The Lindos Anagraphe: “Forging” a Heroic Past In
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THE LINDOS ANAGRAPHE: “FORGING” A HEROIC PAST IN HELLENISTIC RHODES? By JULIA CLAIRE HERNÁNDEZ (Under the direction of Charles Platter) ABSTRACT Modern scholarly approaches to Lindos anagraphe, a 1st century BC inscription recording votive offerings at the Rhodian temple of Athena Lindia, have used the anachronistic term “forgery” to refer to its chronologically impossible Heroic Era dedications. Using Paul Veyne’s theory of “sincere forgery” as an interpretive framework, this thesis evaluates the “epigraphic invention” of these votives according to Hellenistic rather than modern definitions of forgery. Chapter One reviews previous approaches to the text and problematizes the use of the term “forgery” to describe it. Chapter Two contextualizes the anagraphe within the ancient practice of displaying Heroic Era votives in temple settings and evaluates this practice vis-à-vis ancient definitions of forgery. Chapter Three uses Hans Joachim Gehrke’s theory of intentional history to explore how the anagraphe’s Heroic Era votives, when considerd as products of “sincere forgery,” grant new insight into the socio-political, intellectual, and religious contexts of the Hellenistic Rhodian milieu in which the text was created. An epilogue compares the anagraphe to the recent case of the Iruña-Valeia forgeries in Spain’s Basque Country, highlighting the contrast between ancient and modern perceptions of the technique of “epigraphic invention.” INDEX WORDS: Lindos anagraphe, ancient forgery, sincere forgery, Hellenistic Rhodes, epigraphic invention, Heroic Era votives, dedicatory inscriptions, intentional history THE LINDOS ANAGRAPHE: “FORGING” A HEROIC PAST IN HELLENISTIC RHODES? By JULIA CLAIRE HERNÁNDEZ A. B., College of Charleston, 2005 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2014 © 2014 Julia Claire Hernández All Rights Reserved THE LINDOS ANAGRAPHE: “FORGING” A HEROIC PAST IN HELLENISTIC RHODES By JULIA CLAIRE HERNÁNDEZ Major Professor: Charles Platter Committee: Nancy Felson Erika Hermanowicz Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2014 iv MATRI MEAE v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER One THE LINDOS INSCRIPTION AND ITS “CHRONOLOGICAL INCONSISTENCIES”. .1 Two FILLING IN THE GAPS OF TRADITION: BETWEEN “EPIGRAPHIC INVENTION” AND “FORGERY” IN THE HEROIC ERA VOTIVES . 30 An Overview of Heroic Era Votive Offerings in the Ancient World . 31 Interpreting the Heroic Era Votives: “Identity Markers and Forgery”. .. .40 “Identity Markers” as “Forgery”: Inscriptions in the anagraphe . 45 Defining Forgery in the Hellenistic World . 51 vi Three “SINCERE FORGERY” AS “INTENTIONAL HISTORY”: SOCIO-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXTS FOR THE HEROIC-ERA VOTIVES . 63 Gehrke’s “Intentional History” and the Lindos anagraphe . 64 The anagraphe as an “intentional history” of religious expression. 70 Epilogue THE “EXCEPTIONAL” OSTRAKA OF IRUÑA VELEIA, THE LINDOS ANAGRAPHE, AND “EPIGRAPHIC INVENTION”. 92 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 104 APPENDICES A. TEXT OF THE LINDOS ANAGRAPHE . 109 vii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Column Divisions on the Stele . 2 Figure 2: Distribution of Text on the Stele . 3 CHAPTER ONE THE LINDOS INSCRIPTION AND ITS “CHRONOLOGICAL INCONSISTENCIES” During the 1902-1905 excavations at Lindos on the island of Rhodes, Danish archeologist Christian Blinkenberg uncovered a Hellenistic stele spoliated from the city’s acropolis in late antiquity. 1 The stele’s second life as a paving stone in the church of Agios Stephanos at the acropolis’ base had left it worn from centuries of foot traffic. Despite centuries of wear and tear, the stele’s inscription, designated ILindos.2 in Blinkenberg’s epigraphic corpus, remains mostly legible, covering a surface area of 2.37 meters in height with a width of 0.85 meters, approximately 7.5 by 2.5 feet. The lengthy text of the inscription, roughly 2,800 words of which survive, is divided into four sections by three incised lines. A horizontal line marks off the top eighth of the stele as a unique discrete textual entity; below this section, the additional two lines form three distinct columns of equal width that run the remaining length of the stele. The following image (Figure 1), adapted from Blinkenberg, shows the location of these lines and their resulting divisions as well as Blinkenberg’s letter designations for each column:2 1 Blinkenberg’s original publication of the stele appeared in 1912 in the Danish Royal 2 Blinkenberg (1941), 160. Figure 1: Column Divisions on the Stele As the text itself states, the purpose of this carefully arranged, tetrapartite inscription is to glorify Lindian Athena and her venerable sanctuary. An official decree recorded in section A of the stele that Blinkenberg dates to 99 BC expresses this goal explicitly. 