Inscriptions du sanctuaire de la Mère des Dieux autochtone de Leukopétra (Macédoine) (review)

The Macedonian sanctuary of the Autochthonous Mother of the Gods at Leukopetra, near Beroia, was discovered by earth-moving equipment and emergency excavation in 1965, when a segment of the new national highway was being built. Although the site itself has never been fully excavated, many architectural pieces, four altars, three offering tables, stelai, and plaques were rescued and taken to the Beroia Museum. The original excavator, Photias Petsas, helped recently by a younger generation of accomplished epigraphists, has labored over the years and through many vicissitudes to publish these finds. For this was not merely a sanctuary, not merely a small marble temple, but a sanctuary and temple covered with inscriptions, most of them (161 of 170 complete enough to categorize) recording the cession or consecration of slaves or children to the service of the goddess. Many of the inscriptions (127 of 194) are virtually complete and dated by local and imperial era, the earliest from A.D. 141-42 (?), the latest from A.D. 313.

This handsomely produced and meticulously edited volume therefore publishes a corpus of material that contributes to a number of important topics: to the debate over the legal and actual status of the persons ceded to gods here and elsewhere; to the administration and health of a small sanctuary in the territory of a larger city in Roman Macedonia; and to the religious beliefs that may have undergirded all of the above. It also provides evidence of the erratic but apparent diffusion of Roman legal status, legal concepts, and legal practices even in the backcountry of a larger city, and thereby also sheds interesting light on what happens before and after the Constitutio Antoniniana in one specific place. All this should interest historians of Greece under the Empire, or students of the phenomenon of "Romanization," or historians of Greece keen to track continuity and change in the practices of sanctuaries and slaves.

The volume itself is a pleasure to use. The lengthy introduction covers the mythical and actual history of the area (20-23); the geographical and social backgrounds of the dedicators (23-28); the goddess, her multiple names, and her financial dealings (28-33); the legal status of the consecrated (33-60, with a clear summary of a hundred-year-old controversy); onomastics (61-63); and language (63-73)--the Lefkopetra inscriptions constitute a "unique dossier" (63) for how Greek was spoken for centuries during the High Empire. How each lemma is to be laid out is then discussed (74), and the architectural and other pieces described (75-78); for the last, the drawings (figs. 37-51) are indispensable. All that is missing is a discussion of letter forms, itself noted as reserved for further study by J. Touratsoglou (75).

The 194 inscriptions (plus five incerta) are clearly presented, restored when need be, translated, and discussed; all but three (nos. 79, 191, and 193) have pictures as well. Because the inscriptions themselves are also very (if not uniformly) formulaic, their readings seem relatively straightforward to me and I can make no suggestions for corrections in what seem to me to be well-read and well-restored texts except to suggest that numbers 136 and 160 belong to the same monument--a suggestion in which I have been anticipated by Marijana Ricl, who was kind enough to send me an article (forthcoming in Tyche 16, 2001) in which she discusses these inscriptions and suggests different supplements or explanations in only thirteen other cases (nos. 5, 26, 45, 46, 51, 53, 58, 63, 78, 90, 93, 115, and 150). In short, these inscriptions have been published by people who know what they are doing, and with all the proper aids and...