Graninger D. Cult and Koinon in Hellenistic Thessaly (Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy) (ENG)
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
x acknowledgments
Adele Scafuro has been a generous editor whose eye for argument and
ear for style have spared the reader much suering.
e errors that remain are my own.
While this work is dedicated to the memory of my father, who would
always press me with the refrain ‘So, how’s the book going?’ whenever
we spoke, it belongs to Tanya, who endured the lows and celebrated the
highs of this process as only a true love will.
INTRODUCTION
Cult and Koinon in Hellenistic essaly, examines the state religion of the
essalian League, ca. –. ese were decades of political transfor-
mation and economic prosperity, and there is a perceptible eusion of
cult activity throughout the region. State cults received special emphasis
and I will argue that they played a central role in the successful devel-
opment of a regional political identity that was vital for the essalian
League during these years of territorial expansion and consolidation.
ere is, for example, considerable evidence for the adoption of a com-
mon essalian calendar by new members of the League, for the estab-
lishment of new regional festivals (e.g., the Eleutheria at Larisa), and for
the elaboration or reorganization of older cults (e.g., that of Athena Itonia
at Philia). I will also demonstrate, however, that older religious traditions
of member ethne continued to be maintained in these newly ‘essalian’
territories that in some cases assumed new signicance by encouraging
the persistence of a local, cultic identity beside a regional, political ideal.
In Chapter One, ‘Histories’, I introduce the fundamental issues of polit-
ical geography and cultural identity in ancient essaly. In the Archaic
period, the two central plains of essaly were divided into four districts
(tetrads) for administrative purposes. Tetradic essaly was inhabited by
essaloi who may have exercised some form of hegemony in the Archaic
and Classical period over the neighboring territories (oen described as
perioikoi in modern scholarship) of Perrhaibia, Magnesia, and Achaia
Phthiotis. e residents of the latter were regarded as politically and cul-
turally distinct from the essaloi. Some such relationship may also have
with the ethne of the Spercheios valley further to the south (Malis, Ainis,
Oitaia, Dolopia). From this foundation, the chapter traces the local his-
tories of these regions beginning with the Archaic and Classical periods
of essalian ascendency and concluding with the formal incorporation
of the essalian League into the Roman province of Achaia in . Spe-
cial emphasis falls on politics and society from , when T. Quinctius
Flamininus reorganized the essalian League at the end of the Second
Macedonian War, to . ese years witnessed the independence and
sovereignty of many territories previously subordinate to essaly in the
Archaic and Classical period and their subsequent incorporation into the
essalian League.
introduction
Chapter Two, ‘League Sanctuaries’, explores in detail two essalian
cults—those of Athena Itonia and Zeus Eleutherios—and their relation-
ship to the development of a regional essalian identity during the Hel-
lenistic era.
1
e primary sanctuary of Athena Itonia was located near
the modern village of Philia in rural, western essaly. Although she
had received cult at this site since the early Iron Age, there is no evi-
dence that Athena Itonia was perceived as a central goddess of the es-
salian state until the second century, when her sanctuary at Philia was
reinvigorated aer the Flamininan settlement in . e decision to
elevate this particular sanctuary at this time seems to have been both
strategic and sentimental: It lay near the mythic invasion route of es-
saloi from southern Epiros and staked a strong claim to territory that in
recent decades had been the site of friction among Macedonia, Aitolia,
and Athamania. Zeus Eleutherios was, by comparison, a new cult for the
region established in Larisa aer the renewal of the essalian League
in . e foundation elevated the prestige of the new capital city of
the koinon and deliberately evoked the Hellenic patriotism of the Per-
sian Wars. e essalians, conspicuous medizers, could here be recast
as instrumental in this most recent liberation of Greek territory from for-
eign domination. e Eleutheria, a festival with athletic and cultural con-
tests, attracted participants from throughout the Greek world. A handful
of peculiar equestrian events in the program (e.g., aphippolampas, aphip-
podromas) reect local tradition and may have been open to essalians
alone.
