IF FREQUENT RECOURSE to the courts was a feature of life in ancient Athens, apparently so too was the feeling that the machinery of the law would not necessarily produce the desired result without one's own intervention into its working. Evidence is the use of the lead curse tablet against opponents at law.1 Some twenty-five Attic curse tablets, dating in the late 5th and the 4th centuries
B.C.E., are recognizable as being intended to influence the outcome of trials, for there are antidikoi ("opponents"), synegoroi ("assisting speakers"), and the like among their intended victims.2 One such tablet (Ill. 4), which curses synegoroi, was among several lead curse tablets (the others unfortunately too damaged to yield texts) found in 1972 among objects of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.E. in a dump fill in a well beside the Panathenaic Way at the crossroads in front of the Royal Stoa.3 The text consists of a list of names of six intended victims in the nominative case, all but one (who is qualified as a synegoros) with his father's name in the genitive; there follows a generalizing phrase in the accusative case but no verb; 4th- and possibly 5th-century parallels exist for this arrangement of nominatives plus accusatives in curse texts.4 The text is written retrograde, no doubt to throw the intended victims' plans into reverse; the inscriber's discomfort with this type of writing is evident.
Retrograde curse texts are rare in Attica, the practice of merely reversing spelling (e.g. EAIAAAK for KAAAIAE) being much commoner.5 Most curse texts with reversed spelling seem to be of
1 For an introduction to the study of lead curse tablets, see K. Preisendanz, "Fluchtafel (Defixion)," RAC VIII, cols. 1-24, Stuttgart 1972. There are two corpora of curse tablets, Wiunsch 1897 and Audollent 1904. Greek tablets that have appeared more recently are listed inJordan 1985, pp. 151-197.
2 See Wunsch 1987, index IV, and Audollent 1904, index IIB3, s.wvv. k8xa-o(rt , ~LAppuq, txrop, oUv8txos, auv/5yopoq.
Further Attic examples includeJordan 1985,6,9, 19,42, and 48. C. A. Faraone ("Aeschylus' 5tvo4 Uatop.to [Eumwn. 306]
and Attic Judicial Tablets," JHS 105, 1985, pp. 150-154) argues that Aischylos' account of the Furies' use of a hymn to bind Orestes' wits before his trial on the Areopagos is an early attestation (458 B.C.E.) of magical coercion to ensure the outcome of litigation.
3 For the excavation of the well (J 5:1), see Shear 1973, pp. 360-369. Some of the fill in the well consisted of objects discarded from a nearby rectangular shrine whose cult was female.
H. A. Thompson adds per itt.: "It should be pointed out that the well belongs with the shrine (which I continue to believe was in all probability the Leokorion). This is shown by the relationship of peribolos and well on the plan as well as by the great number of offerings from the shrine that were found in the well. But in addition to serving the shrine, the well served also as a place for discarding material relevant to other aspects of religious or civic life, notably the tablets and tokens from the Hipparcheion and the great number of loom-weights which, I venture to suggest, are to be related somehow to the wearing of Athena's peplos done under the authority of the Basileus."
4 Wunsch 1897, nos. 38 and 39 (5th or 4th century); Jordan 1985, no. 19 (Attica, early 4th century?); Audollent 1904, nos. 60 and 61 (Attica, 4th century); Jordan 1985, no. 171 (Olbia, no published date, but letter forms suggest 4th century).
5 I know of only two other Attic examples of curse tablets inscribed retrograde, Wunsch 1897, nos. 26 (six lines, retrograde throughout, 5th or 4th century) and 33 (five lines, parts of two retrograde, 4th century). For examples of reversed spelling, see Wunsch 1897, index VE, s.wv. "Litterarum ordo a dextra incipit." It happens that the Agora excavations have yielded a black-glazed lamp of the 4th century (see M. Lang, Graffiti and Dipnti [The Athenian Agora XXI], Princeton 1976, no. C 32) with six men's names, spelled backwards, inscribed on its nozzle. Its purpose, as Lang speculates, was no doubt magical; cf. D. Jordan, Rev. of M. Lang, Graffiti and Dipinti in ArchNews 7, 1978 [pp.92-94], p.94.
