Gavin Blasdel (University of Pennsylvania / American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
Over the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in Sulla’s sack of Athens in 86 BCE. Much research has focused on the archaeological evidence for the destruction (e.g., Parigi 2019), its portrayal in literature (e.g., Kuin 2018), and its local political circumstances (e.g., Kuin 2017). Recently, Rogers (2021) has convincingly argued that the sack was a “crisis event” that served as a catalyst for revitalizing change. Building upon this observation, this paper reconsiders an overlooked public statue monument in honor of Sulla as a window onto the Athenian response to the attack (IG II2 4103 = SEG 24.214). Of particular interest is the columnar form of the monument, the significance of which has not yet been appreciated, and its original, still unlocated, display setting. In making the case that Sulla’s honorific column most likely stood in the southeastern corner of the Agora, this paper argues that the monument was a powerful statement of Athenian civic ideology at a pivotal and vulnerable moment in the city’s history.
Although the inscription’s findspot was never recorded, there are several clues to its original location. Peppas-Delmousou (1965) has noted that Sulla’s statue base, though highly fragmented, took the form of a large unfluted column, a rare and extraordinary type of honorific monument at Athens. Of the ten other such monuments known, eight honor Roman military men. Seven were found in the vicinity of the Stoa of Attalos on the eastern side of the Agora, including one discovered in situ before the stoa’s north side that honors one of Sulla’s officers. This clustering is surely significant and raises the possibility that Sulla’s own column stood in the vicinity. A survey of the inventory numbers of the Epigraphical Museum provides additional, if more speculative, support. Five inscriptions with inventory numbers close to those of Sulla’s fragments came from an area just south of the Panagia Pyrgiotissa, where five columns were found. If Sulla’s monument was found nearby, it seems plausible that it was originally positioned in front of the stoa, perhaps at its southmost end, on high ground situated close to the Panathenaic Way.
If accepted, this reconstruction has important repercussions. Sulla’s column would have served as a pendant to that of his officer at the northern end of the stoa. Thus, the two were a pair. The choice of the Agora can be explained by the Athenians’ well-known association of Sulla with the tyrannicides, whose statues also stood there, perhaps directly opposite the stoa just across the Panathenaic Way (Baltes 2020). Both columns were set up by the demos, whose active role is emphasized in the inscriptions’ use of the dedicatory formula (Ma 2013). The combination of display context and inscription therefore would have recalled and associated the contemporary Athenians with the ur-activity of the democracy, the erection of statues for tyrannicides. At the same time, these new tyrant slayers looked to the future in inaugurating the eastern side of the Agora as a space devoted to monuments honoring Romans.