While the ultimate function of Greek calendars was to keep time,
such mechanisms could acquire profound ideological signicance, espe-
cially at times of calendar reform. Such a process of calendar assim-
ilation and dissemination throughout the territories of the essalian
League is traced in Chapter ree, ‘e essalian Calendars’. e cal-
endar used by the essalian League aer its refoundation may have
been based on the state calendar of Larisa. e chapter charts the rel-
atively swi adoption of this calendar throughout the tetrads and then
follows its spread to the former perioikoi as they entered the League.
e unmistakable trend is toward greater uniformity. Some regions,
like Perrhaibia and Ainis, appear to adopt the league calendar rela-
tively soon aer their entrance into the League; others, like Malis and
1
For a recent study of the politics of several local sanctuaries in second-century
essaly (Apollo Kerdoios at Larisa, Athena Polias at Phthiotic ebes, and Artemis
Panachaia at Halos), cf. Freitag .
introduction
Achaia Phthiotis, retained local calendrical traditions well over century
aer becoming politically essalian.
e varying speed with which the essalian calendar was adopted
within the League’s newly gained possessionsrepresents in somemeasure
the resistance of localreligious identities to a regional politicalideal. Such
a tendency may also be reected within the Delphic Amphictiony of the
later Hellenistic period, for it is there alone that the complete Archaic-
Classical spectrum of perioikoi is visible. Chapter Four, ‘International
Religion’, explores the ideological signicance of membership in the
Delphic Amphictiony at this date and charts the institution’s history
ca. –. In , Augustus installed the new colonial foundation of
Nikopolis as the dominant member of the Amphictiony by reallocating
the votes of the essalian perioikoi.eseperioikoi were now regarded as
essalian from the perspective of Delphi as well. e chapter concludes
with a consideration of the broader network of international religion
within which the Hellenistic essalian League participated.
In ‘Conclusion and Postscript: Ainian Futures’ the argument of the
preceding chapters is summarized and reviewed: state religion was an
important apparatus of the essalian League and proved vital in the gen-
eration of a regional essalian identity. At the same time, however, cult
continued to provide a suitable venue for the contestation of this identity,
whether locally or abroad. As a coda to the work as a whole, I oer a case
study of Ainis and the subsequent religious and political history of the
Ainianes within the essalian League during the Roman Empire. e
Ainian experience illustrates remarkably well how the tension between
local and regional conceptions of ethne and koina could continue to be
played out in the language of cult.
e monograph is heavily dependent on inscriptions. In most cases,
the citation of individual editions or the quotation and translation of
passages is sucient for the purposes of the argument. In the ‘Epigraphic
Appendix’, I publish new editions of and commentaries on a group of
victor lists associated with the Eleutheria. ese inscriptions provide
crucial insight into this festival which was one of the focal points of the
state religion of the essalian League in the post-Flamininan period.
Many of these texts have not received signicant critical attention since
the publication of IG ., however, and it has proven possible to
glean more from them via autopsy.
2
2
e lists were, moreover, presented in IG in a jumble with other victor lists from
introduction
e two foundations of modern scholarship for the history of Archaic
to Roman essaly are O. Kern’s Inscriptiones essaliae (IG .)
and F. Stählin’s Das hellenische essalien.
3
Kern’s corpus, which
furnishes the epigraphic basis for all research on the region, made a
systematic analysis of essalian social and political institutions pos-
sible.
4
Stählin, a practitioner of the traditional art of historical geog-
raphy, put essalian topography on a relatively rm basis. Although
not all of the readings of the former or the identications of the latter
have been universally endorsed by later generations of scholars, their
work continues to be the source of much productive disagreement. e
early generations of archaeologists working in essaly deserve mention
here as well, especially A.S. Arvanitopoulos and N.I. Giannopoulos. Both
scholars excavated tirelessly and published prolically, and both made
important contributions to the study of essalian epigraphy, topog-
raphy, and history.