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ILL. 4. Curse tablet
the 4th century. Taken together, the aim, the context, the syntax, and the reversed spelling of the tablet suggest a 4th-century date.
CATALOGUE
C 1 (IL 1695) Lead curse tablet Ill. 4 Dump fill in well in front of Royal Stoa.
4th century.
H. 0.0615; W. 0.0905.
Written retrograde:
1 M?vrxp(T7)q K[p&-]
2 TrtTog, KaXXtakpoaxogq 3 IIauaoatp&:ou,
4 NLx6oapacogq Fvt- 5 (povog,
6 1eoxXj(<) auvo oOp- 7 os, A6rT6Xuxoq 'EtttXU- 8 xou, TLi6aorpaTxo 'Ie- 9 poxXel?ou, xal nt&v- 10 rcag Touq oauvqy6pouq To'u 11 Mevexpo&oug.
Menekrates son of K[ra]tes, Kallistratos son of Pausistratos, Nikostratos son of Gniphon, Theokles synegoros, Autolykos son of Epilykos, Timostratos son of Hierokleides, and all the synegoroi of Menekrates.
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Presumably, Menekrates was the principal in the lawsuit, and all the other men served as his synegoroi. None of the men is identifiable with any Athenian on record, although Timostratos son of Hierokleides (PA 7463) may be the father or the son of a Hierokleides son of Timostratos who proposed two honorific decrees, IG 112 206 and 209, in 349/8 B.C.E.
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KT.IROTERION
FRAGMENTS OF KLEROTERIA found in excavations in The Athenian Agora were the subject of an unfinished study by Sterling Dow. An introduction to the form and function of the kleroterion precedes testimonia 324-333 in this book.
CATALOGUE
A fragment of a kleroterion came to light in 1986 in excavations conducted by the Greek Archaeo- logical Service. The piece, which was subsequently kept in the storeroom within the Library of Hadrian, had at the time of finding been used in the building of the "post-Herulian" wall near the so-called Diogeneion. I thank Alkestis Choremi, Archaeologist, for informing me of this find, for sending me a photograph, and for giving me valuable assistance in my study of the stone at first hand. I thank the A' 'EypopetL IHpotoaoptxov xal KXaitx5v 'ApXaLto:twv of the Akropolis for permission to describe it here.
K 1 (IIA 367) Kleroterion fragment PI. 6 Fragment as whole: H. 0.193; W. 0.18; max. p. Th.
0.11.
Preserved face: H. 0.123; W. 0.145.
Vertical distance between slots, as measured on center:
0.215.
Distance between columns of slots: 0.035.
Slots: H. (at face) 0.009; L. 0.035; Depth 0.02.
Pentelic marble, broken all around except for an area of the face which preserves in three columns three complete slots for pinakia and traces of eleven others. The three complete slots are in the middle column of the three.
Dimensions, spacing, and workmanship of the slots, when compared with those of nine kleroteria in Athens (namely, Dow 1937, nos. II-VI, VIII-XI), show that the
fragment under discussion was never a part of any of those nine. The measurements do not coincide, and the workmanship is less careful than that in all others examined, except perhaps for Dow's no. II. The slots were fashioned by drilling two shallow holes ca. 0.035 m.
apart and then chipping out the marble between. Then a second pair of holes was drilled in the shallow slot, a little closer together, and then a third pair, a little closer again, with the result that in one measurable case the length of the slot at bottom is less than half what it is at the face.
Of the kleroteria published by Dow, all could have been designed for use in dikasteria. Not enough of the present kleroterion is preserved to recommend a par- ticular application.
