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Three relevant articles have come to my notice since my text was sent to the printer. Brief comments must suffice. The most important of the three is a review of the Cos fragment of the Coinage Decree (Table 2.25) by
Georgiades, and Pritchett, (BCH
lxxxix (1965) 400–40).Google Scholar Professor Georgiades, a distinguished mineralogist, after rigorous examination of the Cos stone and samples from various different quarries, concludes that the marble was not Pentelic, but ‘almost certainly Parian’. Professor Pritchett argues that it is very unlikely that an Athenian mason working in Athens would use marble from Paros rather than the local Pentelic for an inscription, and that the Cos fragment should not therefore be dated by reference to inscriptions cut in Athens. This new evidence may shake the confidence of those who relied solely on the three-barred sigma of the Cos fragment for an early date, but before this argument is rejected further enquiry is needed. Is it otherwise known whether Cos imported Parian marble either before or during the fifth century? Is it likely that if the Coans were paying for the stone they would have used Parian marble rather than local limestone? Is it not possible that a mason working in a sculptor's workshop at Athens should use a spare block of Parian not needed for sculpture? More important, the inscription in Attic letters is in the Attic tradition. Why should an Athenian in Cos in the twenties (the later date for the Coinage Decree) use a form of sigma that had been obsolete in Athens for twenty years, while no other letter in his text suggests that he was old-fashioned?
Mattingly, 's re-dating of the financial decrees of Callias to 422/1 (Proceedings African Class. Ass.
iii (1964) 35–55)Google Scholar affects my main argument considerably less. I would still maintain my view (p. 86) that 434/3 is a firm date for these decrees but I would naturally wish to meet Mattingly's detailed objections. However, since I have not included these decrees in the table of securely dated inscriptions, the argument from letter-forms is not affected. A word should, however, be said about his late dating of the Praxiergidae Decree (Table 2.11). This is a notoriously puzzling script, but I agree with the mid-century dating advocated by Wilhelm and Lewis. Raubitschek is surely right in assigning DAA 299 to the same hand. The style of the fragment of relief on this dedication is a compelling argument against a date significantly later than 450.
The third article raises a more fundamental issue. In the course of a stimulating review of the state of Ancient History studies in this country, M. I. Finley has pronounced judgement (Times Lit. Suppl., 7.iv.66, p. 289). “Instead (of exploring seriously worth-while problems) at the moment there is an astonishingly bitter controversy in the scholarly journals in which, to put it a bit unkindly, the problems and issues of the (Athenian) empire have been reduced to a question of the date when the Athenian stone-cutters began to carve the letter sigma with four bars instead of three.” No one would like to be convinced that two long summers' detailed work, for which nature did not design him, has been wasted on what a sociologist might legitimately call trivialities. A brief statement is needed, though some justification has been given elsewhere for this study of letter-forms (HSCP lxvii (1963) 29 f.). The main evidence for the history of the Athenian Empire (as distinct from an analysis of its character in the period covered by Thucydides and Aristophanes) comes from a long series of inscriptions, the most important of which are not explicitly dated. From the literary evidence (if Plutarch is dismissed as unreliable) two views of the development of the empire, each coherent, are tenable: (1) that strong imperialism developed only after the death of Pericles and is to be primarily associated with the rise of Cleon and his successors; (2) that the vital steps from Alliance to Empire were taken in the early forties. It is no exaggeration to say that the answer to these questions depends primarily on whether criteria based on letter-forms (especially but not solely sigma), first formulated in the late nineteenth century, are still valid. A History of the Athenian Empire which ignored this question should have no authority. Finley has made a molehill out of a mountain.
