Greek History and Epigraphy: Essays in Honour of P.J. Rhodes. Edited by 
LYNETTE MITCHELL and LENE RUBINSTEIN. Swansea: The Classical Press of 
Wales, 2009. Pp. xxviii + 301. Cloth, $110.00. ISBN 
978–1–905125–23–4.

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CJ Online 2010.04.02

This volume, an attractively produced tribute to the Greek historian P.J. 
Rhodes, brings together contributors from Europe and North America. Most of 
the papers included were first delivered at a conference in honor of Rhodes 
on the island of Rhodes in 2005; as is natural in a volume of this kind, 
some have undergone more revision since the original event than others. All 
15 papers deal in some way with epigraphic evidence, though only one 
publishes a new inscription. Seven of the fifteen concern Athens, and five 
are responses or corrections to earlier scholarship by authors other than 
the honorand. I will offer a brief comment on each paper, beginning with 
the Athenian ones.

V. Gouschin, after a general discussion of the origins of ostracism, makes 
a modest attempt to analyze the regional distribution of the individuals 
named on published ostraka from the Athenian Agora and Kerameikos. He finds 
higher than average concentrations of candidates from the Paralia and the 
southern part of the Attic plain, which leads him to argue for the 
significance of the geographical regions of Attica (rather than deme or 
tribal affiliations).

A. Matthaiou’s goal is to reassess the evidence for the use of pure Ionic 
and mixed Attic-Ionic script in Athenian public inscriptions specifically 
between ca. 450–420 BCE, before the official adoption of the Ionic script 
in 403/2 BCE. An unacknowledged problem here is that the dating of most of 
the documents in question is insecure; Matthaiou follows D.M. Lewis’ 
dates, which tend to be early. In addition, a significant number of the 
Athenian state documents in question concern foreign (though not Ionian) 
individuals and polities, for whom letter cutters might have considered use 
of the Ionic script appropriate. Matthaiou suggests that the shift from 
Attic to Ionic script in Athens began in the demes and moved from there to 
the city; no consideration is given to the role played by private 
inscriptions from the city (and specifically the Acropolis), where the 
Ionic and mixed scripts were already common in the 5th century.

A. Scafuro offers a substantial, well-documented and fascinating close 
study of the honors awarded by the Athenians to the Atthidographer 
Phanodemos in the late 330s and 320s BCE. Phanodemos’ chief honors were 
crowns, and he in turn crowned the hero Amphiaraos. This paper represents 
one of the best discussions available of the crowning of worthy individuals 
or corporate bodies as a mainstay of 4th-century Athenian political 
culture, delving into the motives behind Phanodemos’ reciprocal and 
unusual (but not unique) crowning of a god or hero.

M.H. Hansen’s subject is the Athenian grain-tax law of 374/3 BCE 
published by R. Stroud in 1998; the inscription is quoted in its entirety. 
Hansen posits an earlier law (not extant) imposing the tax, emphasizing the 
focus of the law we have on the transport of the grain collected to pay the 
tax. I. Worthingon reconsiders the fragmentary Athenian inscription 
(recently republished by Rhodes and R. Osborne, and again quoted in full) 
identified as the common peace of 337 between the Athenians and Philip II. 
He suggests that what we have may in fact be the text of a bilateral peace 
treaty dating to 338, and that a second fragment listing the names of other 
Greek states may not be pertinent.

S. Hornblower amplifies a point made in passing in his ongoing commentary 
on Thucydides. As in much recent work on Thucydides, the issue is what 
Thucydides did not tell us. In a straightforward and convincing 
presentation, Hornblower shows how the near-absence of the Kleisthenic 
boule of 500 from Thucydides’ history fits his literary aims, 
particularly in his narrative of the Sicilian expedition. D. Whitehead 
supplements his previous work on the virtues enumerated in Athenian 
honorific decrees. Specifically, he argues that arete began to be 
considered an acceptably democratic virtue at some point in the 4th 
century, assuming some of the meaning previously described by andragathia, 
itself a synonym preferred by the Athenians to andreia.