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PINAKIA
IN THE PRESENT ESSAY "pinakion" designates a small inscribed plaque of bronze or boxwood that Athenians (and others)' used in various allotments during the 4th century B.C.E. A character- istic pinakion was inscribed with the owner's name, his father's name, and his demotic. The letters were either incised or punched. Separate and distinct from these letters, a single letter, one of the first ten of the Attic-Ionic alphabet (A, B, F, A, E, Z, H, e, I, K), served to designate dikastic section.
One or more seals might, in addition, be stamped into the metal. These seals might show an owl, an Athena head, or a gorgoneion. Pinakia tend to measure ca. 0.11 m. in length, 0.02 m. in width, and from 0.0015 to 0.0025 m. in thickness, depending partly on the number of times one owner's name had been erased and a new owner's name inscribed in its place. Between ca. 348 B.C.E. and 330-326 B.C.E., that is, between the time of Demosthenes 39.10-12 and Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia, Athenians changed from bronze to boxwood for their dikastic pinakia. No example, needless to say, of a boxwood pinakion has survived. The datum, however, is helpful because it establishes a terminus ante quem for bronze pinakia, whose use in the first half of the 4th century B.C.E. is also indicated by the shapes of their inscribed letters.
By size and shape, the pinakia (both bronze and boxwood) were fit for insertion into slots of an allotment machine, or kleroterion. Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 63-65 [249]) describes in detail the procedure by which dikasts were allotted to service on a court day.2 In a simple allotment, however, a number of pinakia could be shaken up in a receptacle from which one or more were taken at random. See, for instance, the allotments described by Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 65 and 69).
Since not all such pinakia carry a dikastic section letter, it may be that not all were used in dikastic allotments. Only those that have such section letters conform with Aristotle's description of allotment procedures at the dikasteria. The pinakia that do not carry a section letter could have been used in any of the numerous other allotments that the Athenian system of administration made necessary. The use of pinakia for allotment in the boule can be envisioned from Aristotle's description at Ath. Pol. 44.2: "And whenever the prytaneis bring together the boule or the demos this man (epistates of the prytaneis) allots the nine proedroi, one from each tribe except that holding the prytany, and again from these nine, one epistates, and he hands over the agenda to them."
There is explicit testimony, for instance, that bronze pinakia were used in allotments to the boule and to archonships (Demosthenes 39.10-12).
The complete and exhaustive study of all known Athenian pinakia by John H. Kroll (1972) makes it unnecessary here to go into detailed examination of these pieces and the significance of their various characteristics for our understanding of their use. They are included here to give a complete picture of dikastic operations in the Agora.
1 See "After 322 B.C.E.," pp. 41-42 above.
2 See Dow 1937, pp. 198-215; idem 1939, pp. 1-34; idem, RE Supplement VII, 1940, cols. 322-328, s.v. Kleroterion;
andJ. D. Bishop, "Cleroterium," JHS 90, 1970, pp. 1-14. A description of this allotment is given in "Three Court Days," pp. 32-34, 37 above.
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Twenty-three of the twenty-four pinakia and fragments catalogued below3 were found in the Agora, more scattered over the whole area than were other sorts of dikastic equipment. Pinakia, since they were personal possessions, moved about with their owners, and so pinakia have also been found outside the Agora, especially in graves, far more frequently than other dikastic material.4
Pinakia with section letters were obviously designed for use in the kleroteria, where the columns of slots were marked by section letters and a whole row could be allotted or excluded by a single
ball.otting a group or groups
of men to achieve equal representation from a number of different sections of the population.
This "mechanization" was ideal for allotting courts ranging in size from 200 up, from ten roughly equal sections of potential dikasts, but would only have been cumbersome where the desired result was proportional representation from groups of different sizes.5 Or, since pinakia seem to have been designed for use in a kleroterion, allotments that did not require the use of that specialized equipment might well have been carried out more simply with black and white beans in ajar from which individuals themselves drew.
