The fifth-centuryhoroiof Aigina

Abstract

The fifth-centuryhoroiof sacred lands, found in Aigina, marked the property of two named cults, of Athena and of Apollo and Poseidon. They are inscribed (for the most part) in the Attic dialect and script, surprising features one or both of which they share with similar stones from Samos, from Chalkis and from Kos. The accepted view is that they were set up following Athens' seizure of Aigina during the summer of 431 BC, when the Athenians expelled the islanders and installed a colony of their own people who remained until 404. For the setting aside oftemenefor the gods would naturally accompany such a foundation in confiscated territory, as it did in Mytilene four years later. Yet some of the inscriptions bear such early letter-forms as angular tailedrhoand three-barredsigma, forms long regarded as confined in Attic texts to the period before 446/5. There is thus a clear contradiction between the accepted view of the context of these inscriptions and the tenets of ‘orthodox’ epigraphical doctrine. In editing the inscriptions forIGiv (see on nos 33–8), Fraenkel acknowledged the contradiction but was unshaken by it, though he did concede that the placing of thehoroicould have been no later than the very outset of the colony: ‘Tantum vero rationi palaeographicae erit tribuendum, ut statim post occupatam insulam instituisse terminationem sacrorum Athenienses sumamus.’

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