The Boston relief and the religion of Locri Epizephyrii

The three-sided Boston relief (Plate XIIIa), which is to be dated in the second quarter of the fifth century, has been the object of a long controversy with regard both to its subject matter and to its authenticity, which has been doubted by some scholars. The authenticity of the monument will be taken for granted here, since the work of Jucker, and especially the recent exhaustive stylistic and scientific study by Ashmole and Young leave no possible room for doubting it. Another aspect of the relief which I will take for granted in this paper is the artistic milieu which created it, since it has been convincingly shown that it is of South Italian, and more specifically Epizephyrian Locrian, origin. The object of the present paper is to discuss the iconography of the monument, especially with reference to the cult and religious environment of the city in which it was produced.The interpretation of the central scene and the two side-panels of the Boston relief is still a matter of controversy, although many hypotheses have been put forward since the monument first appeared in the antiquities market. Discussions of the iconography of this relief tend more often than not to connect the problem, in some way or other, with the subject matter of the Ludovisi throne (Plate XIIIb), another three-sided relief belonging to the artistic environment of Locri Epizephyrii, but of a much higher artistic quality. The interpretation of the scenes on the Ludovisi throne has not provoked the same amount of controversy, and it would, I think, be a fair statement that the interpretation of the central representation as the birth of Aphrodite is now generally accepted—more accurately, it is the new-born Aphrodite being assisted out of the sea, and to the shore, by the Moirai or the Horai. On each of the side-panels a female figure is shown, a naked pipe-player on one, a heavily draped young matron burning incense in a thymiaterion on the other. They have been interpreted as hetaira and young bride or wife, two contrasting figures associated with Aphrodite's Locrian cult.

A granophyre from Coire Uaigneich, Isle of Skye, containing quartz paramorphs after tridymite (Plate XIII)

The narrow belt of granophyre lying to the west of Blaven in the Isle of Skye showed so admirably the effects of chilling that a series of specimens was collected by one of us (L.R.W.) and found to contain, in the chilled marginal rock, phenoerysts of tridymite, now inverted to quartz. In the Thulean Tertiary igneous province former tridymite is known from certain acid lavas, for example, the Tardree rhyolite (von Lasaulx, 1877) and certain Icelandic liparites (Hawkes, 1916), and from metamorphosed arkoses adjacent to basic igneous intrusions (Harker, 1908, 1932), but it has not previously been noted in the intrusive acid rocks. In addition to phenocrysts of tridymite inverted to quartz, there is present in the groundmass of the unchilled granophyre a second generation of inverted tridymite crystals, surrounded by a final stage of quartz and felspar which has crystallized with normal microgranitic textures. Some of the textural features resemble those of the normal Skye granophyres, while others resemble certain metamorphosed arkoses.

Electrodialysis of mineral silicates: an experimental study of rock-weathering (With Plate XIII.)

Palmer's investigation of the chemical and mineralogical aspects of soil-forming processes was restricted to comparative chemical analyses of the weathered shells and the essentially unaltered cores of certain spheroidal basic boulders from Wahiawa in the Hawaiian Islands.The present writer describes an experimental approach to the general problem of rock-weathering on lines suggested by Dr. A. Brammall:(a)Electrodialysis of eight typical rock-forming mineral silicates, each of which was dialysed separately after having been ground to an impalpable powder and analysed in detail.(b)Assessment of the effect of dialysis by comparing the composition of the unaltered mineral with that of the slime left in the mineral-chamber when dialysis was virtually at an end.(c)X-ray and kathode-ray tests on three of these minerals and the corresponding slimes, to ascertain whether colloidal end-products associated with, or coating, particles of unaltered mineral had integrated to form one or other of the specific ‘crystalline colloids’ identifiable in soils and clays.