Many pinakia have other kinds of stamping in addition to the section letter. According to an older view,6 the different stamps represented various offices, so that as a result, a man's pinakion served as a kind of pocket curriculum vitae. But there are too few varieties of stamps to represent the multiplicity of offices open to Athenian citizens, and there seems to be no criterion by which some offices should be so denoted and others not. Furthermore, the fact that some of the stamps were impressed before the name was inscribed and others were certainly added later has now been established by Kroll, who was able to distinguish between primary and secondary seals on the basis of relative location, symmetry, orientation, and form.7 His conclusions about their respective functions are perhaps more open to question, namely, that the (primary) triobol seal, representing as it does the dikast's daily stipend, appropriately authenticates dikastic pinakia, while the (primary) gorgoneion seal merely certifies citizenship; and that the secondary seals were validating stamps applied to the pinakia of all dikasts registered at a particular time. It seems certain that the primary seals give original certification and the secondary seals represent some kind of renewal, but the differentiation between dikastic and nondikastic pinakia depends in large part on the hypothesis that there was an annual allotment of 6,000 dikasts, as a result of which those citizens who were not reallotted had
3 The twenty-fourth (P 24) was catalogued with Agora material when it was brought in from a cremation burial near Daphni.
4 See Kroll 1972, pp. 9-11.
5 For example, in the allotment of a tribal contingent to the boule, where the demes were represented according to their population, the allotment had to be moe discriminating. Thus Kroll's description (1972, pp. 92-94) of the use of dikastic section letters and kleroteria in the allotment of offices seems not to take into account the need for deme distribution to which Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 62.1) testifies for a whole group of offices or boards for some not very distant earlier period and for the bouleutai and phrouroi continuing into his own time. Kroll's interpretation of his Class III and Class IV pinakia as nondikastic requires him to suggest a nondikastic use for the sections. There remains some doubt, however, both as to the necessity of their being nondikastic and as to the likelihood of annual reallotment to achieve a standing body of 6,000 dikasts and of an annual reissue of tickets, with newly allotted dikasts turning in nondikastic pinakia and former dikasts excluded by the lot exchanging dikastic pinakia for nondikastic. If so much care was to be taken to insure a properly limited and authenticated pool of dikasts, there would have to have been strict requirements about the turning in of "last year's" pinakia. And if those controls were so lax as to allow so many Athenians to take their pinakia into the next world, there was nothing to prevent a live Athenian keeping his dikastic pinakion and using it year after year without benefit of reallotment.
6 T. Teusch, De sortitione iudicum apud Athenienses, Gottingen 1894, pp. 54-58, cited by Lipsius 1905-1915, p. 150, note 50 and Hommel 1927, p. 42.
7 Kroll 1972, pp. 41-59.
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to exchange dikastic pinakia for nondikastic, and vice versa. It may be that differences in the primary seals resulted from nothing more significant than different issuing authorities (like mint marks) or from changes of symbols over a period of years. Since Kroll has clearly determined that his latest class of pinakia exhibits no seals at all, their function was not essential to the dikastic allotment as described by Aristotle.8
Turning to what is, at least in origin, the specifically dikastic part of the pinakia, one should note that on some of these the section letter is stamped and on others it is incised. Kroll argues9 that the difference was chronological, with the stamped letters having been applied to the earlier pinakia before the names were inscribed and the incised section letters added to later pinakia along with the owners' names and "regularly changed with each change of name." Mode of application, however, is not a sound basis for chronological distinctions. Compare the bronze ballots: some have a stamped letter while others have a large letter in relief (see pp. 87-88 below), and both kinds were contemporary (see pp. 82-83 below).
CATALOGUE
The pinakia are arranged as follows: (1) alphabetically by names (of last use) where the first part is preserved; (2) ends of names; (3) middles of names. Findspots are generally indicated by the square or squares of the Agora grid (e.g., 116 for P 1), with a context date where available; for dated deposits that are also groups, the grid designation is followed by the number of the deposit (e.g., B 19:14 for P 13) within the square. All letters are incised, except where othere otherwise indicated. All dates are B.C.E.
