Dionysius the Areopagite

pp. 89-123

in: Michael Harrington, Sacred place in early medieval neoPlatonism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

Vincent Scully, in his 1962 study of Greek temples in their landscape setting, argues that the ancient Greeks did not locate their temples without consideration to the surrounding landscape.¹ As a general statement, this point hardly needs arguing, since the temples appear in locations already hallowed by myth. The temple of Apollo at Claros, for example, is built over a sacred spring said to have originated in the tears of Man to, the daughter of Tiresias. It is difficult to find a sacred site in Greece whose sacred character does not depend on the action in that place of a mythological figure.² Scully, however, wishes to make a more specific claim: that features inherent in the landscape, rather than actions said to have been performed there, make the place holy and so a suitable site for a temple. Prominent among these landscape features are the horns of Cybele: two pronounced hilltops, which, from the temple site, appear close together. Scully recites the great number of temples whose landscapes exhibit this feature, as well as other temples, which possess other symbolic features. Such features serve to drive home Scully's claim that "the place is holy even before the temple is built."³