong permanently to the real
149 Wiegand and Schrader, Priene, Berlin, 1904, pp. 378 ff., figs. 480 and 481; Arch. Anz., XV,
1900, pp. 178-179; Ransom, op. cit., plates VIII-XVIII. Cf. the Etruscan couch with epiklintra at
both ends, Studniczka, op. cit., fig. 28, and the bronze couch in the Walters Art Gallery (D. K. Hill,
Journal of Walters Art Gallery, XV-XVI, 1952-1953, pp. 49-61).
150 A description and good pictures of such rests which were found in Italy appear in Not. d.
Scavi, 1902, pp. 448 ff., figs. 17, 19a and b, 26, 27. See also the description and photographs of what
Miss Hill, op. cit., terms the fulcra.
151 Ath. Mitt., XXVI, 1901, p. 371.
152
Hesperia, XVII, 1948, p. 293.