Open Access Serial: AIO Papers (Attic Inscriptions Online)

As this is the inaugural publication of AIO Papers, readers may welcome a word of explanation as to the purpose of the series. The primary objective of Attic Inscriptions Online is to make available English translations of Attic inscriptions, based on the most accurate and up-to-date Greek texts. The authoritative publications of the Greek texts are Inscriptiones Graecae vol. I (before 403 BC) and vol. II (403 BC - AD 267), new editions of which appear at infrequent intervals. When an inscription is included in a recently published volume of IG, such as the third edition of IG II (IG II3), the first fascicules of which appeared in 2012, identifying “the most accurate and up-to-date” Greek text can be quite straightforward. In other cases, however, there can more of an issue. It can often be addressed by including one or more references to the review of epigraphical scholarship which is published every year in the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG). However, a simple reference to IG, SEG, or occasionally to another publication, is not always sufficient. SEG, for example, records textual proposals with a degree of indiscrimination which may mislead the inexperienced user. In the process of reviewing the textual literature while preparing a translation for AIO translators may see potential for textual improvements which require explanation and justification. The first purpose of AIO Papers, therefore, is to supply a forum in which the texts underlying the translations published in AIO may be clarified.

Second, it is part of AIO’s purpose to communicate Attic inscriptions to students and researchers who may lack the background knowledge, of the languages, culture and institutions of the Greek world in general, and of Athens and Attica in particular, that is needed to understand a translated inscription in its raw state. AIO Papers will publish essays intended to equip the user of AIO with such background knowledge. AIO Papers no. 4, to appear later in 2014, will be the first of this type: a companion to the translations of the inscribed Athenian laws and decrees of 352/1-322/1 BC, texts of which were published in IG II3 1, fascicule 2.

AIO Papers will also publish other papers consistent with the objectives of AIO.
This includes translations of important articles written by scholars in languages other than English but which, in the editor’s opinion, deserve a wider circulation among an Anglophone readership. AIO Papers no. 2 and 3, translations of two papers originally published in Italian by Enrica Culasso Gastaldi, fall into this category.
[From the Preface to AIO Papers 1]

AIO Papers 8

S. D. Lambert - Two Inscribed Documents of the Athenian Empire: The Chalkis Decree and the Tribute Reassessment Decree

This paper discusses two important inscriptions for the history of the Athenian Empire, the Chalkis decree of 446/5 (or 424/3?) BC (IG I³ 40) and the tribute reassessment decree (“Thoudippos’ decree”) of 425/4 BC (IG I³ 71). Based on English translations of the most up-to-date and authoritative Greek texts, the paper sets out to explain the inscriptions in historical context, without assuming prior knowledge of ancient Greek or of the history of Athens and the Athenian Empire. To help the reader new to the study of Athenian inscriptions, the Paper includes an introduction to inscribed Athenian decrees of the fifth century BC. This paper will be useful for researchers, teachers and learners of Greek History at University level, but is also designed to help 6th-form teachers and students in the UK with the study of these two inscriptions, which are set as source material for the “Relations between Greek states and between Greek and non-Greek states, 492-404 BC” period study under the OCR specification for A-level Ancient History (H407, for first assessment in 2019; LACTOR⁴ 1.78 and 138). Note: minor corrections were incorporated on 28 June 2017. Hard copies are available through Andromeda Books.

AIO Papers 7

S. D. Lambert with a contribution by J. D. Morgan - The Last Erechtheion Building Accounts

This paper presents up-to-date texts, informed by relevant work published since 2000, of the two extant sets of fragments of the building accounts of the Erechtheion in Ionic script as a basis for translations of these accounts published simultaneously on AIO. It reviews the date of these accounts, and presents a fresh argument by John Morgan to the effect that, if certain assumptions are made, no. 2 (IG I³ 477) is datable to 405/4 BC. That would make it probably the latest extant account. Morgan also finds in this fragment a supporting argument for the position initially aired in AIO Papers 5, p. 3, that the Council's year and the archon's year were not made systematically coterminous in 407 BC, as had previously been thought, but continued to be out of step, probably until ca. 403 BC.