Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/131

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Chap. III.]
CONSTRUCTIVE USE OF ANTAE.
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artistic purpose, have been used here principally for constructive reasons; first, because they served to secure the corners of the walls against direct injury, and, secondly, because they served to render the walls strong enough to support the great beams of the roof. This discovery of parastades in their original form, and with the primitive use for which they were employed, is of capital interest to archæcology, the more so as the discovery has been made in Troy divine.[1]

  1. Karl Boetticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, Berlin, 1874, I. pp. 194, 195, 198, writes on the parastades as follows: "Antae v. Anta.—In the ancient (original) cella with parastas-spaces, where the side-walls are extended to the edge of the stylobate, so as to range with the pillars, both the walls are ended or finished by a parastas or anta at the point of junction. The anta corresponds here with the entablature of the pillars, and, together with them, encloses the space requisite to form the portico.
    "The antae have neither a static nor a constructive function. It is not a pillar to sustain a weight; it is essentially an artistic form to accentuate the end of the wall and the beginning of an epistylion. Its employment is necessitated only from its relation to the epistylion, and consequently it requires only a very slight degree of relief from the face of the wall, and a marked difference in the form of the capital from that of the pillars. As it ends the mass of the wall, its front face must be the whole thickness of the wall, but as the inner side receives only the mass of the epistylion or entablature, its breadth must be governed by that of the epistylion; while its outer face is only marked by sufficient projection to distinguish it from the face of the wall itself.
    "When the anta is in such a situation that a space is enclosed on both sides of it, so that two epistylia rest on it, the breadth of the anta is governed by the breadth of the epistylia, and the anta then assumes the function of a pillar. When the epistylion rests neither on the end. nor the middle of the wall, the anta is marked only by two small facets.
    "The capital (of the anta) consists of a necking with a slight projection adorned with an anthemion (or honeysuckle ornament); above this is a slight Doric cymatium with a necking of several annulets, like the echinus of the pillars, thus connecting the two parts together in design. A narrow abacus marks its junction with the pillars of the pteron, and is ornamented with a meander (fret) on its face, like the abacus of the pillars. Originally this abacus had no cymation to separate it from the pteron, as was universally the case in later monuments.
    "The reason why originally the antae were not constructed with a