As the editors of this volume observe, few scholars still believe that the Greek city died at the battle of Chaeronea. Detailed studies of the large volume of texts inscribed by a very wide range of cities in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods have unequivocally shown that this was a period of great vitality in the political life of these communities. The aim, therefore, of this collection of sixteen papers, most of which were originally presented at the weekly Epigraphic Workshop held in Oxford, is to answer the question of ‘what now?’, by providing examples of the epigraphic approaches being practised.
A central part of the answer to this question which the volume offers is more of the same – more of what the editors call ‘hard’ or ‘high quality’ epigraphy, above all the careful autopsy of stones and the diligent preparation of texts, best exemplified by the editio princeps, the first edition of a new inscription. In this volume there are two model examples of this genre – the chapter by A. Schachter and F. Marchand publishing six inscriptions discovered in the Thespiai survey and P.'s chapter presenting the first edition of five unpublished texts identified in the storerooms of the museum on Siphnos. None of the new texts is very long, but they are more than just a token affirmation of the importance of the continual discovery of inscriptions for the renewal of ancient history. In particular, the new texts from Thespiai include a document from the fourth century b.c. commemorating the collectors of a local two per cent tax (the pentekoste) as well as a (deliberately destroyed?) bilingual dedication by the Emperor Domitian; from Siphnos, in addition to small fragments of a decree of the Naxians and a Siphnian decree honouring their strategoi, the new haul includes two fragments of the inscribed base of a public honorific statue for a woman, Astiē (‘townswoman’). One of the most intriguing new texts to be presented, however, is not, strictly speaking, new at all. G. Malouchou presents two Athenian texts first published in the nineteenth century but accidentally overlooked when the relevant volumes of Inscriptiones Graecae were compiled. The text in question is a horos inscription, indicating that a property had been used as the security of a loan, engraved on the threshold-stone of what was evidently a rather luxurious house. One wonders what the neighbours thought when the stone mason lay, awkwardly, on the ground to carve this text – and whether it was because social stigma attached to mortgaging one's family home that this stone was later turned upside down, presumably once the debt had been paid. Unusually, this text makes reference to the fact that a woman gave her permission for the loan, apparently because her dowry provided the money which financed it.
It is not, however, enough simply to publish good texts. This volume makes it clear that inscriptions need to be publicised and made accessible as well. This is not the least of the services which G. Kantor performs in his re-edition of an important new judicial text from Chersonesos Taurica, originally published in a difficult to access Russian-language journal, which reorganises the local court system to establish smaller juries in the context of a civic crisis paralysing the established system. (The text cites oligandria – ‘the scantiness of men’ – as the cause of this paralysis, though the problem was probably the unwillingness or inability of as many citizens to devote time to judicial proceedings as the established law required rather than absolute de-population of the citizen body.)
The contribution which this sort of ‘hard epigraphy’ can make to history is probably best illustrated by P. Thonemann's re-edition of Alexander's famous Priene edict. Thonemann offers a compelling new reconstruction, arguing that we should restore in this text a reference to a general decree of Alexander's, that the Greeks of Asia Minor be autonomous and free (specifically, free from paying tribute), and read the edict as a whole as, in part, an attempt to clarify the ambiguous position of Naulochon, as a mixed community with both Greek and non-Greek inhabitants. Thonemann argues that Alexander's edict heralded an important new motivation for a community to Hellenise in the ancient world – fiscal immunity from tribute (if not necessarily from other contributions) – but in this case it is striking that, as inhabitants could be exempted on the basis of their ethnic status, a supposedly communal tribute comes to resemble a tax on individuals. This also prompts the intriguing question of who was to decide which inhabitants of Naulochon were Greek.
Alongside its celebration of hard epigraphy, this volume places a strong and welcome emphasis on the importance of broader synthetic studies of different themes, institutions and types of epigraphic material. These contributions illustrate how inscriptions can be used to illuminate more than just isolated historical moments and in general they also provide useful overviews, making the material they treat accessible more broadly to students of ancient history. So, in addition to providing us with convincing new reconstructions of three important statue monuments, J. Ma's chapter gives a brief but authoritative history of honorific statues, public and private, and their symbolic functions. N. Kennell offers a detailed and coherent account of the neoi – the militarised and, as he shows, frequently militaristic element of the citizen body – gathering and exploring the scattered epigraphic evidence for its identity as a political community in its own right and its relations with both ephebes and the wider citizen-community. J. Prag, by exploring how individuals from Sicilian poleis were identified in both the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, provides an interesting case study in the layering of civic and regional identities. W. Slater's paper, conversely, examines the very real practical and administrative consequences which communal prestige questions of festival status had, in terms of the rewards which victors could expect to receive from their home cities (and the complexities that resulted from the fact that they did not necessarily wish to return there to collect them). No fewer than two chapters, by A. Chaniotis and A. Ellis-Evans, treat the phenomenon of epidosis inscriptions and show that these apparently bland lists of civic donors (one of which is depicted on the cover of the book) were heavily charged ideological monuments, the product of lively civic dramas of public giving which can in some cases be reconstructed in detail (Chaniotis is particularly good on the epidosis list of Kalymna, pp. 94–5). A particularly novel approach to Hellenistic epigraphy is pursued in B. Gray's chapter, in which he explores how far the proposers of decrees drew on Aristotelian philosophical concepts in discussing the merits of individuals, particularly their education.
As this brief survey shows, even the more thematic chapters are quite disparate. For the most part, they do not speak directly to each other and the five sections into which the sixteen papers are unevenly divided are navigation aids rather than a serious attempt to provide a structured account of the post-classical city (‘Poleis and Ruling Powers’; ‘Poleis in Conflict’; ‘The Social Economics of the Poleis’; ‘Poleis of Honour’; ‘Institutions, Ethics, Religion’). Collectively, however, the papers fulfil the aims of the editors very successfully and together provide a coherent argument for the continuing importance of serious epigraphy for the study of the post-Classical poleis.
