The master narrative of a profound crisis in traditional faith leading to a hardening of authority and religious persecution in late fifth-century Athens has a long scholarly history, one that maintains a persistent presence in current research. This paper proposes to reexamine some aspects of religious authority in late fifth-century Athens through one case-study: the trial of Andocides in 400 BCE. Instead of proposing a new reconstruction of the events that led to this trial, it will compare and contrast the (...) rival rhetorics of authority deployed by Andocides in De mysteriis and Ps.-Lysias in In Andocidem and attempt to locate them in their respective social and cultural contexts. (shrink)

This list of the documents found in Lois sacrées des cités grecques. Supplément attempts to classify them in terms of the categories formulated in Harris, “Towards a Typology” (2015). 1. Athens (Agora). Law/decree of the polis (?) – between 510 and 480 BCE (IG I3 231; IE 7) This fragmentary inscription is written in boustrophedon, which dates the text to the late sixth or the early fifth century BCE; Clinton dates the inscription more precisely to 510-500 BCE. Perquisites for officials (...) at th... (shrink)

This list of the documents found in Lois sacrées des cités grecques attempts to classify them in terms of the categories formulated in Harris, “Towards a Typology” (2015). 1. Attica. Athens. Calendar (probably subdivision of the polis) – early fifth century BCE (IG I3 234) The inscription is damaged, but contains the names of months (line 3: Thargelion; line 16: Gamelion), the names of gods, and animals to be sacrificed. The authority cannot be identified, but the non-standard sequence of mo...

Discarding the unreliable late evidence for the Library of Alexandria in the Hellenistic period, I establish a new history of libraries and books on more secure primary sources. Beginning in the second century BCE at various places across the eastern Mediterranean, rich, powerful men began to sponsor collections of books. These new public displays of aristocratic and royal munificence so transcended earlier holdings of books—which had been small, vocational, and private—that in an important sense they constitute the invention of the (...) library. As political institutions, these libraries depended on a revaluation of books, treating them as valuable irrespective of their content, and in various domains people increasingly attended to books as formal objects. Romans accelerated the pace and scope of this biblio-political revolution and extended the revaluation of books, transformations which gave a deeply anachronistic imprint to the frequently cited late stories about Hellenistic libraries. (shrink)