Attic Inscriptions in UK Collections British Museum Decrees of the Council and Assembly Stephen Lambert
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Attic Inscriptions in UK Collections British Museum Decrees of the Council and Assembly Stephen Lambert AIUK VOLUME BRITISH 4.2 MUSEUM 2020 AIUK Volume 4.2 Published 2020 AIUK is an AIO Papers series ISSN 2054-6769 (Print) ISSN 2054-6777 (Online) Attic Inscriptions in UK Collections is an open access AIUK publication, which means that all content is available without Attic Inscriptions charge to the user or his/her institution. You are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the in UK Collections full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from either the publisher or the author. C b n a This paper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. Original copyright remains with the contributing author and a citation should be made when the article is quoted, used or referred to in another work. This paper is part of a systematic publication of all the Attic inscriptions in UK collections by Attic Inscriptions Online as part of a research project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): AH/P015069/1. PRINCIPAL PROJECT AIO ADVISORY INVESTIGATOR TEAM BOARD Stephen Lambert Peter Liddel Josine Blok Polly Low Peter Liddel Robert Pitt Polly Low Finlay McCourt Angelos P. Matthaiou Irene Vagionakis S. Douglas Olson P.J. Rhodes For further information see atticinscriptions.com Contents CONTENTS Preface ii Abbreviations iv 1. The Collection of Decrees of the Athenian Council and Assembly in the British Museum 1 2. The Decrees of the Council and Assembly in the British Museum and Athenian History 7 1. Introduction 7 2. Council and Assembly 7 3. Prescripts of inscribed decrees: persons referred to 9 4. Prescripts of inscribed decrees: dating 10 5. Other indicators of the date of decrees 12 6. Three drivers of the Athenian habit of inscribing decrees on stone 14 7. The content of the Athenian decrees in the British Museum and Athens’ developing policy agenda 16 3. The Inscriptions 21 1. Regulations concerning the Eleusinian Mysteries 21 2. Decree about Erythrai 36 3. Decree about Hestiaia 40 4. Decree about treaty with Rhegion 52 5. Decree proposed by Kleinias relating to the tribute 56 6. Decree about building a temple 61 7. Honours for Euagoras of Salamis, 394/3 BC 63 8. Honours for a man from Argos 70 9. Honorific decree for a seer (?) 74 10. Honorific decree with relief 78 11. Honours for Asandros of Macedon, 314/3 BC 82 12. Honours for Spartokos of the Bosporan Kingdom, 285/4 BC 85 13. Honorific decree, 259/8 BC 101 14. Decree, 255/4 BC 105 15. Decrees honouring the prytany of Ptolemais, 192/1 BC 107 16. Three decrees honouring the ephebes, their superintendent and officers, 40/39 or 39/8 BC 119 17. Decree on the conveyance of sacred objects for the Eleusinian Mysteries 129 Concordances to AIUK 4.1 and 4.2 138 i Preface PREFACE This, the second part of AIO’s new edition of the Attic inscriptions in the British Museum,1 includes the seventeen decrees of the Athenian Council and People in the collection. Ranging in date from ca. 475-450 BC to ca. 220 AD they span almost the entire chronological range of Athenian decree-inscribing, supplying a series of illuminating snapshots of the city’s policy-making, and the development of its democracy and decree-inscribing habits, across seven centuries. Just two of these inscriptions were not included by Hicks in GIBM I (1874) (7, 10), but the texts of the other fifteen and our understanding of their historical contexts have been transformed since then by the progress of scholarship. This includes in nine cases the discovery or identification in the meantime of fragments that belong to the same or a closely related inscription (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 15, 16, 17). Some of this epigraphical progress is of long-standing, but some is more recent, and some is altogether new. This edition reflects, for example, a newly published arrangement of the fragments of the important decree of 394/3 BC honouring Euagoras of Salamis (7) (Matthaiou 2019); significant new readings and analysis of two fourth-century honorific decrees, 8 and 9; and reassessments of major inscriptions such as the decree making arrangements for Hestiaia on Euboea in the period of the Athenian Empire (3) and the early-third century decree honouring Spartokos III of the Bosporan kingdom (12), an important document of the Athenian grain supply. As well as a guide to the BM’s collection of Athenian decrees, this part of AIUK 4 is designed as a general reference point for decrees of the Council and Assembly on AIO. The introductory section 2 has been written with that broader purpose in mind and includes general discussions of matters such as the