ABSTRACT
The Heraion at Samos, one of the great centres of ancient Greek religion, received only a short, incidental mention from Pausanias. Our understanding of this great sanctuary would be enormously facilitated if only Pausanias had given an account of the island in his famous description of Greece, just as he had done for the sites of mainland Greece and the Peloponnesus. The lack of a text by Pausanias on the Heraion at Samos makes us so keenly aware that the detailed descriptions of buildings, history and cult, collected by the periegete at other sites, constitute fundamental invaluable help for modern investigations of sites such as Delphi, Olympia and the Acropolis of Athens. Only a very little information about the Heraion at Samos has come down to us in the literary sources. The most important is from Herodotus who mentions the Hera sanctuary at Samos several times and provides us with some important pieces of information. Otherwise there are only a few scattered mentions which partly contradict each other, and whose reliability as sources is hard to evaluate because they are mostly so late, many centuries after the floruit of the Hera cult on Samos. With the exception of the great temple of Hera and the altar of Hera, no ancient structure in the Heraion is named in the ancient sources. Since the ancient sources mainly pass over the Samian sanctuary in silence, we must rely almost exclusively on the results of archaeological excavations if we wish to form an idea of the significance, the character, the history or the individual features of the cult in this sanctuary.1
