1Since 2000 I have been working on a volume in the series Inscriptiones Graecae, which will include all the inscribed state laws and decrees of Lykourgan Athens. Drafts of the lemmata are complete and revisions are in progress. In the meantime I have published a series of prolegomena. Their purpose is primarily epigraphical, but not exclusively so, and they may be helpful to historians seeking to orientate themselves in this material2. I mention this because in part it explains why inscriptions will figure rather prominently in this paper. I also think, however, that there are good methodological reasons for a focus on the inscribed laws and decrees of the polis when one is seeking to address questions about developments in “the political” in Lykourgan Athens. For the laws passed by Athenian citizens sitting as nomothetai and the decrees passed by Athenian citizens sitting as the Assembly, or – in committee as it were – as the Council, supply an insight of unique quality into the preoccupations and priorities of the city at this period. The record is of course selective: not all laws and decrees were inscribed; those which were inscribed were those to which the majority of Athenians present and voting for the measure in question on the day decided to give special significance by transforming them into enduring monumental form, in most cases by erecting them in the central, sacred space of the city, the acropolis – those which carried meanings and messages that the citizens especially wished to convey to and about themselves, to and about non-citizens and outsiders and to and about the gods. Not all survive, but the number that do – about 270 from the period 352-322 – is a large enough and probably a random enough sample to be treated for our purposes as representative.

2The question, therefore, that I propose to address in this paper is: what changes are observable in Lykourgan Athens in the political priorities and preoccupations of the Athenians as reflected in the laws and decrees which they inscribed at this period? And I shall address the question at a reasonably high level of generality, not looking so much at the specific provisions and circumstances of individual decrees, which inevitably show great variability from case to case, but at the shape of the overall picture: at changes in the types of messages the Athenians were seeking to project, changes which give an insight into developments in the city’s political priorities and identity. I shall argue that a key factor running through several of these developments is a strengthening of the emphasis given to the city’s dialogue with its own past: an increasing sense of decline in comparison to that past and a concomitant desire to connect with and learn from it.

Honorific decrees

3The large majority of inscribed decrees at this and all periods were honorific, and such decrees had a rather specific purpose, which is revealed to us by the so-called hortatory intention clauses that begin to appear in them in the 340s. The precise wording varies, but in essence these are clauses which state that the purpose of passing the decree – sometimes explicitly the purpose of inscribing the decree – is, by honouring those who have displayed philotimia towards the city, to encourage the future display of philotimia towards the city by the honorand and/or others in the expectation that they will receive similar honours3. In other words the decrees not only recognise past services to the city, they are an attempt to manipulate future behaviour and to embrace as many as possible in the web of beneficent reciprocal exchange binding Athens to individuals and communities throughout the Greek world.

4Until the 340s inscribed decrees of this type nearly always honoured foreigners; it was only in the 340s that the Athenians began regularly to inscribe decrees honouring their own fellow-citizens, not, for the most part, prominent generals and leading politicians, but ordinary Athenian officials: state secretaries, priests, superintendents of the water supply, members of the Council, that sort of thing4. This development is, I think, best understood in conjunction with the emergence of the hortatory intention clauses at precisely the same time: essentially these inscriptions are levers designed to make ordinary Athenian officials behave well; and why is there a perceived need for this specifically in the 340s? Because, I suggest, it is in the 340s that the Athenians are gripped by an intensified sense of the decline of their polis, decline in comparison with the glory days of the fifth century, decline in the face of the rise of Macedon, and by an acute sense that the performance of the polis is crucially dependent on the performance of its officials. It is part of the same urgent sense of the need to encourage and maintain standards in public life which is also detectable, for example, in the success of Aeschines’ case against Timarchos in 346, and which, after Chaironeia, produced the frenetic reforming zeal of Lykourgos and his likeminded colleagues across the range of “the political”, from finance to religion to military education, a movement in which the recognition and award of outstanding contributions to the well-being of the polis by individuals was a key weapon in the reformer’s armoury, a “carrot” to complement the “sticks” wielded against those who failed to make the grade, by Aeschines in the Timarchos case, and later most famously in several cases prosecuted by Lykourgos5. Philotimia was a problematic (aristocratic/elitist/contention-encouraging) virtue which the city was notably reluctant to recognise formally in the language and practice of its decrees before the 340s6, and in the longer perspective the introduction of inscribed decrees honouring Athenian citizens marks a significant staging post on the road from the democratic collectivism of the high classical polis to the emphasis and reliance on individual euergetism which is such a marked feature of hellenistic political culture7. At first the decrees are a little reticent about the detail of the financial contributions made by citizen honorands, though such contributions are often implied8; later hellenistic decrees tend to be more explicit9.

