Sara B. Aleshire, best known for her volumes on the Athenian Asklepieion, was a talented scholar of Greek epigraphy and religion, a fixture at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and endower of the Sara B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy at the University of California, Berkeley. This volume emerged from a panel on Greek epigraphy and religion held in her memory at the North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy in 2016. Ronald S. Stroud provides a biography (5–7), peppered with personal reminiscences, giving a sense of Aleshire as colleague and friend for those not fortunate enough to have known her.
The fourteen papers in this volume advance a wide range of debates. Many also present improved texts (Carbon, Matthaiou, Malouchou, Takeuchi, Zellman-Rohrer) or publish texts for the first time (Kalliontzis, Makres). These advances cannot all be discussed here (summaries appear in Bulletin épigraphique 14 (2022)). The editors have arranged the papers in three parts (‘Varia’, ‘Attica’ and ‘Beyond Attica’); I group them here by broad approach.
Angelos P. Matthaiou’s chapter on IG II3 1 292 (71–89) on the sacred orgas is a model of the restoration and contextualization of a text through close attention to the stone, careful consideration of parallels and analysis of historiographical evidence. He reconstructs the decree as a delimitation of the boundary between sacred and marginal land within Attic territory, after the boundary between Athens and Megara had been resolved. Yannis Kalliontzis (108–43), publishing the first Brauron inventory from Brauron (although actually found in Oropos), uses parallels from the Brauron inventories on the Acropolis to restore and identify the new list as the record of an audit (exetasmos). Kazuhiro Takeuchi (53–70) and Georgia E. Malouchou (283–94) extend our understanding of sacred laws from Paiania in Attica (IG I3 250) and Parparia on Chios (SEG 17.379), respectively.
Several studies use inscriptions’ physicality as an interpretative tool. In Maria Mili and Jenny Wallensten’s study of Hermes Chthonios on Hellenistic Thessalian funerary stelae (227–47), the names of the deceased and of the god are always physically separated, indicating that they should be read as two separate clauses (an epitaph and a dedication, mediated by the living viewer), not a single sentence. Together, text and imagery suggest that Hermes here represents fixity, not liminality in death. Andronike Makres (167–203) uses the findspots of late Hellenistic statue bases for athletes at Messene (in the agora rather than the gymnasium) to show that athletes were still seen as civic representatives.
Other studies deploy philological methods. Jan-Mathieu Carbon’s chapter (27–52) on epigraphic descriptions of sacred butchery reveals their emphasis on careful cuts into equal portions that kept femurs intact. This clashes with zooarchaeological evidence for rough, uneven cuts and shattered femurs, but the existence of a gap between inscribed norms and archaeologically attested practice is precisely the point. Elena Martín González (204–26) shows the importance of considering a corpus in toto with her analysis of the Dodona oracular tablets; textual parallels allow most tablets that have been interpreted as answers from the oracle to be read as abbreviated questions. Attention to formulae and vocabulary allows Stephen Lambert (90–107) to reveal how a third-century AD decree (I Eleusis 638) reinforces archaizing content (restoration of traditional ritual) with archaizing style (intertextual links to fifth-century BC decrees). Michael Zellman-Rohrer (310–34) connects the text on a magical gem in the Getty with medical recipes in Late Antique and Byzantine manuscripts, not only allowing him to restore the text, but also demonstrating that gem-cutters were part of wider medical and magical traditions.
Adele C. Scafuro’s approach (248–82) is based on analysis of how inscribed decisions were intended to function. She argues that the popularity of Koans as foreign judges in the Hellenistic period reflects their actual skill as judges, through close analysis of their settlement of a dispute on Telos (IG XII.4.1 132). In place of outstanding fines, political exiles are to pay for sacrifices and temple repairs, substituting a penalty they could not afford for a liturgy they could, thereby facilitating reconciliation practically and rhetorically.
Laura Gawlinski (11–26) highlights the methodological issue of modern typologies in a review of the development of the concept of ‘sacred law’ since 1896, showing it to be a product of personal research interests, accidents of publication, influence from Latin epigraphy and scholarly inertia.
The quality of the volume does honour to Aleshire’s memory. Specialists in Greek religion and epigraphy will find much of use. Graduate students and other scholars who seek to do good work with Greek epigraphy will find a showcase of best practice. It is generously illustrated with photographs and drawings and completed with detailed indexes of epigraphic/papyrological sources, literary sources and themes.