relationship between the Council and Assembly, of decree prescripts, the Athenian calendar and dating. As in AIUK 4.1 the bibliographies supplied for each inscription are selective, limited for the most part to key items for establishing the text of an inscription in the BM and its original location, findspot and acquisition. With inscriptions whose publication history is mostly long and complex this is a necessary policy if we are to avoid our editions becoming unwieldy and padded with outdated references. In particular, items of bibliography which pre-date Boeckh’s CIG I (1828) are not systematically recorded. Entries in that work which contain references to earlier publications are marked with an asterisk (*).2 Also as in AIUK 4.1 I do not attempt to describe the display history of the inscriptions, but note their location within the Museum when the autopsy for this edition was carried out. 1 On the rationale for the new edition see the Preface to AIUK 4.1. 2 The earlier work most commonly cited in CIG is F. Osann, Sylloge Inscriptionum Antiquarum Graecarum et Latinarum, a corpus of Greek inscriptions divided into sections by collection. It was published as a whole in 1834, including as section 1, Marmora Elginiana e Museo Britannico cum Appendice aliorum titulorum in variis Britanniae Museis conservatorum. It had previously been published in fascicules from 1822 (Osann, p. v, Praefatio, n. 1) and as such was available to Boeckh. ii Preface Thanks are due once again to the responsible British Museum curators, Peter Higgs and Alexandra Villing, for their helpful collaboration, to Alex Truscott for facilitating autopsies of the stones, to the BM photographic department and to my brother, Julian, for images reproduced here. I am grateful to the participants in the workshop in honour of Leslie Threatte at the Epigraphical Museum, Athens, October 2018, and especially to Angelos Matthaiou and Voula Bardani, for their comments on preliminary versions of 8 and 9 presented there. Josine Blok, Peter Liddel, Polly Low, William Mack, Angelos Matthaiou, Douglas Olson, Peter Rhodes, Peter Thonemann and an anonymous reader helped to improve this work by their acute comments and suggestions on a draft. 12 has benefited from the scrutiny of David Braund. I am grateful to Robert Pitt for his notes on his autopsy of 3, for access to his squeezes of this and other inscriptions, and for valuable information on collection history. Angelos Matthaiou kindly supplied a copy of his new edition of 7 in advance of publication and offered helpful suggestions on my own draft. Georgia Malouchou shared valuable information about the early modern topography of Athens. Mirko Canevaro responded helpfully to queries about laws and decrees in the manuscripts of the Attic orators; Floris van den Eijnde to queries about the archaeology of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Josine Blok, David Braund, Andrea Giannotti, Peter Liddel, Matthew Simonton, Peter Thonemann and Kai Trampedach generously permitted me access to their work prior to publication. Julian Schneider’s editions of the other post- Sullan ephebic decrees for AIO helped to contextualise the treatment of 16 in this edition. The British School at Athens and its excellent library has continued to supply an ideal base for my work, and in preparing this part of the BM volume I also benefited from the libraries of the American and French Schools at Athens, the Greek and Roman Department of the BM, the Institute of Classical Studies, London, and the University of Heidelberg. The staff of the Epigraphical Museum, Athens, and of the Agora Excavations kindly permitted me to study relevant fragments in their keeping. As ever, Irene Vagionakis worked tirelessly behind the scenes, helping prepare this part of AIUK for publication and the accompanying material on the AIO main site. iii Abbreviations ABBREVIATIONS I use the abbreviations for epigraphical works listed at https://www.atticinscriptions.com/browse/bysource/ and in addition: Agora X: M. L. Lang and M. Crosby eds., The Athenian Agora. Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. X Weights, Measures and Tokens (1964) Agora XXXI: M. M. Miles ed., The Athenian Agora. Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. XXXI The City Eleusinion (1998) Agora XXXVIII: C. L. Lawton ed., The Athenian Agora. Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. XXXVIII Votive Reliefs (2017) Aleshire and Lambert 2011: S. B. Aleshire and S. D. Lambert, “The Attic Gene and the Athenian Religious Reform of 21 BC”, in J. H. Richardson and F. Santangelo eds., Priests and State in the Roman World, 553-75 APF: J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families (1971) ATL: B. D. Meritt, H. T. Wade-Gery, M. F. McGregor, The Athenian Tribute Lists (1939- 1953) Austin 1938: R.