Foreign relations

5Chaironeia marked a watershed in Athenian external relations, as the city was transformed from proud leader of the Second Athenian League to subordinate member of the panhellenic alliance led by Philip of Macedon. This too occasioned a profound political shift which is observable in the epigraphic record. Treaties are one of the major categories of inscribed Athenian decree. There are eight treaties (or similar) in the Athenian epigraphical record of the decade and a half before Chaironeia, most of them bilateral. In the equivalent post-Chaironeia period, the years between Chaironeia and the death of Alexander, there are no bilateral treaties involving Athens and another city. Only two inscribed treaties from this period of Athenian history are extant: the fragments of the Peace of Corinth itself10 and a very fragmentary treaty with Alexander about the supply of troops on campaign11: both are Athenian copies of multilateral agreements of the Hellenic League under Macedonian leadership. This epigraphical silence speaks eloquently of the extent to which Athens’ international freedom of manoeuvre was constrained in the years after Chaironeia. Here we have a whole sphere of “the political” – a central feature of the “freedom and autonomy” to which, to use the contemporary diplomatic language, every Greek polis aspired, namely the power to make and break treaties, from which Athens seems now to have been excluded12.

6A comparable shift is detectable in the inscribed decrees honouring foreigners. There was less of a problem with the “political correctness” of encouraging philotimia when it came to these decrees: foreigners were outsiders to the Athenian polity; inscribing decrees for them was not relevant to issues of how citizens should treat each other, and they had always been the most common type of inscribed decree. These decrees too, however, witness the introduction of explicit references to philotimia and of hortatory intention clauses in the 340s, and this makes them more transparently instruments of foreign policy, levers which could be pulled to encourage outsiders to serve Athenian interests, a form of monumentalised diplomacy.

7In addition to decrees honouring individual foreigners, in the fourth century before Chaironeia Athens also passed decrees honouring whole cities – usually but not always members of the Second Athenian League. Directed at states rather than individuals, such decrees can be seen as instruments of inter-state diplomacy, more comparable in this sense to treaties than to decrees honouring individuals; and a corollary of Athens’ withdrawal from bilateral treaty-making after Chaironeia was that she also withdrew from inscribing decrees honouring whole cities: no such decree is datable to the period between Chaironeia and the Lamian War13.

8This withdrawal from formal interstate diplomacy did not, of course, mean a complete withdrawal from active participation in foreign relations. The city continued busy and active in pursuing her interests on the international scene. The standard narrative account of Athenian history at this period, based primarily on literary sources (Diodoros, Plutarch, the orators) in which the exploits of Philip and Alexander take centre stage after 338, shows this clearly enough, though the general impression those sources convey is more of a re-active policy, whether to Philip and Alexander themselves or to the anti-Macedonian initiatives of Thebes, of an Agis or a Harpalos, or to the threat to the cleruchy on Samos posed by Alexander’s exiles decree, than a pro-active one14. A striking example of an independent initiative documented in the epigraphical record is the colony which Athens sent to the Adriatic in 325/4, an initiative for which our sole evidence is the decree preserved in the naval lists, Rhodes & Osborne 2007, n^o 100, discussed in this volume by Ober. Our most abundant epigraphical evidence for the development of Athenian foreign relations at this period, however, is the large corpus of inscribed, self-standing, Athenian decrees honouring individual foreigners. The statistics are not very firm or decisive, but the number of such decrees certainly shows no decline after Chaironeia and may show a slight increase over the preceding period15. In the absence of bilateral interstate relations, it was these decrees that now carried the thrust and burden of the formal side of Athens’ foreign relations. What do they tell us about the spheres of foreign policy to which Athens was giving priority between Chaironeia and the Lamian War and how did these differ from what went before? What policy levers was she trying to pull? To what ends was she seeking to direct her influence? The large majority of decrees honouring foreigners at this period fall into three broad categories: unsurprisingly perhaps, easily the most numerous are decrees which, directly or indirectly, concern relations with Macedon. Unsurprisingly too they display a shift of direction after Chaironeia: before it such decrees are aimed at encouraging and supporting enemies of Philip16, while those aimed at maintaining good relations with the Macedonian regime and its friends put in an appearance only in the years after the battle17. Interestingly, however, Athens does not hesitate to inscribe decrees after Chaironeia which show her giving a warm welcome to enemies of Philip who had supported Athens but were now in exile from their home cities18. The importance of sending to the world (and to itself, no doubt) the message that Athens was loyal to friends in adversity could override, it seems, the danger that the news of such loyalty might not be welcome to the new Hegemon of Greece; and later in the 30s and early 20s there are other decrees which arguably express muted or suppressed resistance19, or an aspiration to resist20.

