ABATON is the name the Rhodians gave to a great edifice that they constructed to hide two bronze statues that Queen Artemisia had erected in their city in memory of her triumph over them. [1] Vitruvius, Book II, p. 48. [2]

1. Artemisia II of Caria, who died 350 BCE, reigned over Caria for two years, from 353 to 351 BCE. She was a naval strategist and commander who conquered Rhodes after that island republic objected to a woman’s ruling over Caria. Morris Hicky Morgan has translated Vitruvius’s account as follows: “§14. After the death of Mausolus [the king], his wife Artemisia became queen, and the Rhodians, regarding it as an outrage that a woman should be ruler of the states of all Caria, fitted out a fleet and sallied forth to seize the kingdom. When news of this reached Artemisia, she gave orders that her fleet should be hidden away in that harbour with oarsmen and marines mustered and concealed, but that the rest of the citizens should take their places on the city wall. After the Rhodians had landed at the larger harbour with their well-equipped fleet, she ordered the people on the wall to cheer them and to promise that they would deliver up the town. Then, when they had passed inside the wall, leaving their fleet empty, Artemisia suddenly made a canal which led to the sea, brought her fleet thus out of the smaller harbour, and so sailed into the larger. Disembarking her soldiers, she towed the empty fleet of the Rhodians out to sea. So the Rhodians were surrounded without means of retreat, and were slain in the very forum. §15. So Artemisia embarked her own soldiers and oarsmen in the ships of the Rhodians and set forth for Rhodes. The Rhodians, beholding their own ships approaching wreathed in laurel, supposed that their fellow-citizens were returning victorious, and admitted the enemy. Then Artemisia, after taking Rhodes and killing its leading men, put up in the city of Rhodes a trophy of her victory, including two bronze statues, one representing the state of the Rhodians, the other herself. Herself she fashioned in the act of branding the Rhodians. In later times the Rhodians, laboring under the religious scruple which makes it a sin to remove trophies once they are dedicated [to the gods], constructed a building to surround the place, and thus by the erection of the ‘Grecian Station’ covered it so that nobody could see it, and ordered that the building be called ‘ἄβατον’ (Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1914). The Greek word ἄβατον means ‘tread not.’

2. Vitruvius’s De architectura (probably written between 30 and 15 BCE), has long been regarded as the first theoretical work on architecture. The text survived thanks to a single copy that was preserved somewhere in England and that was copied during the Carolingian Renaissance. It exerted, however, no influence on medieval architecture, being rediscovered only during the Italian Renaissance—by Poggio Bracciolini in 1414, according to an oft-repeated (but unreliable) account. The first printed edition was published by Fra Giovanni Sulpitius in 1486 or 1490; the first illustrated printed edition by Fra Giovanni Giocondo in 1511. It was translated into many European languages. The first French translation was published by Jean Martin in 1547, but the most influential French edition of Vitruvius was commissioned by Colbert in 1664 and published by Claude Perrault in 1673.