Epigraphy and Religion Revisited

Around the end of the fourth century BCE, a series of stone stelai were set up to record narratives of healing by the god Asklepios at his sanctuary at Epidauros, effected through incubation (IG IV².1.121-124). These accounts (ἰάματα) feature a diverse assortment of pathologies, cures, and patients from across the Greek world, and recount in vivid prose the dreams and other scenarios in which the god and his associates offer both healing and chastisement to visitors.

Emerita was one of the most important cities of Roman Hispania and had been an administrative capital already in the pre-Roman period. Abundant literary, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence attests to the prominence of this ciuitas. Modern visitors to the city are impressed by its Roman amphitheatre and theatre, as well as by its readily accesible archaeological sites. For philologists, archaeologists, and historians interested in the transitory period from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, Emerita is major scientific laboratory.

The widespread view that Greek and Roman slaves had no autonomous religious lives and harbored no private spirituality has a long pedigree, having first been postulated in the mid 19^th c., and subsequently reaffirmed by Franz Bömer in the 1960s, in the only full-scale study to date of the religion of slaves in ancient Greece and Rome, and then again by P. Herz in a revised edition of part of Bömer’s work in 1980 and 1991. More recently J. Scheid has responded vigorously to challenges to this view put forth by A. Bendlin and K.

This paper begins by exploring the epigraphic evidence for curses and binding spells in early (Archaic-Classical) Greece, in both the public and private spheres. A cache of five new curse tablets from Peiraieus is discussed; it is argued that they preserve a hexametrical binding tradition, which likely evolved over time from an oral version of a curse-incantation (Faraone 1995; Lamont 2015; forthcoming.).

In this paper, I examine the well-known Hekatompedon Decrees (IG I³ 4A-B) in order to disentangle their possible date and numerous topographical references. In the process, I also consider the role of the tamiai and prytanis in their capacity as inspectors on the late Archaic Akropolis. The overarching results of this investigation are a likely reconstruction of monuments on the Akropolis in the first quarter of the 5^th century B.C.E. and a deeper understanding of accountability in the early democratic polis.