Output details
30 - History
Cardiff University
Inscriptions on stone are the most important contemporary written source for the history of ancient Athens whose texts survive directly from antiquity. The responsibility internationally for the corpus of Greek inscriptions from Athens (Inscriptiones Graecae (IG) I, up to 404/3 BC, IG II, 403/2 BC - AD 267) lies with the Berlin Academy. The second edition of IG II, published 1913-1940 (IG II2), has become outdated by new finds (e.g. from the excavations of the Athenian Agora) and the progress of scholarship and, following the successful completion of the third edition of IG I (1981-1998), in 2000 it was decided at an international meeting to embark on the much larger task of producing a third edition of IG II, beginning with the inscribed laws and decrees in 10 fascicules, distributed among an international team of editors. Fascicule 2 (352/1-322/1 BC) is the one of the first fruits of this project. As is traditional for IG the language of the apparatus and commentaries is Latin, the primary focus textual and the style extremely concise. Fascicule 2 includes 281 inscriptions (84 of which were not in the second edition): honorific decrees, for both Athenians and foreigners, religious regulations (such as the law and decree on the Little Panathenaia, 447, which supplies fundamental evidence for this major Athenian festival), and inter-state agreements (including the treaty with Philip II, 318, which marks the beginning of the long period of Macedonian domination of Greece following the battle of Chaironeia in 338/7); and important texts such as a law against tyranny (320) and a law on the repair of walls in the Piraeus in the aftermath of the battle of Chaironeia (429). Joins and disjoins of fragments (among them, the identification of a new fragment of 312, the only inscribed decree proposed by Demosthenes) are identified. Texts are preceded by a description of the stone and the script and a full textual bibliography, and followed by an apparatus criticus and brief historical comment. The volume concludes with extensive concordances, indices, and a full set of photographs. The general policy of the new edition has been to cut out of the text speculative restorations of fragmentarily preserved inscriptions included in many earlier editions, while the new text includes the dating of over 50 inscriptions included in the fascicule was improved, while 43 inscriptions that were candidates for inclusion, were excluded from the fascicule on chronological grounds.
Lambert was primarily responsible for editing and for revising the texts following examination of all available stones, squeezes (in Berlin, Princeton and Oxford), transcripts and photographs, and scrutiny of the, in many cases quite extensive, textual bibliography. In the early stages of the work, Lambert was assisted, primarily in bibliographical research, by Emmanuel Vintiadis and Peter Liddel, but as editor Lambert is responsible for the main body of the fascicule; Professor K. Hallof, Director of IG, is responsible for the concordances, indices (the chronological index VI B based on a draft Lambert supplied) and some of the photographs.
The volume, which contains 281 inscriptions, is part of an international project, begun in 1999, to edit the inscribed laws and decrees of Athens, 403 BC to AD 267. It represents the collection and analysis of a considerable body of inscriptions and associated evidence. The work entailed reappraisal of the texts (including autopsy of the stones) and results included numerous revisions of joins, textual restorations and datings to cast new light on the inscriptions. Texts are presented in the concise style traditional for IG.
