Hellenistic Epigram

Ancient religious sites were businesses, and they needed a revenue stream from visitors and pilgrims. The aim of this chapter is to discuss three epigrams which were arguably commissioned to publicise specific shrines, and by enhancing their attractiveness to assist in the fund-raising process. The establishment of the local and material contexts of these epigrams will suggest further hypotheses about the meaning and genesis of each of them.

The ways in which ancient shrines operated financially are well documented. Particularly when a shrine offered a special benefit – initiation, healing or oracular responses – worshippers were required to pay for access to ceremonies and to make sacrifices and thanks-offerings for services received. The regulations for the Amphiareion at Oropos, which include a number of sacred tariffs, were typical. Some temple users were native citizens, individually or in groups, who could be relied on for regular income. But, especially for major sacred sites, contributions from foreign clients and entities must have been a significant part of their income. Famous temples such as those of Delphi and Olympia, although well-established and the hosts of celebrated oracles and/or regularly recurring major games, took pains to maintain their foreign clientele through the regular dispatch of theoroi (sacred embassies) around the Greek world to announce the events they were hosting. They also canvassed literary opportunities for self-promotion. Pindar's epinicia, for example, not only boosted the victors they lauded, but also the sacred locations where the games took place; and other genres such as paeans, dithyrambs, and hyporchemata had similar publicity value. Apart from the fees paid by pilgrims, a celebrated shrine could anticipate rich gifts and deposits from kings and cities, and the practice became even more widespread as the successors of Alexander, along with lesser potentates, sought to enhance their profiles among Greeks everywhere.

If the most prestigious temples were anxious for publicity, less wellknown and new sacred sites must have courted it even more eagerly. But their means of reaching their potential clientele were more limited. This is where epigrams could come to the fore as an economic and mobile form of publicity. A well-turned epigram inscribed at a shrine could be memorised or copied by visitors and diffused; and, it might also be published in an authorial collection, and then perhaps anthologised, thus achieving greater circulation.