9The other two main categories of decree honouring foreigners are in a sense more interesting when it comes to thinking about significant shifts in Athens’ political priorities, for both are new after Chaironeia and, in their preoccupations and implications, they both show the way forward: they are characteristically hellenistic.

Grain supply

10The first of these is decrees honouring grain traders. A preoccupation with grain supply was, of course, nothing new for Athens: it was natural in a populous city which was not endowed with the qualities of land and climate necessary to produce significant quantities of bread-wheat; it can be traced as a major preoccupation throughout the classical period and it was a fixed item on the agenda of the Assembly. Nor is the topic new to Athenian inscriptions after Chaironeia. In the fourth century one of Athens’ most important diplomatic relations was with the rulers of the kingdom of the Bosporos, from which, so Demosthenes claims in Against Leptines, Athens imported more grain than from all other sources combined21; and there was a series of inscribed decrees honouring these rulers before 338, including a much anthologised decree for the sons of Leukon, shortly after they had succeeded their father in 347/622. We now also have the striking grain tax law of 374/3, which casts a bright ray of light on the importance for Athens of the supply of grain from her Aegean island possessions, Lemnos, Imbros and Skyros23. What is new, however, after Chaironeia, is that Athens begins systematically and quite frequently to inscribe decrees honouring individual foreign grain traders, men who were actually involved in shipping grain around the Mediterranean24. What are we to make of this shift? As the hortatory intention clauses again make clear, the main object of the exercise was to encourage traders to ship their grain to Athens rather than somewhere else. To an extent this is a product of circumstances specific to the grain supply in the 30s and 20s: there is good evidence for shortages in Greece as a whole at this period, whether caused by crop failures or disruption and diversion of supply to meet Macedonian priorities25; but the underlying anxieties are also very clearly a response to political decline. For Athens one of the advantages of Empire, in the fourth century as in the fifth, had been the control it gave her over trade routes and sources of supply of economic commodities. In the fourth century, in addition to the grain tax law, we have, most strikingly, the inscription dating to the period of the Second Athenian League (ca. 350?), Rhodes & Osborne 2007, n^o 40, which shows the cities of Keos being required by Athens to ship their entire production of red dye – miltos – to Athens and nowhere else, and only on ships specified by Athens. (Keos produced the best miltos in Greece according to Theophrastos, On Stones 8.51-54, and it was used amongst other things for staining pottery). In the immediate aftermath of the defeat at Chaironeia Athenian anxieties ran immediately to the security of the grain supply26; and it is not, I think, coincidental, that it is precisely at the point that Athens loses control of the Second Athenian League that she begins systematically to honour grain traders, for a consequence of the loss of Empire was a radical reduction in Athens’ power to manipulate the supply and traffic of grain in and through the Eastern Mediterranean. She could no longer rely on the exercise of imperial persuasion to secure supplies27; nor, it seems, were there options open to her at the level of interstate diplomacy28. It was on individual grain traders that she was obliged to focus her diplomatic attention and effort. This new genre of decree set a pattern: the decrees of the Lykourgan period honouring grain traders stand at the head of a series which continued through later decades; and the grain supply was to continue to be of high long term priority and concern in hellenistic Athens, a topic which Graham Oliver has illuminated in his recent book29.

