A friend of mine visiting Athens sent this photo. You will have guessed which particular detail caught his attention. I’ve tried to decipher the inscription, but I haven’t quite got it. Here’s my best shot:
κατ᾽ ἐπερώτημα τῆς
βουλὴς τῶν φ’ Χαρίτωνα
Νεικιοῦ Μαραθώνιον ξ (??)
κορεύσαν τὰ Ασκληπιο<ῦ>
καὶ Ὑγεῖας εν τῶ<ι> ἐπιπομ-
πῆι οὗ Ἀλεξάνδρου ἄρ-
χοντος ἐνιαθτῶ.
“In accordance with the sanction of the council of the 500, Chariton son of (?) Neikios from (the deme of?) Marathon (something) fulfilled what is due to Asclepios and Hygieia (according to instructions given) in a visitation, in the year of Alexander’s archonship.”
There are several problems with this interpretation, so I’d welcome any help…
Can Νεικιοῦ mean “son of Neikios” without the article? (i.e. τοῦ Νεικιοῦ)
φ’ is evidently the numeral 500, and I’m particularly proud of figuring that out.
The end of line 3 is a mystery to me. The last letter looks like a capital I with serifs, except that this is Greek, not Latin, so I’m guessing it’s a Ξ with the middle stroke not easily visible. But what it means, I have no idea. Beginning of a short word, but what? ξύν? A numeral??
The words after Ὑγεῖας don’t make good sense to me. This reconstruction is very tentative.
Is οὗ here like this really Greek?
Why is Chariton and the rest in the accusative?
And finally: what is this? My guess was that this is some sort of votive stele to Asclepios and Hygieia. There are ruins of temple to Asclepios near the acropolis, perhaps this photo was taken there…
You can see from the list that Roman and Greek names became quite entangled as the Roman period wore on.
The last word is ἐνιαυτῶι, but I think you just hit the wrong key on the keyboard, since you got the accent right.
Νεικιου – genitive of Νεικιας, apparently a prevalent spelling for Νικιας. There’s a result for this name with the -ει- spelling in Athens around 203-207 CE in the online searchable Athenian onomasticon (#272):
I think the letter at the end of the third line is a form of Z, not Ξ.
-κορευσαντα looks like it might be the end of an aorist participle, accusative agreeing with Χαρίτωνα.
This is a herm. The mutilated genitalia are at the bottom of the preserved part. A bust of the individual would have sat on top of the slab. Prominent citizens were honored with herms well into the Roman period (go figure). There’s a collection of herms from the Roman period, complete with genitalia, on the second floor of the restored Stoa of Attalus in the Athenian Agora. Actually, I think that erecting herms (no pun intended; the genitalia were flaccid, after all) to honor prominent individuals was a custom that was actually revived in the Roman period, particularly during the second century, when Athens enjoyed a revival under Hadrian and the local Athenian magnate Herodes Atticus, whose full name was Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes, and who served as a Roman consul for a year.
[In Αἴλιον Ἀπολλώνιον, the iotas must be treated metrically as consonantal. Fitting proper names in hexameters with metrical licenses goes back to Homer. Note the epic language in an inscription from the third century CE. Also the Graeco-Roman name Aelius Apollonios.]
Based on just one sample (obviously not conclusive), the formula would be something like:
X (acc.) στῆσε[ν] Y (nom.) [or εστησε if we are not displaying our erudition by composing hexameters in epic language].
So the inscription on Khariton’s herm looks like it’s incomplete. It would be something like: Χαρίτωνα . . . [εστησε[ν] Y]. That would account for the accusative.
From the photo it doesn’t look like Khariton’s herm has been restored or that the remainder of the text has somehow been effaced, but it’s hard to tell for sure, especially for those of us who aren’t specialists in epigraphy. My suspicion is that a lot of very skillful (and hence deceptive) restoration of monuments on display in the Agora and elsewhere has occurred, and I wonder whether this one was pieced together from fragments. Was the iota adscript at the end of ΕΝΙΑΥΤΩΙ, in contrast to its article ΤΩ earlier in the inscription, added erroneously?
Again, why did my edit buttons go away after a while? Nescit uox missa reuerti?
I created an admin post about this. I’ve seen several threads now where someone asks a question, has the question answered, and then goes in and deletes the original question, defacing the thread. So I limited default post editing time to 60 minutes. I can adjust that if the window isn’t wide enough.
