Inscriptions as Honors and the Athenian Epigraphic Habit

Abstract

This paper argues that the great number of public inscriptions produced in Classical Athens is not directly related to Athens’ precocious democracy and a democratic sense of what the citizen needed to know, but rather to a precocious Athenian culture of honoring, first the gods, then foreign benefactors, and then Athenian citizens individually and as groups. Honoring gods was a habit the Athenians shared with others, but the culture of honoring humans on stone was the historically contingent result of events in Athenian history, specifically maritime empire and then the reaction to the oligarchies of 411-10 and 404-403 BC.