Theater

11The second new category of decree honouring foreigners which emerges after Chaironeia are decrees honouring men for services connected with the Athenian theatre. I have published elsewhere fresh texts and some discussion of this set of decrees30. Some of them honour men who made financial contributions to two of the great public building projects of the Lykourgan period: the theatre of Dionysos and the Panathenaic stadium31; others honoured foreign poets, actors and others who had contributed to the great Athenian dramatic festivals32. Some were passed at the special Assembly in the theatre of Dionysos which the city held each year in Elaphebolion after the celebration of the City Dionysia. An active engagement by the polis with its theatrical life was, of course, no more a new thing after the battle of Chaironeia than an active engagement with its food supply, but the regular, systematic honouring with inscribed decrees of men who had contributed to this aspect of the life of the polis was an innovation. It should undoubtedly be connected with the policy of promotion of the City Dionysia and other aspects of Athenian theatre, and of the city’s festival and cultural life more broadly, which is a familiar feature of Lykourgan Athens, most famously in the canonisation of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the building works at the theatre of Dionysos33.

12There is also here, I suggest, a similar motivation and dynamic to the one we observed in relation to the grain supply decrees. In a world where the city’s political and military capacity to secure its food supply was much diminished, it was obliged to rely to an extent on the good will of grain traders, to be secured in part by the prospect of honours. By the Lykourgan period the Greek theatre had acquired many of the attributes of an entertainment “industry” with fierce competition to attract international “star” poets and actors, by financial and other incentives. Alexander is said to have paid off a fine imposed on one actor for failing to appear at the City Dionysia in order to appear instead at one of his own festivals and to have paid 10 talents to another34. Lykourgos himself proposed a decree offering large cash prizes (600 to 1000 drachmas) for dithyrambic poets at a festival in the Piraeus35. Rather like modern celebrities, “star” performers could acquire elite levels of wealth. There is no decree of this period honouring an Athenian poet or dramatist. If Athens wished to showcase itself as the leading city of Greek drama, there was patently a realisation that this was to be achieved not only by building splendid theatres and erecting statues of the best Athenian dramatists of the past. The city also needed to exert itself to attract international “star” performers, and it did so by offering both financial incentives and, as our decrees indicate, the less tangible, but no less real, incentive of honour.

13If one can legitimately measure influence by the number of extant inscribed decrees that a man proposed, far and away the most influential Athenian politicians of Lykourgan Athens (indeed of the whole of Athenian history before 322) were Lykourgos and Demades36. One generally thinks of them as on opposite sides of a fence constructed to divide so-called “pro-Macedonian” from “anti-Macedonian” politicians; and their rivalry is clear enough. Lykourgos vigorously opposed the proposal to award extravagant honours to Demades (see further below). We should probably interpret the number of inscribed decrees they proposed as an aspect of this rivalry. An inscribed decree proposed by you on the acropolis displayed to contemporaries, no less than it displays to us, your influence in the Assembly. This is one policy sphere, however, where both politicians were active: Lykourgos proposed two of the extant decrees in this theatrical genre37; in my article I identified Demades also as proposer of two38, but that number should be increased to three if we accept Sean Byrne’s persuasive argument that a decree of this type previously dated to the third century and attributed to an otherwise unattested homonymous grandson of Demades, IG II² 713 (+ Add.), was actually proposed by the famous Demades himself39. This evidence for Demades’ involvement in theatrical politics adds a further aspect to Patrice Brun’s attempt to give us a more rounded impression of Demades’ political contribution than has generally been inferred from the negative spin of the very limited literary record for this politician40.

14The other proposers of these theatrical decrees whose names are preserved are all different men. We may infer, I think, that there was a fair degree of consensus about this theatre policy in Athens across the political spectrum; and that, as far as Lykourgos and Demades were concerned, this was a sphere of policy in which they were rivals not in the sense that they were seeking to drive policy in different directions, but in the sense that they were competing to attract popular support for differing specific measures which had essentially the same objectives41.

