Basile

Use in the book

Socrates begins his story with his return: "We had got back from the army at Potidaea the evening before, and after so long away I was glad to make for my old haunts. In particular I went into the wrestling-school of Taureas, the one opposite the shrine of Basile, and there I found a great crowd" (153a; see Taureas). The shrine is a landmark and nothing more. Socrates names it to say which wrestling-school he means, and he describes it no further; no one sacrifices or prays there, and the goddess is not mentioned again. The dialogue's one other holy place is treated quite differently: Critias reads the inscription at the temple of Apollo at Delphi as the god's greeting to those who enter, and makes it part of his argument that temperance is knowing oneself (164d–e2; see Advice and greeting).

The name hangs by a thread in the manuscripts. In the Bodleian manuscript (B), the Plato written in 895 and now in Oxford, the line has the name, but the letters ικ are written above it, which turn it into βασιλικῆς, "royal"; the Venice manuscript (T) has βασιλικῆς outright. With βασιλικῆς the feminine adjective has no noun expressed, and the goddess disappears. The English of Benjamin Jowett, the Victorian translator of Plato, reflects that reading: it sets the wrestling-school "over against the temple adjoining the porch of the King Archon", the royal portico in the Agora. Burnet prints the name as it is written in B's line, and the decree of 418/17 BC that names a sanctuary of Basile bears him out.

Places to read

1. 153aSocrates goes into the wrestling-school of Taureas, opposite the shrine of Basile.

Translation in this edition

"The shrine of Basile" renders τοῦ τῆς Βασίλης ἱεροῦ. Ἱερόν is "shrine" here and "temple" at Delphi (164e), the one other place where the dialogue uses the word. The goddess's name is kept as a name, not translated as "the Queen". "Wrestling-school" renders παλαίστρα (palaistra), here and at 155d.

Βασίλη

Attested: Βασίλης (Basilēs; 153a). Basile, the local Athenian goddess whose shrine stands opposite the wrestling-school of Taureas; the Venice manuscript, and letters written above the line in the Bodleian, make the name βασιλικῆς, "royal". Lemma: Βασίλη.

Other ancient sources

A decree of the Athenian Council and People, passed in 418/17 BC, the year of the archon Antiphon, orders the fencing of "the sanctuary of Codrus and Neleus and Basile", which it calls an ἱερόν, as Plato does, and has the king archon, the magistrate in charge of the city's ancestral sacrifices,² lease the precinct. An amendment by the same proposer, Adosios, sets the lease of "the precinct of Neleus and Basile" at twenty years and puts the fencing on the lessee, at his own expense; he is also to plant no fewer than two hundred olive shoots, and the decree is to be set up in the Neleion, the shrine of Neleus.³ Codrus was remembered as the king who, in the story the orator Lycurgus tells, went out of the city in disguise to be killed by the invading Peloponnesians, because Delphi had promised them Athens unless they killed its king; and Herodotus, the historian of the Persian Wars, tells of a Neleus son of Codrus who led the settlers of Miletus, the Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor.⁴

The decree also shows where the precinct lay. The lessee is to have the ditch and the rainwater, "the water from Zeus", that runs between the Dionysion, a sanctuary of Dionysus, and the gate by which the initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries go down to the sea, and between a public building and the gate that leads out to the bath of Isthmonicus. The two gates are identified as the Phaleric and the Itonian, south of the Acropolis, and the precinct lay between them. Whether it lay just inside the city wall or just outside is disputed; a precinct large enough for two hundred olive trees, and the wrestling-school that Plato sets opposite the shrine, are the arguments for outside.⁵

Basile was worshipped in the Attic countryside as well. The sacrificial calendar of Erchia, a village of Attica east of Mount Hymettus, inscribed in the fourth century BC, prescribes for her a white ewe-lamb on the fourth of Boedromion, a month of early autumn, to be burnt whole and offered without wine, at a cost of seven drachmas. The epigraphist Stephen Lambert has connected the offering with the Genesia, the Athenian festival of the dead.⁶