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Modern Description: The monument of Lysikrates is the most famous of all choregic monuments. Still in situ at the end of the “Street of the Tripods”, and commemorating a victory in the boys' dithyramb at the City Dionysia in 335/4, it owes its almost complete preservation to later use as library of a now-destroyed Capuchin monastery. It is a roofed cylindrical structure, ca. 12 m. high, set on a rectangular base, decorated with six Corinthian columns (the earliest use of such columns anywhere on the exterior of a building). Above the columns is an epistyle, inscribed on its eastern side, and decorated with a relief frieze depicting Etruscan pirates being harried by Dionysos and his satyrs and turned into dolphins. This will have reflected the subject matter of the dithyramb. It also had contemporary resonance. There was an expedition against pirates by the general Diotimos supported by Lykourgos in this same year, IG II3 1, 336, cf. the colonising expedition to the Adriatic of 325/4, explicitly to protect against Etruscan pirates, IG II3 1, 370, with n. 3. The tripod will have been on the top of the monument, its feet set either on the crowning akanthos decoration at the very top of the monument or on the roof below. (S. Lambert, Attic Inscriptions Online)
[Judith Binder: Lysikrates: choregic monument with frieze representing Dionysos and the pirates, 335/334 B.C., on the ancient Street of the Tripods (present-day Plateia Lysikratous, Plan 1 eta—8, no. 77) IG II² 3042; Travlos, J. 1971, 348-352, figs. 450-452, 709-710; H. Bauer, “Lysikratesdenkmal, Baubestand und Rekonstruktion,” AM 92 (1977) 197-227, figs. 1-7, pls. 91-6, Beilagen 5-10; Wilson, P. 2000, 219-226, figs. 11-14; [possibly the temple of Dionysos mentioned by Pausanias Paus. 1.20.2]]
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choragic_Monument_of_Lysicrates
Wikidata ID: Q1160691
Trismegistos Geo: 364

Info: Attic Inscriptions Online

Attic Inscriptions Online, created by Stephen Lambert of Cardiff University. Translated inscriptions of Athens and Attica, with explanatory notes and supporting academic papers, placed online with a Creative Commons Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

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