The Stoa of the Herms in Context: (re)Shaping Paradigms * Matteo Zaccarini This paper discusses evidence on one of the archaeological ghosts of the classical Athenian agora: the Stoa of the Herms. The monument is famous for the three inscribed herms placed inside, set up to celebrate the conquest of Eion in the early fifth century. Traditionally, modern scholarship associates the stoa and its herms – commonly referred to as the ‘Eion herms’ – with Cimon, son of Miltiades, and employs relevant sources to postulate a complex, related Athenian celebration and contemporary reception of the monument. The archaeological remains of the building are unidentified. I will discuss literary evidence and propose a reconsideration of the historical coherency of the tradition on the Stoa of the Herms. My aim is to highlight how focusing on the context of each relevant source is essential in order to understand and interpret this monument. I will thus address a case study on Greek art, public architecture and cultural reception which is known, essentially, through distant, literary sources alone. The Area of ‘the Herms’ The stoa is known for having stood in the northwest corner of the Athenian Kerameikos agora, notoriously called ‘the Herms’. 1 It is convenient to quote Harpocration’s complex, dense lemma, which embeds several earlier sources: * My sincere thanks are due to David Lewis (Edinburgh) for his feedback on this paper. 1 Vaguely defined since at least the time of Lysias (23.3) and Xenophon ( Eq.Mag. 3.2). Author Original – Article published in: D. Rodríguez Pérez (ed.), Greek Art in Context. Archaeological and Art Historical Perspectives, London-New York, Routledge (2017), 132-41