15As with the decrees honouring grain traders, this new genre of decree honouring contributors to the Athenian theatre also set a pattern for the political priorities that were to preoccupy Athens in the hellenistic period. As a genre of inscribed decree it was quite short-lived; there are sporadic later examples, but they tend to be for theatrical people who were also prominent on the broader political scene42; and in general future generations did not maintain quite the intensity of political concentration on theatrical and cultural regeneration which is such a marked feature of Lykourgan Athens; but the new genre looked to the future in another important respect: it represented a shift away from a polis whose identity was grounded primarily in its political and military power and influence, towards a polis whose identity was grounded primarily in its cultural power and influence; and from a polis whose identity was grounded primarily in its role in the contemporary world to one whose identity was grounded primarily in its past achievements.

Religion and Festivals

16Another notable aspect of Lykourgan Athens was an intense engagement of the polis with the regeneration of its religious and festival life and this too is a prominent feature of the inscribed laws and decrees of the period, catalogued, with brief discussion, in Lambert 2005. We have, for example, the famous law and decree introducing enhancements to the sacrifices at the annual celebration of the Panathenaia, to be funded from the proceeds of rental of land called the “Nea43”; the law of Phanodemos providing for the celebration of a new festival, the Great Amphiaraia, in the newly acquired territory of Oropos (Phanodemos is known to us primarily as an Atthidographer, FGrHist 325, but he is also the most prominent Athenian in the epigraphical record of Lykourgan Athens, after Lykourgos and Demades)44; and there are several more fragmentary inscriptions45. This is not a new genre – we have inscribed festival regulations dating to before Chaironeia46 – but we have more dating to the years ca. 335-330 than we do from the whole of the period 403-33847; and, interestingly, the genre is entirely absent from the epigraphical record of fourth century Athens after Alexander’s death. Religion is a complex phenomenon and there is no simple explanation of this development. Partly it is about cultural display, about the city’s desire to present itself, to itself and to the outside world, with the maximum of splendour48. Partly it has to do with the paideutic qualities of religion. Paideusis is a key theme of the Lykourgan period49, perceived as vital to the well-being of the city, apparent most obviously in the great ephebic reform of the mid-330s50. Its connection with religion is manifest in the ephebic oath, inscribed at this period in the sanctuary of Ares and Athena Areia in Acharnai, in which a very earthy religion, grounded in the fatherland and its crops, is powerfully deployed to inculcate patriotic values: “I shall not disgrace the sacred weapons… I shall defend the hiera and hosia … I shall honour the ancestral hiera. Witnesses: the gods Aglauros, Hestia, Enyo, Enyalios, Ares and Athena Areia, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone, Herakles, the boundaries of the fatherland, wheat, barley, vines, olives, figs51.” And as Lykourgos’ speech against Leokrates makes clear, the myths that were associated with religion, for example those relating to the sacrifice of Erechtheus and the daughters of Kekrops, could also be felt to have powerful paideutic value. Partly I think it is also legitimate to adduce here the personality of Lykourgos himself, who as member of the genos Eteoboutadai, responsible for supplying the two major priesthoods on the acropolis, Athena Polias and Poseidon Erechtheus, inherited an intense personal sense of religious engagement52. But partly too we should not underestimate the power in the Greek mind of the simple idea that a city that was on good terms with the gods was a healthy city and likely to be a successful one. As Josine Blok points out in her paper for this colloquium, what made a citizen in classical Athens, as ordinary Athenians themselves perceived it, was, above all, participation in those same hiera and hosia which the ephebes swore to defend, both of them categories defined in relation to the gods.

