Epigraphic Economies (organized by the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy)

The importance of inscribed instrumentum domesticum for our knowledge of ancient economy has been recognized since the time of Heinrich Dressel. However most modern studies about the process of production and distribution of goods in the Roman world are based on stamps (amphoras, lamps, bricks and so on) and other kinds of “standard”, repeated information (like graffiti and tituli picti inscribed on different part of amphoras).

The ATHENIANS Project, soon to be made available in electronic format, offers researchers studying the ancient Athenian economy a vast body of epigraphical, topographical, and prosopographical information from a wide range of sources, including decrees, building accounts, confiscation records, manumissions, leases, grave stones, coins, and vases. These subjects have been combed by numerous scholars over many years, then verified, analysed, classified, entered, and stored in relational databases.

This paper investigates how the Latin inscription known as lapis Pollae (CIL X 6950 = CIL I² 638 = ILS 23 = ILLRP 454 = Inscr. It. III.1 272) can be used to address the shifting balance between agriculture and husbandry in Sicily and Lucania as a consequence of the growth of demand for grain in the 2nd century BC.

Delos, if you would like to be the home

of my son, Phoebus Apollo, […]

your inhabitants will be nourished

by the hands of foreigners

(Hom., Hymn to Apollo, vv. 34-40,

transl. M.P.O. Morford - R.J.Lenardon)

This paper examines the epigraphic and material evidence of private associations and domestic cults of Italian merchants in late Hellenistic Delos to address the ways in which merchants employed religious practices as economic agents in the dynamic urban economy of the island in this period.

The famous Spartan War Fund inscription (IG V 1 1) provides a list of poleis and individuals who “gave to the Lacedaimonians for the war” a series of specified contributions. Where most scholarship has focused on the dating of the text, which has now been anchored in the Decelean War (Bleckmann 1993 and 2002, Piérart 1995), the inscription has barely begun to inform our understanding of the Spartan economy (cf. Loomis 1993: 77-80, Smarczyk 1999: 63-64, Hodkinson 2000: 167-170; Thommen 2014, 94-99, 127-129).