OLYNTHOS
Chalkidike, Greece.
About 3 km
inland from the Bay of Terone and some 64 km SE of
Thessalonika. Part of the site was inhabited in the
Late Neolithic period but not in the Bronze Age. Continuously from perhaps as early as 1000 B.C. there was a small Iron Age settlement consisting, at least in part, of Boiotians. In 479 it was captured and turned over by
the Persians to Terone and the Chalkidians. It appears
on the tribute lists of the Delian League from 454 on
(paying 2 talents) but in 432, encouraged by Macedon,
it revolted and received a large accession of population
from other revolting Chalkidic coastal cities. It was
almost certainly at that time that the Chalkidic state
(“league”) was formed and that a large new section
of the city was laid out to accommodate the increased
population. Olynthos weathered the Peloponnesian War
successfully and about 389 B.C. made a treaty with
Amyntas III of Macedon. Its growing prosperity and
power led to an attack by Sparta and, after a lengthy
siege, to its capitulation in 379 B.C. Though forced to
become temporarily an ally of Sparta, its economy seems
not to have suffered severely. At any rate Philip II, after
his succession to the throne of Macedon in 360, seems
to have found it expeditious to conclude a treaty (357)
with the Chalkidians, a fragmentary copy of which was
found close to the site. By his adroit political maneuvers
Philip kept Olynthos and Athens from combining
against him until 349 when open war broke out. Despite
the “Olynthiacs” of Demosthenes, Athenian aid proved
too little and too late; the city fell in 348 and was
destroyed by the Macedonians. Coins indicate a slight
continued habitation or rehabitation of a few poor houses
at the extreme N end of the N Hill as late as ca.
316 B.C. when the few survivors were no doubt among
those Olynthians settled by Kassander at Kassandreia
on the site of Poteidaia (
Diod. Sic. 19.52).
Four expeditions between 1928 and 1938 uncovered a
part of the S Hill (the site of the older town, with small
irregular houses and slight remains of at least one public
building), and about a quarter of the N Hill and slopes
to the E (the site of the new housing district and of a
stoa-like public building). The district was laid out on a
very regular Hippodamian plan. Blocks of 300 Ionic feet
(300 x 29.5 cm) E-W x 120 feet N-S were divided into
two rows of five houses, each house approximately 60 feet
square. Normal streets were 17 feet wide but Avenue B,
the main N-S street, was 24 feet—the extra 7 feet being
deducted from the length of the A blocks. The hundred-odd house plans recovered, including five complete blocks (50 houses) provide the best evidence available for the form of the Hellenic house (430-348 B.C.). Each block
was evidently built as a unit with continuous rubble
foundation walls, and the individual houses, though no
two are exactly alike, conform to a general pattern with
court on the S and portico on at least the N side off
which most of the principal rooms open; this S orientation, for shelter in winter, agrees with the prescriptions for domestic architecture given by Xenophon and Aristotle.
A typical house (A vii 4) has a porch (prothyron)
opening from the street on the S into the SW corner of
a cobble-paved court (aule) in the middle of the S
side of the house (but the entrance is never axial). To
the W of the court is a large storeroom or, possibly,
shop; to the E is a cement-floored dining room (andron)
with its anteroom; to the N is the broad portico (pastas—first identified at Olynthos) with a small storeroom at its E end. Off the N side of the pastas opens a series of rooms including a kitchen (ipnon), with flue (kapnodoke) and a cement-floored bathroom (balaneion) with
built-in clay tub. A second story (with bedrooms?) was
reached by wooden stairs from the court. The walls
were of adobe brick on rubble foundations; the roof
was sloping and tiled. The finest house discovered, the
Villa of Good Fortune, measures about 85 x 55 feet;
in addition to the pastas there were narrower and shorter
porticos on the other three sides; pebble mosaic floors
adorned four of the rooms, those in the andron and its
anteroom having both patterns and mythological scenes
(Dionysos in chariot; Thetis bringing armor to Achilles);
the others bear inscriptions (
Ἀγαθὴ τύχη,
Εὐτυχία καλή,
Ἀφροδίτη καλή).
The Olynthos mosaics, occurring principally in the
andron, occasionally in the court or the pastas, constitute
the most extensive and finest group of Greek pebble
mosaics known in the period of the late 5th and early
4th c. B.C. Some sixteen inscriptions found in the houses
give information regarding the sale, mortgage, or rental of
houses, and mention values from 230 to 5300 drachmas.
Public buildings so far discovered are few and unimportant: on the S Hill a fountain house and some remains of a larger structure; on the N Hill, at the E end of Block A iv, another fountain house, a building with a central
row of Doric columns, and traces of what was apparently
a stoa facing S on a large open space probably reserved
for an agora to be enclosed eventually by other public
buildings. A city wall of adobe brick on rubble foundations was traced along part of the W and N sides of the
N Hill (at the rear of the houses). Two fairly extensive
cemeteries with both inhumation (ca. 90 percent) and
cremation burials were excavated, and a plundered stone
chamber tomb was cleared on a hill to the W of the site.
Most of the finds (large amounts of pottery, figurines,
loom weights, grain mills, and other household objects)
are housed in the archaeological museum in Thessalonika. The large numbers of Chalkidic silver tetradrachmas, tetrobols, and other coins (many found in
hoards concealed in the houses) are in the Numismatic
Museum in Athens.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
D. M. Robinson in
TAPA 59 (1928)
225-32; 62 (1931) 40-56; 65 (1934) 103-7; 69 (1938)
43-76 (inscriptions, public and private); Mabel Gude,
A History of Olynthus (1929) provides a convenient collection of ancient sources referring to Olynthos and the
Chalkidians, together with a prosopography of Olynthians known from literary or epigraphical sources; D. M.
Robinson et al.,
Excavations at Olynthus (1930-52) I-XVI
(Neolithic settlement: I; houses and other architecture:
II, VIII, XII; coins: III, IX, XIV; pottery: V, XIII, XIV; figurines: IV, VII, XIV; minor objects: II, X; mosaics: V; cemeteries: XI; P. A. Clement in
Olynthus 9 (1938) 112-61 (further discussion of the history of Olynthos based
on the numismatic evidence); J. W. Graham in
Hesperia
22 (1953) 196-207; 23 (1954) 320-46; 27 (1958) 318-23
(further studies of houses); D. M. Robinson in
RE
s.v. Olynthos.
J. W. GRAHAM