3 Charging two Lindian citizens, Timachidas and Tharsagoras, with the creation of the stele, the decree enjoins these individuals to inscribe it with an accounting of ἅ κα ἦι ἁρµόζοντα περὶ τῶν ἀναθεµάτων καὶ τᾶς ἐπιφανείας [τ]ᾶς θε<ο>ῦ [Α.8],4 “whatever things are fitting concerning the offerings and the epiphanies of 3 Blinkenberg establishes this date for the stele based by comparing the names of the individuals mentioned in the decree of section A, Timachidas, Tharsagoras, and Hagesitimos, with other epigraphic evidence from the sanctuary that is datable, in particular, with lists of priesthoods. See Blinkenberg, 1912, 343-345. 4 The text of the inscription used for the following study and quoted throughout is that of Blinkenberg’s 1941edition. The Doric dialect of the inscription is typical of Rhodes and reflected throughout Lindian epigraphy. 2 the goddess.”5 In fulfilling their mission, the pair has created a composite text, distributed on the stele as follows: A. Decree B. Offerings C. Offerings Epiphanies D. Figure 2: Distribution of Text on the Stele Two columns of the stele catalogue a series of remarkable donations made to the goddess over the course of the sanctuary’s history, while the third records a series of her epiphanies. The previous overview of the stele and its inscription has been deliberately terse. Any discussion of the text that moves beyond simple description quickly runs up against a series of pitfalls encountered by investigators for over a century. The complex nature of the inscription eludes simple classification and even the seemingly simple act of determining what to call the text turns into an act of 5 Unless otherwise indicated, the translations of both ancient and modern languages provided throughout are my own. 3 interpretation, as is evident in the early controversy over assigning it a generic label. In his original report, Blinkenberg coins the term “Chronique du Temple Lindien” to describe the text, suggesting a link between the inscription and the epigraphic form of the chronicle, an annalistic historiographic genre found throughout the Greek world in temple and other public settings. The title “Lindos Chronicle” quickly caught on among scholars, and, after a hundred years, the denomination remains conventional.6 For Felix Jacoby, however, Blinkenberg’s use of the term “chronicle” for the inscription is not only “unfortunate” but also “misleading.” While Jacoby counts the inscription among the local histories of Rhodes catalogued in the third volume of his Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, he distinguishes the text, with its “mixtum compositum” character combining votive inventory and epiphany narrative, from the distinct epigraphic genre of the “temple chronicle.”7 According to Jacoby, the latter, best exemplified by the lists of priests in the Athenian Asklepion, relates a continuous narrative of a sanctuary’s past and takes as its 6 The three most recent studies of the inscription, those of Josephine Shaya, Carolyn Higbie, and Natcha Massar, all use some iteration of Blinkenberg’s original term. Shaya uses “Lindian Temple Chronicle,” Higbie “Lindian Chronicle,” Massar “Chronique du Lindos.” See Josephine Shaya, “The Greek Temple as Museum: The Case for the Legendary Treasure of Athena from Lindos,” AJA 109 (2005): 423-442; Carolyn Higbie, The Lindian Chronicle and the Greek Creation of their Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Natcha Massar, “La ‘Chronique de Lindos’: un catalogue à la gloire du sanctuaire d’Athéna Lindia,” Kernos 19 (2006): 229-243. 7 The Lindos inscription appears in Jacoby’s third volume, Geschichte von Städten und Völkern, as entry number 532. See Jacoby, Geschichte von Städten und Völkern (Horographie und Ethnographie), Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker vol.3, (Leiden: Brill, 1955), 443-451. 4 chronological framework the yearly succession of priests since the sanctuary’s foundation. As the Lindos inscription does neither, Jacoby suggests instead the term anagraphe for the text, an epigraphic designation that indicates its list-like nature and its public display.8 Jacoby’s term avoids the pitfall of forcing a generic label such as “chronicle” on the complex inscription and reflects the text’s own language: the decree recorded in Section A describes the process of creating the inscription using the verb ἀναγράφω [Α.6] and refers to the text of the inscription with the term ἀναγραφά [Α.8-9].9 The present study will follow Jacoby’s lead in using this descriptive rather than interpretive designation for the inscription. 10 Despite the utility of Jacoby’s terminology, his subsequent remarks on the Lindos text