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Modern Description: From Strabo's description of the demes, capes, and islands between Peiraeus and Sounion (9.1.21), Zoster can be securely identified as the promontory that juts into the sea at modern Vouliagmeni, in essence the S point of Hymettos. Of the three tongues that constitute the headland, only the central one, Mikro Kavouri, corresponds to Stephanos' precise description of Zoster as a peninsula (s.v. *zwsth/r). Thus it appears that, although the name Zoster was applied generally to the whole cape, as for example by Herodotos (8.107), it was also used in a narrow sense to refer only to the projection that forms the E side of the deep bay in front of Vouliagmeni. A reason for this focus is not hard to find. According to Pausanias (1.31.1) it was at Zoster that Leto 'loosened her girdle with a view to her delivery,'; and that there was an Altar of Athena, Apollo, Artemis, and Leto.
Archaeological discoveries have confirmed the special character of the central promontory. At the neck of the peninsula, in the so-called Laimos where the spit of land is so low that it is easily flooded, remains have been recovered of a small sanctuary, dedicated, as is known from several inscriptions, to Apollo of Zoster. The temple was originally built about 500 B.C. and consisted of a sekos only, later partitioned to make two rooms of unequal size, to which was added, no earlier than the second half of the 4th c., a peristyle of unfluted columns, 4 x 6, each set on its own base with no connecting stylobate. Within the front part of the cella were found three marble bases, a table, a throne, and a fragment of a votive fluted column preserving the beginning and end of an inscribed distych in honor of golden-haired Apollo. To the E of the temple on its axis are the foundations of a large rectangular altar. As the inscriptions show, the sanctuary was administered by the demesmen of Halai (Aixonides).
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoster_(Attica)
Wikidata ID: Q60790988
Trismegistos Geo: 60763
Manto: 10159360

Info: Princeton Encyclopedia

(Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, from Perseus Project)

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