Two papers deal with the concept of “epigraphical habit.” J. 
Sickinger’s contribution concerns so-called “formulae of disclosure” 
in Athenian public inscriptions, e.g. “in order that all people may know 
that the people and the boule know how to offer thanks to those who always 
say and do what is best for the boule and the people.” Contrary to 
connections previously drawn between such formulae and democratic concerns 
with transparency, Sickinger finds that in only a few isolated examples do 
they explicitly justify or rationalize publication on stone. Instead, most 
such formulae address the action being taken, that is, the honor being 
offered. R. Osborne comments on the Thasian use of inscriptions in the 6th 
and 5th centuries BCE, in contrast mainly to the example of Athens. He 
draws attention to inscribed Thasian laws that regulate behavior and 
commerce with a general application to the public, including visitors to 
the island; some almost fall under the heading “signage.” The typical 
early sacred laws and decrees of other poleis are arguably more restricted 
in scope and audience. Osborne’s essay means to be an impressionistic 
rather than a systematic analysis of early Thasian epigraphy, and as such 
it succeeds.

A. Makres publishes a very fragmentary inscribed stele (only the preamble 
and part of a name list survive) that she identifies as a 2nd-century BCE 
ephebic list from Asine in Messenia. The attribution hinges on the 
possibility that the cult of Apollo Maleatas—not the previously attested 
Apollo Pythios—alluded to in the inscription, was the principal Apollo 
cult of Asine. A photograph of the stele would have been helpful, and 
although no illustrations are given for any of the papers, only this one 
can be said to suffer from their absence.

C. Tuplin offers a spirited defense of the authenticity of the Gadatas 
letter found near Magnesia, which purports to be a letter of Darius I to a 
local official, despite the fact that the text was not inscribed on stone 
until the second half of the 2nd century CE. As Tuplin rightly notes, the 
concept of “authenticity” in a case such as this one is rather elastic: 
is the Greek text we have a translation from Old Persian or another 
language? Was the translator a native speaker of Greek? Could the wording 
of an original have been improved at one or more points before the text was 
inscribed on stone? The oddities that abound in the document encourage 
speculation, but make certainty impossible.

B. Dreyer provides an excellent summary of scholarship on local city elites 
in Hellenistic Asia Minor. The example of Metropolis soon before and after 
its transition from Attalid to Roman rule is offered, but is examined only 
in passing.

L. Mitchell begins with a wide-ranging survey of attitudes toward 
friendship and equality in the Archaic and Classical city-states, with 
emphasis on the literary evidence of Xenophon and Aristotle. In the final 
part of her essay, she shifts gears and considers the role played by 
friendship and equality in the world of the Macedonian court and the 
Successors. There, the formulaic language of honorific decrees shows Greek 
poleis using the language of friendship and equality to their own 
advantage, to undertake and manage bottom-up relationships with the kings 
and their friends.

In an astute analysis of grants of tax exemption (ateleia) by Greek cities 
to non-citizens, L. Rubinstein begins by asking the extent to which such 
grants (often awarded within the context of honorific decrees) conflicted 
with the legitimate interests of tax farmers. The question touches on the 
efficacy and thoroughness of public record-keeping, as well as the apparent 
expectation that written records will be consulted. As it turns out, 
individual cities were inconsistent in their practices, and the inscribed 
documents we have reveal logical gaps in the process of exempting and 
claiming an exemption that would have needed to be filled by supplementary, 
written documentation.

J.K. Davies concludes the volume with brief and refreshingly old-fashioned 
reflections on the state of the discipline of Greek epigraphy, and 
recommendations for future work. In short, he argues that we need more (and 
more up-to-date) epigraphic corpora. The papers included in this volume 
demonstrate that continual work is needed even on previously published 
inscriptions, and that such work can and should be a mainstay of the 
discipline of Greek history.

CATHERINE M. KEESLING
Georgetown University
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