Poecile

• The picture-gallery, a celebrated hall or portico in the market-place at Athens: in porticu, quae Poecile vocatur, Nep. Milt. 6, 3; cf. Plin. 35, 9, 35, § 59.—
• II A gallery in the Athenian style at the Tiburtine villa of the emperor Hadrian, Spart. Hadr. 26.

• , Ποικίλη(στοά), the picture gallery, frescoed hall in the market-place of Athens, N.

POECILE (Ποικίλη), a rock on the coast of Cilicia, near the mouth of the Calycadnus, and on the east of Cape Sarpedon, across which a flight of steps cut in the rock led from Cape Zephyrium to Seleuceia. (Strab. xiv, p. 670 ; Stadiasm. Mar. M. § 161.) Its distance of 40 stadia from the Calycadnus will place it about Pershendi. Instead of any steps in the rock, Beaufort here found extensive ruins of a walled town, with temples, arcades, aqueducts, and tombs, built round a small level, which had some appearance of having once been a harbour with a narrow opening to the sea. An inscription copied by Beaufort from a tablet over the eastern gate of the ruins accounts for the omission of any notice of this town by Strabo and others ; for the inscription states it to have been entirely built by Fluranius, archon of the eparchia of Isauria, in the reigns of Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian.

A celebrated portico at Athens, which received its name from the paintings with which it was adorned (ποικίλη στοά, from ποικίλος, “diversified”). Its more ancient name is said to have been Peisianactius ( Zen.). The pictures were by Polygnotus, Micon, and Pamphilus, and represented the battle between Theseus and the Amazons, the contest at Marathon, and other achievements of the Athenians (Pausan. i. 15). Here were suspended also the shields of the Scioneans of Thrace, and those of the Lacedaemonians taken in the island of Sphacteria. It was in this portico that Zeno first opened his school, which was hence denominated the “Stoic,” or “School of the Porch,” from στοά. See Stoici.