5
e inuence of two contemporary giants in the
study of ancient essaly (and much else besides) is felt throughout the
present volume: Christian Habicht and Bruno Helly. Both can be seen
to continue the work of Kern and Stählin. Habicht has tended to focus
on the politics of the Hellenistic period,
6
while Helly and the équipe
thessalienne based at the Institut Fernand Courby, Lyon, have taken a
Larisa, an arrangement which continues to produce misunderstandings in scholarship,
e.g., Miller , p. : ‘ese games [the Eleutheria] were apparently not open to
other Greeks; only citizens of Larisa participated. An inscription from about the time
of Christ lists the events and the names of their winners (IG ., ). Many of these are
standard competitions of the gymnikos agon: stadion and diaulos races, the pyx, and
the pankration, for both men and boys. ere were also competitions for trumpeters
and heralds. Competitions in literary composition and rhetoric were held, but none in
music—a signicant dierence with the Panathenaia: a torch race for boys, the apobates,
and cavalry marksmanship, as well as a cavalry charge, an infantry charge, and infantry
marksmanship and archery … It is curious that the Eleutheria did not seem to have any
of the standard horse races’. Nearly every claim in this passage is incorrect. It is hoped that
the arrangement of these inscriptions oered in the present volume will help to provide
amoresecurebasisforfuturestudyofthefestival.
3
Major advances in the study of essalian history must also be ascribed to Kern and
Stählin’s predecessors, especially H.G. Lolling, who conducted important topographic
and epigraphic research in the region. See Habicht a and Habicht b. For a
conspectus of early travelers to essaly, see IG ., pp. xxvi–xxviii.
4
To be supplemented with McDevitt , SEG,andBullÉp.
5
For a conspectus of their research, see Gallis .
6
One of Habicht’s students, H. Kramolisch, is the author of several important studies
of Hellenistic essaly, including the fundamental Die Strategen des thessalischen
Bundes vom Jahr v. Chr. bis zum Ausgang der römischen Republik.
introduction
broader chronological and more interdisciplinary view which has al-
lowed many problematic essalian institutions to come into focus.
7
Religion, however, has remained in the background. F. Hiller von
Gaertringen could comment in on the topic of essalian religion
that ‘eine klare, die Tatsachen gebende Sammlung der Kulte fehlt noch’,
and this remains largely true today.
8
While there are a number of use-
ful monographs and article-length studies focusing on individual cults,
divinities, or sanctuaries,
9
there are no grand regional studies the equal
of F. Graf’s Nordionische Kulte or M. Jost’s Sanctuaires et cultes d’Arcadie
or any of R. Parker’s fundamental studies of Attic religion. e present
work, with its focus on a subset of cults organized by ocial, state actors
in a relatively restricted chronological frame, will not ll this void. But by
drawing together strands of the political and religious history of essaly
in the Hellenistic period, it may perhaps stimulate further synthesizing
studies on essalian religion.
e central argument of the present study, that ocial state cult simul-
taneously fomented and fragmented the development of a regional es-
salian identity in the later Hellenistic period, can be seen to fall within
the general camp of identity studies. J. Hall’s important Ethnic Identity
in Greek Antiquity put the study of ethnicity in the ancient Greek world
on a far rmer methodological basis than it had previously been. Fol-
lowing Hall, the essential components of an ethnic group are now rec-
ognized to be a shared myth of descent and a shared claim on a territo-
rial homeland, and neither is explicit in the case of Hellenistic essaly.
For earlier periods, there are scattered literary references to an ethnic
eponym, essalos, from whom one may assume all ethnic essalians
were able to claim descent. Similarly, there are traditions of a essalian
migration across the Pindos. On both accounts, then, in the Archaic and
Classical period, there is good evidence that there was a group of ‘ethnic’
7
E.g., Helly on the social and political organization of Archaic essaly, and
Ducat on essalian penestai.
8
Hiller von Gaertringen , col. .
