Summary: This article investigates the topography in Herodotus' account of Xerxes' visit to the Troad in 480 BC, which consists of Mount Ida, the Scamander river, the temple of Athena Ilias at Troy and the tumuli in the surrounding landscape. It suggests that this episode, rather than taking us back to historical events of 480 BC, may (partly) be a product of Greek imagination in the ca. fifty years between Xerxes' invasion of Greece and the publication of the „Histories“, with the landscape of the Troad functioning as a catalyst. To this end, the article traces the Iliadic associations of these places, exposes several topographical problems, and explains how the stories frame Xerxes' visit as hubristic. While the article is not concerned with the historicity of the episode per se, it suggests that this historicity cannot automatically be accepted, as has hitherto generally been done.

While scholars have long acknowledged the limitations of Herodotus’ Histories as a historical source, Herodotus’ topography of the Persian Wars is still usually seen as historically reliable information. This article, by contrast, aims to show that memory studies offers an attractive means to understand this layer of information, as the alleged locations of events do not, in many cases, necessarily reflect the historical situation. Instead, these places may, for various reasons, have been designated as such in local traditions in the ca. 50 years between the wars and Herodotus’ research. As a case in point, this article discusses the topography of Herodotus’ story of the Persian shipwreck along the coast of Thessaly before the Battle of Artemision in 480 BC (Hdt. 7.183, 7.188, 7.191–92). It argues that the attitude among scholars automatically to regard the locations in this account as historically correct has created various problems. In doing so, it identifies the elusive place of Sepias with the coast near the town of Veneto where a remarkable cluster of sea caves (the so-called ‘Ovens’) plausibly formed an ‘anchor’ for the myth of the abduction of Thetis by Peleus, as well as for the Persian shipwreck.

A location referred to as "Parthenon" appears in the fifth-and fourth-century BCE inventories of Athena's riches as one of the treasuries on the Acropolis of Athens, along with the Hekatompedon, the Proneos, the Opisthodomos, and the Archaios Neos. It is usually identified with the west room of the building today known as the Parthenon. Here, I offer a thorough review of the epigraphical, archaeological, and literary evidence and propose that the treasury called the Parthenon should be recognized as the west part of the building now conventionally known as the Erechtheion. 1 introduction Why do we call the Great Temple on the Athenian Acropolis the "Parthenon," or Virgin Room? The usual answer is that the name derives from the divine resident of the building, Athena Parthenos. Her colossal chryselephantine statue stood in the temple's cella, the great room opening to the east (fig. 1). However, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, long before the earliest attestations of the name "Parthenon" for the whole temple, the statue is mentioned in the inventories of treasures inside the "Hekatompedos Neos" (Hundred-Foot Temple). This, then, was the name of the cella, the only possible location of the statue. In those same centuries, separate inventories were made of a different treasury on the Acropolis, also called "Parthenon. " Where, then, was this Parthenon treasury located, and what is the origin of its name?Under the assumption that the Parthenon treasury must be a part of the building that was later called the Parthenon, scholars have nearly unanimously identified the Parthenon treasury with the west room of the Great Temple (the room with four columns that opens to the west in fig. 1, hereafter called the West Room). 2 It is not clear, however, why precisely this space 1 I am grateful to the Netherlands Institute at Athens, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Athens, and the German Archaeological Institute at Athens for their support. For astute comments that have greatly improved the article, I thank the editors of the AJA, the anonymous reviewers,

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