Big Dig

Dr. Theodore Leslie Shear is glad that Italy did not make war on Greece any sooner. Professor of classical archeology at Princeton, Dr. Shear was in charge of a grandiose excavation project which has gone on at Athens for ten years. When bombs fell on Peiraeus and elsewhere around Athens, Dr. Shear shut up shop abruptly. But his work was nearly complete anyway.

Financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who put up a total of $1,200,000, the big dig in Athens laid bare the site of the Agora (ancient market place) lying at the foot of the Acropolis and the Areopagus. To get at this, the diggers had to tear down 365 houses in modern Athens. Some 250,000 tons of earth were removed from 25 acres. In Philadelphia last week, Dr. Shear gave the American Philosophical Society a summary of the finds:

> The Portico of Zeus haunted by Socrates, the Temple of the Mother of the Gods where the city records were kept and in the courtyard of which Diogenes lived in a tub, a Temple of Apollo, a main thorough fare 30 feet wide leading to the Acropolis.

> Some 8,000 documents (laws, treaties, contracts, decrees, etc.) and 90,000 coins from all parts of the Mediterranean basin.

> A handsome series of vases continuing with few gaps through 5,000 years, from the Stone Age down to late Byzantine times; much Greek and Roman sculpture, including several "unique masterpieces." One of these was a twelve-inch ivory statue of Apollo, broken into 200 pieces, so that putting it together was a jigsaw-puzzle job.

> The base of a monument recording the names of 192 Athenians who died in the battle of Marathon.

> Some 500 clay fragments used in voting on names proposed for ostracism, or expulsion from the city. Among the celebrated names on these was that of Aristides, ostracized (according to legend) because the citizens got tired of hearing him called "Aristides the Just."

Rhapsodized Dr. Shear: "The public and private life of the great city over millennia of time, its history and art, its bloom and decay, in fact the whole typical course of human destiny, are revealed in the results of this excavation."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.