9
E.g., Daa-Nikonanou on Demeter cult with special attention to votives;
Chrysostomou – and Chrysostomou – on Zeus cult; Chrysostomou
on Ennodia cult; Hatzopoulos on ‘initiation’; Graninger on Artemis
rosia and ‘initiation’; Kilian-Dirlmeier on the votives from the sanctuary of
Athena Itonia at Philia. Philippson is problematic, attempting as it does to sketch
essalian myth and religion as a fusion of Indo-European and indigenous, Aegean
elements. Rakatsanis and Tziaphalias and Rakatsanis and Tziaphalias are
expanded catalogues of cults.
introduction
essalians, and it is likely that the territory inhabited by this group of
ethnic essalians was coterminous with that commanded by the es-
salian League. As essaly and the territories of the former essalian
perioikoi began to cycle out of the Macedonian and Aitolian orbit in the
later Hellenistic period, the dynamic between the ethnic group and the
political collective had shied. e essalian League now commanded
considerably greater territory than that inhabited by the ethnic es-
salians of the Archaic and Classical period, and while there are indica-
tions that those living within the territories of this renewed, expanding
koinon became politically essalian, some may have retained their ear-
lier, perioikic ethnicities.
e present study, with its emphasis on identities grounded in cult,
focuses rather on what Hall terms secondary indicia of ethnicity, that
class of attributes which may very well attend upon an ethnic group, but
need not, and which may be present among other groups that were not
properly ethnic. While such indicia may indeed appear marginal and sec-
ondary from the perspective of the formal study of ethnicity, they are
compelling objects of research in their own right. It is now generally
accepted that there were in eect dierent types of identity in antiquity to
which individuals could simultaneously subscribe with no inherent con-
tradiction. is recognition of so-called ‘tiered’ identity has been a pro-
ductive development in recent scholarship and has opened up new and
potentially fruitful areas of inquiry.
10
In the case of later Hellenistic es-
saly, membership in the essalian League did not translate into mem-
bership in the essalian ethnos, for many individually distinct ethne par-
ticipated in the essalian koinon. It is the relationship of these two tiers
of identity in the language and practice of cult that forms the central focus
of this work. Such questions have tended to be asked of the Early Iron and
Archaic periods, but they are just as appropriate in later periods, for these
dynamics continued to inuence group formation despite the emergence
of large territorial empires like those of the Diadochoi and their epigones
or Rome.
10
Cf. the programmatic treatment in Morgan , passim,especiallyp.:‘Farfrom
being distinct and alternative forms of state, poleis and ethne were thus tiers of identity
withwhich communitiescould identifywith varying enthusiasm andmotivation at dier-
ent times. And to these may be added extra-community class or interestbonds … Under-
standing the chronological development of, and balance between, oen highly localized
tiers of place and broader notions of people and/or geography in the construction of polit-
ical identities is a particularly important challenge’.
chapter one
THESSALIAN HISTORIES
‘And so it comes to pass, as I have said
before, that the boundaries and the
political organizations of tribes and
places are always undergoing changes’.
1
Introduction
e Hellenistic history of essaly captures in microcosm the tensions
and paradoxes which characterize the broader experience of the region.
A rst-tier power in northern Greece throughout much of the Archaic
and Classical periods, essaly had probably exercised some form of
hegemony over the neighboring territories (perioikoi)ofPerrhaibiatothe
north, Magnesia to the east, and Achaia Phthiotis to the southeast. Such
control also periodically extended further south to Malis, Ainis, Dolopia,
and Oitaia in the Spercheios valley. Philip II of Macedon established
a controlling interest in essaly, however, and throughout the early
Hellenistic period, essaly and her former perioikoi endured a series
of new rulers, at times Macedonian, at times Aitolian. At the conclusion
of the Second Macedonian War in , Rome imposed a reorganization
of essaly as a koinon,or‘federalleague’,andseemstohavenurtured
its development so that it might serve as a potential counterweight to the
remaining major hegemonic powers of central and northern Greece—the
kingdom of Macedon and the Aitolian League. Perrhaibia and Magnesia
were similarly reorganized in , and Ainis and Oitaia soon followed,
most probably at the conclusion of the ird Macedonian War in .
e perioikoi had gained an autonomy not known for several centuries.
Overthecourseofthenextyears,however,mostofthesenewly
1
Str. .., trans. Jones: οτω δ συμβανει τος ρους κα τς συντξεις τ ν τε
!"ν ν κα τ ν τ#πων %λλττεσ"αι %ε
, κα"περ ε'πομεν. Cf. Str. ..; ..; ..;
...