Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia

Chapter 9. Landscape Synchesis: A Demeter Temple in Latium

Chapter 9 Landscape Synchesis: A Demeter Temple in Latium Kathryn M. Lucchese Abstract Besides the Eleusinian mysteries, the late-fall pre-planting rites of the Thesmophoria were the most characteristic of the festivals of Demeter. The thesmophoria themselves, usually translated as “the things laid down,” were offerings flung into a natural crevice or man-made chamber in the rock known as a megaron, left to decay, and then retrieved and plowed into a nearby ritual field, thus securing the region’s fertility for the season to come. By metaphoric extension, the Thesmophoria became associated with the civilization that developed in the wake of sedentary agriculture, the “things laid down” being understood as a code of civil laws, the goddess ’s title being translated into Latin as legifera, “law-giver.” A small temple just outside Rome, built by Herodes Atticus, can now be firmly identified as dedicated to Demeter/Ceres due in part to the recent discovery of a well-preserved megaron there. Herodes used the construction of this sanctuary as a gesture of synchesis linking himself to the goddess of laws in order both to exonerate himself of his wife’s bloodguilt and to increase his own social standing. The Notion of Synchesis For those classicists unfamiliar with the field of cultural geography, I should explain that it functions as a sort of theoretical archaeology, specifically accounting for the placement of man-made features within the context of the natural environment—a system of both built and natural features commonly referred to as a “landscape”—by means of studying these features’ location, function, and meaning. Geographers often refer 162 Kathryn M. Lucchese to this study as a “reading” of the cultural landscape, and its construction as “writing.” The implication is that we communicate cultural values such as wealth, status, and national origin by how we construct or “write” these systems. It struck me that a particularly felicitous subject for such a study might be a sacred landscape system “written” by the famous Greek sophist and antiquarian Herodes Atticus. I knew of such a site through reading Rodolfo Lanciani’s narrative of the remains of a sacred grove in the Almo Valley, south of Rome,1 and, given the opportunity to study it during a sabbatical semester spent in Rome from January to June 1993, determined to learn all I could. I carried out research both at the site in the Caffarella valley just off the Via Appia Pignatelli southeast of Rome’s Porta Appia (Fig. 9.1), and in the libraries of the Vatican and the American Academy at Rome. This body of information ultimately became the core of my Master’s thesis.With the help of my husband, Robert R. Lucchese, I was able to explore a series of caves and tunnels at the site that I identified, Figure 9.1. Map of the Caffarella/Pagus Triopius in suburban Rome. By the author. Landscape Synchesis 163 I believe for the first time, as a perfectly preserved thesmophoric megaron. I quickly shared my discovery with local archaeologists at their Via Campitelli office, and it was clear that they were as yet unaware of the existence of the megaron at the site. In the summer of 2000, I returned to the site and discovered a vent resembling a man-hole cover over the bailing hatch of the megaron. This suggests that some exploratory work has proceeded below, the extent of which I do not know. It is high time, however, that a wider audience of classicists was made aware of this uniquely complete temple complex, and perhaps that excavations begin. In reading landscapes, geographers often discover that their creators or “authors” have made figurative references, creating some higher symbolism at the site. This is especially the case, I would argue, when the landscape ’s creator is in fact an author—in this case, a sophist, famous for his store of antiquarian references and clever figures of speech.2 The method by which Herodes Atticus seems to have evoked complex implications from this temple complex struck me as being like the trope of synchesis. In synchesis, nouns and their modifiers appear in a line of poetry in an interlocked word order, a-b-a-b, or, to use Clyde Pharr’s example from the back of the “purple Vergil,” saevae memorem Junonis iram (“fell Juno’s unforgetting hate”).3 The effect is for syntactically unrelated words to attract each other...