Inscribed Athenian Laws and Decrees in the Age of Demosthenes: Historical Essays by Stephen D. Lambert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inscribed Athenian Laws and Decrees in the Age of Demosthenes: Historical Essays by Stephen D. Lambert Brad L. Cook Inscribed Athenian Laws and Decrees in the Age of Demosthenes: Historical Essays. By Stephen D. Lambert. Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy. Leiden, NL and Boston, MA: Brill, 2018. Pp. ix + 333. Hardback, $144.00. ISBN: 978-90-04-35248-3. Lambert has assembled eleven essays, seven previously published, between 2010 and 2017, and four new, all of which are prefaced by an introduction that epitomizes the chapters and updates them with his collective view of the whole. In an earlier volume of essays, with the same title but subtitled Epigraphical Essays (2012), he presented a valuable set of prolegomena to the 4th-century Athenian inscriptions that are included in the fascicle of Inscriptiones Graecae, which he edited, IG II3 1, 2 (2012). In addition, on the useful and ever-expanding website, Attic Inscriptions Online (AIO), of which Lambert is the founder, English translations are available for all these inscriptions, and many more, with notes and links to additional online resources. Now, in this latest collection of essays, Lambert examines an array of important historical discussions to which these same 4th-century Athenian inscriptions offer clues and complications. Throughout this volume Lambert authoritatively engages with a number of the topics prominent in current scholarship, while at the same time, through the clarity of his detailed presentations, and the thorough bibliography, shows fully the scope of the topic and the epigraphical particulars that he is bringing into the discussion. Chapter 1 considers where inscribed laws and decrees were erected in Athens and how their monumentality functioned. The related question of which particular decisions of the Assembly were inscribed and what we may learn from that selectivity is the concern of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines what we can learn from the shift in inscriptional evidence in the 340s, after the Peace of Philocrates in 346, and, with [End Page 490] some overlap, Chapter 4 continues that theme into the 330s and 320s, the era of Lycurgus’ influence on so much of Athenian life. How Athens’ 5th-century past is reflected and also reinscribed in the epigraphical record during the Lycurgan era is considered in Chapter 5, and Chapter 6 looks at the topic for the entire 4th century, starting with the restoration of the democracy in 403; to be noted is the useful appendix that lists the thirty-three inscriptions discussed. More abstract, and more difficult to assess, is the role that inscriptional sources can play in the scholarly discussion about the rule of law in the 4th century, especially in the post-Chaironeia era, the topic of Chapter 7. The epigraphical evidence for the proposers of decrees and the “distribution of political influence” is considered in Chapter 8, which serves as an update of Mogens Hansen’s classic study of rhetors in 4th-century Athens, with some theoretical observations drawn from Josiah Ober. Along the same lines, Chapter 9 focuses on the more difficult question of the relative role of the Boule and the Assembly in the 350s to 322/1 BC, when much more of the shaping of decrees appears to have been taking place in the Assembly than earlier, with a postscript on the inscriptional evidence of the same during a later era, 229/8 to 198/7 BC. The last two chapters are parerga, each focused on a pair of related inscriptions: the first examines two inscriptions from 339/8 BC connected to the taxiarch Boularchos; the second considers two inscriptions, or two parts of the same inscription, from 308/7 BC about the posthumous honoring of Lycurgus, and so they are of relevance to a number of the earlier, topical chapters. In all these essays much is clearly presented, both fundamental issues of epigraphical importance and well-chosen illustrative examples, making this book, if not a handbook per se, certainly an authoritative reference work on all the epigraphic issues herein addressed.14 Except for a trio of missing spaces (15, 157, 278) and what looks to be an OCR confusion (“pedimerits,” 125), the book is...