The first time that I noticed this was your very useful response in the Beginning Poetry thread, for which the other user’s original question is now lost.
Thanks! That makes it a lot clearer now. The largest part of my problem was assuming that the inscription was significantly older than it actually is, hence trying to force the names into patronyms, when they actually were of the Roman type, or refusing to accept that it actually reads Pompeius, and refusing the idea that ει/ι could have merged.
This is obvious, and I’m ashamed to have written “κορεύσαν τὰ”. I’d grown pretty impatient not being able to decipher the end and somehow was pretending it was κορευσαντα τα, with an extra τα there…
Actually, I was suspecting something similar. Look especially how the final letter on line 4 (Υ) simply doesn’t fit in the space alloted to it. It looks like the slab should be wider on the right than it is. And if that’s true, the rounding on the top of the slab can’t be original either - and as you say, there should be bust of Chariton there. So what happened? My guess: at some stage, this stone slab was recycled to some new purpose (whether to serve as a flower stand or some other purpose) and the right side (or more?) of the stone was trimmed out. (This reminds me of a recent little scandal in Finland. Gravestones from graves that are no longer cared for are recycled to make pavement stones - I suppose this happens in other countries as well. On one occasion, however, the stones were carelessly positioned so that the names of deceased persons were visible on the street, which created a good occasion for many a clickbait journalist.)
Yes, that’s what I told my friend – you have guessed correctly what caught my his attention. At the very least, I got the herm part right. I think I’ve actually seen those in the Stoa of Attalus last time I visited Athens, in 2010. If I’m lucky, I’ll see them again next autumn!
“Chariton son of Nikias from Marathon, who, according to the sanction of the council of the 500, served at the temple of Asclepios and Hygieia in the year of Pompeios Alexander’s archonship.”
(I’m assuming that “according to the sanction of the council of the 500” goes with ζακορευσαντα and not the missing εστησε).
This is an interesting testimony to the enduring worship of Asclepius going into the 3rd century CE.
Paul, Thucydides scholar: According to this article, this Athenian Asclepieion was built (on the south slope of the Acropolis) in 429 BCE during the plague.
I’m not sure I understand this. Surely this doesn’t mean that Aelius Apollonius was born “out of torchbearers and the holy mother”, but rather “out of torchbearers of the holy mother”? But what is the function of τε in that case?
Who does Δηοῦς refer to? Is it a genitive of Zeus? Who are θεοῖν - Demeter and Persephone?
What is an “archon of ephebes”?
Even as late as the Roman period, I think some Athenian aristocratic families traced (or claimed to trace) their ancestry back to divine ancestors, through genealogies going back to aristocratic families in the classical period.
παρ’ ἀνάκτορα Δηοῦς – I don’t understand this either, but it probably has something to do with Athenian cults and myths, or maybe the inscription has been mis-transcribed.
“Who are θεοῖν - Demeter and Persephone?” I would think so. Note the dual! But the dual θεοῖν probably remained in use in connection with the Elysinian mysteries, and of course the language is epic.
‘What is an “archon of ephebes”?’ Something out of Athenian rituals involving teenage boys?
So the recitation of the authorization for a civic honor was a feature of some or many of these inscriptions.
You might also call it a monstrous perversion of a Homeric formula - whichever you prefer!
No, it demonstrates the continuing vitality of the epic language as a medium of poetic expression 800 or so years after the archaic period. It also reminds us that Homer was the basis of Greek education even into the Roman period and beyond.
Speaking of continuity through the ages - I was intrigued by that word ζάδορος (or ζαδόρος), which I had never seen before. I found it goes back to Mycenean, da-ko-ro.
So the term seems to be some sort of title, whether of a youth who led other youths or a pedagogue in charge of training youths. The term κοσμητὴς τῶν ἐφήβων also crops up in these inscriptions. They date from approximately the same period as the inscription quoted above, i.e., 200-225 CE.
The archon ephebon was some sort of official charged with training youths.
A Google search for “ephebarch” brings up a number of links to discussions of this term. The upshot is that this was an official in many Greek communities throughout antiquity, but the exact duties are somewhat vague, as is the question of whether the ephebarch would himself have been a current ephebe, a recently graduated ephebe or an older man.
Really? Okay… 