In
ancient Greek religionArtemis Caryatis[1] (Καρυᾶτις) was an
epithet of
Artemis that was derived from the small polis of
Caryae in
Laconia;[2] there an archaic open-air temenos was dedicated to Carya, the Lady of the Nut-Tree, whose priestesses were called the caryatidai, represented on the
Athenian Acropolis as the marble
caryatids supporting the porch of the
Erechtheum. The late accounts[3] made of the
eponymousCarya a virgin who had been transformed into a nut-tree, whether for her unchastity (with
Dionysus) or to prevent her rape.[4] The particular form of veneration of Artemis at Karyai[5] suggests that in pre-classical ritual Carya was
goddess of the nut tree[6] who was later assimilated into the Olympian goddess Artemis.
Pausanias noted that each year women performed a dance called the caryatis at a festival in honor of Artemis Caryatis called the Caryateia.[7]
Notes
^Diana Caryatis, noted in
Servius scholium on Virgil's Eclogue viii.30.
^References to Karyai are collected in Graham Shipley, "'The other Lakedaimonians': the dependent Perioikic poleis of Laconia and Messenia" in M.H. Hanson, ed. The Polis as an Urban Centre and as a Political Community, (symposium) Copenhagen 1997:189-281.
^Virgil, Eclogues 8.30 and
Servius' commentary;
Athenaeus 3.78b;
Eustathius of Thessalonica, commentary on Homer, 1964.15, call noted in Pierre Grimal and A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, s.v. "Carya".
^Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1999:227.
^The feminine plural of the placename suggests an archaic "sisterhood of Karya"; see William Reginald Halliday, ed., The Greek Questions of Plutarch, 1928:181; Jennifer K. McArthur, Place-names in the Knossos Tablets: Identification and Location, 1993:26.
^Compare
dryads and the ash-tree nymphs called meliai.
^The festival is attested by
Hesychius, s.v. "Caryai".