See Kroll 1972 for a full treatment of earlier uses and possible readings.
P 1 (B 56) Fragment of pinakion PI. 7 Kroll, no. 45, Class III.
I16.
P.L. 0.032; W. 0.023; Th. 0.0013; L.H. 0.006-0.008.
Only left end preserved, with upper left corner broken away.
Earlier use(s): almost completely erased gorgoneion stamp (0.01 m. in diameter) at lower left; partially erased section letter, A, was incised at upper left; traces only of other erased letters.
Last use: 'App[- -- ] KL[xLvve6U]
The absence of a section letter at the left end (in the last use) suggests either that this pinakion was like IG II2 1869 (Kroll, no. 38) in having its section letter at the right end or that it should be compared to IG II2 1899 (Kroll, no. 182), which may have had no section letter at all.
P 2 (B 822) Fragment of pinakion PI. 7
Earlier use(s): erasure evidenced by thinness and un- even edges (from hammering).
Last use: ATro(piv7r : 4OXt[---]
K7pLttEU6q
Perhaps an ancestor of Demophanes of Kephisia, who appears in a prytany list of ca. 210 (IG II2 913, line 17).
For the absence of the section letter, see P 1.
P 3 (B 242) Fragment of pinakion PI. 7 Kroll, no. 32, Class III.
D9.
P.L. 0.063; W. 0.024; Th. 0.002; L.H. 0.006-0.008.
Broken at right.
Earlier use: traces of letters in second line: . . EIO, partially erased gorgoneion stamp at lower left.
8 1972, pp. 63-68, 104. If it is objected that Aristotle writes of boxwood pinakia, of which no material remains exist, one may answer that it is hard to imagine indelible stamps on wooden pinakia.
9 1972,pp.36-40.
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Last use: E096a[Xoq]
PL. 0.059; W. 0.021; Th. 0.0015; L.H. 0.004-0.009.
Broken at right.
Section letters of all three uses are incised in center of left end.
First use: N[---]
r
AX(apv[eco]
I
For the last name, see IG II2 2423, line 17, where 'Intto vac. is listed with other men from Phaleron. For Anti- chares, see IG II2 1926, line 101, where an Antichares Acharneus appears as diaitetes in 325/4. But a bronze pinakion could not have been reused at that date, since pinakia were then of boxwood. We must either imagine that this Antichares gave up his pinakion at an earlier date to be reused by Hippo- - or that the pinakion belonged to his eponymous uncle in the second quarter of the century.
P 5 (B 974) Pinakion PI. 7
The section letter (?) is quite uncertain.
P 6 (B 1212) Fragment of pinakion
Two pieces preserve most of the pinakion; that they belong together is almost certain, since they were found in the same place on the same day.
Earlier use: remains of erased gorgoneion stamp at right center.
Later use: P[L]Xox[U]]8nr;
K[p]w(7 tl8%)
Upper left corner is damaged, but even so there can have been no section letter; see P 1. Kroll reads AXw(7texqOev), arguing from the break along the diag- onal of the lambda, but the kappa is clear and the lambda line may belong to the earlier use.
P9 (B1352) Pinakion P1.7
Kroll, no. 96, Class V.
I5.
L. 0.139; W. 0.021-0.025; Th. 0.0025.
Earlier uses: remains of punched-letter name and de- motic; traces of three incised section letters (successively gamma, kappa, and beta); three stamps (triobol at lower left, gorgoneion at right, double owl at lower right).
Next to last use: KttXov[l8]r}
rapyt( ) Last use: IX6Fvrnorog
K
'IxapL?eu
Section letters in the last two uses stamped.
P 10 (B 111) Fragment of pinakion P1. 7
P 10 (B 111) Fragment of pinakion P1. 7