The Choragic Monument of Thrasyllos is a memorial building erected in 320–319 BCE on the artificial scarp of the south face of the Acropolis of Athens to commemorate the choregos of Thrasyllos.[1] It is built in the form of a small temple and fills the opening of a large, natural cave. It was modified in 271–270 BCE by Thrasykles the son of Thrasyllos, agonothetes in the Great Dionysia Games. Pausanias refers to the monument indirectly,[2] providing us with the information that in the cave there existed a representation of Apollo and Artemis slaughtering the children of Niobe.
Echoing the west part of the south wing of the Propylaea, the facade of the monument is formed by two monumental doorways with antae and a central pillar, door frames, architrave with continuous guttae, frieze and cornice. The frieze was decorated with ten olive wreaths, five on each side of a central wreath, while the cornice supported bases for the choragic tripods. It was built in a variety of marbles from local quarries. On the epistyle there was the inscription: Two subsequent inscriptions were added in the years 270–271 BCE, which read: The structure would have been surmounted with three bronze tripods, prizes in the choregia. Stuart and Revett record[3] a statue of Dionysos in place of the original tripods; this was likely a later addition at the time of the repair of the Theatre of Dionysos by Phaidros in the fourth century CE.[4]
Sometime in the Christian period a church was installed in the cave dedicated to Panaghia Spiliotissa. Lord Elgin removed the Hellenistic statue of Dionysos[5] in 1802 as a part of the Elgin Marbles; thus the sculpture was spared when the monument was destroyed by an Ottoman bombardment during the siege of Athens in 1827. Although the monument was scheduled to be restored in the nineteenth century by the Athens Archaeological Society, some of the marble was recarved and reused on the Byzantine church of Soteira Lykodimou. Recent restoration work began in 2002 and draws largely on the measured drawing by Stuart and Revett undertaken in the eighteenth century.[6] It was through the work of Stuart and Revett and J. D. Le Roy's Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece (1758) that the Thrasyllos Monument would influence later architecture. Both Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Alexander Thomson adopted the post-and-lintel construction of the monument in their work.[7]