Relationship to the Past

17There is also another factor that is relevant here and I leave it to last because it can, I suggest, be seen as a sort of golden thread linking a number of the developments that I have been discussing and is, I believe, of fundamental importance in any attempt to grasp the nature of developments in “the political” in Lykourgan Athens, namely, an intense preoccupation with, engagement and focus on the city’s own past, particularly, but not only, the glory days of the fifth century. I have suggested that a sense of the city’s decline in relation to that past is a driver of several of the political shifts observable at this period: that it generated a desire to improve the performance of city officials by honouring them with inscribed decrees, and that it generated anxieties about the grain supply that resulted in the new policy of inscribing decrees honouring grain traders. It was an awareness of the towering achievements of fifth century Athenian drama that caused the city to emphasise and seek to enhance its role and status as leading city of Greek culture at a time when its political and military status were ebbing away; and, I suggest, it is in part the commemorative aspects of religion – the way that the practice of polis religion connected citizens with the city’s past in ways which spoke to present needs and anxieties – which caused the city to focus its attention on this aspect of the city’s activities at this period. This topic requires a paper of its own and I can not do it justice here. As in Christianity the eucharist commemorates paideutically the last supper, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so the enhanced practice of religious rituals in Lykourgan Athens strengthened the paideutic commemoration of “myths” of the city, both distant and more recent in time, creating a rich tapestry of resonance and connection. For example in the Little Panathenaia as enhanced by the law and decree of the late 330s mentioned above, one of the most beautiful cows bought with the proceeds of the lease of the Nea is to be sacrificed to Athena Nike53. I have remarked above on the way the attention paid to this cult at this period is an expression of a suppressed Will to Victory; but the significance is much richer and more complex than this. This ritual, as enacted on the acropolis, not only linked to the foundation of the temple of Athena Nike in the glory days of the fifth century and to the dedication of gold and bronze Nikai at that period (cf. below on IG II² 403), it was presided over by the priestess of Athena Nike, tenant of a priesthood established at that period as (perhaps) the first “democratic” polis priesthood, selected not from the genē but from the Athenian People as a whole54; and was enacted at a festival which was the context for the tyrannicide55, a heroic deed referred to by Lykourgos Against Leokrates 51, and which finds an echo in the famous law of 337/6 condoning the murder of anyone who sought to overthrow the democracy and replace it with a tyranny, and placing restrictions on the Areopagos in such circumstances56. Thus this new ritual of the Panathenaia subtly asserts and confirms Athens’ democratic heritage, a response on the religious plane to perceived threats to the ancestral democracy, which were another aspect of the Post-Chaironeia Anxiety.

18If we look briefly outside the epigraphical sphere, this focus on the past and its paideutic value also links the two great political speeches of the year 330. Lykourgos’ speech Against Leokrates is packed with paideutic stories about the past, designed to impress on the jury the value of self-sacrifice in the interests of the wider community; and a major theme of Demosthenes’ speech On the Crown is that Athenians owed it to their own past, to the heroic deeds of their ancestors, to resist Philip, and that was true even though resistance turned out in the end to be futile.

19This intense focus on the past, particularly the fifth-century glory days, is also a marked feature of the inscriptions of this period, a topic I explore more fully elsewhere57. A decree I have already mentioned, IG II² 403 = Lambert 2005, n^o 3, is the locus classicus. It is about the repair and “raising” of a statue of Athena Nike on the acropolis (apparently by increasing the height of the base), which, as the text spells out in detail, had originally been dedicated from the spoils of campaigns in Western Greece during the 420s. The action resonates with, and was perhaps a prelude to, one of Lykourgos’ proud achievements: the replacement of the golden Nikai on the acropolis which had been melted down for coin in the later stages of the Peloponnesian War58. In this decree the Athenians are reaching back at a time of national crisis to connect with a period when the Athenian Empire was at its strongest, “raising” literally and symbolically the goddess of Athena Victory at a time of defeat.

20Another striking, if more subtle, example is the decree of 338/7, proposed by the fiercely anti-Macedonian politician, Hegesippos of Sounion, which provided a refuge in Athens for Phormio and Karphinas, Akarnanians exiled from their home city in the aftermath of the allied defeat at Chaironeia59. The decree refers explicitly to the citizenship grant made to their grandfather, also called Phormio, who was probably named for the Athenian general Phormio, active in western Greece in the 420s, and whose citizenship, it can be calculated, may well have been granted ca. 400, i.e. in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. This was a situation which had special resonance in the post-Chaironeia years and Lykourgos alludes to it in his extant speech as holding lessons for the present situation: “Our city was a slave [...] to the Thirty when its walls were torn down by the Lakedaimonians [...] yet [...] we won back our freedom and earned the right to be guardians of Greek prosperity60”. The past could inform the present in all sorts of ways.

21A feature common to both these inscriptions is a focus on the acropolis, the sacred heart of the city, as locus of past-connectivity. In IG II² 403 it is the inscription on the acropolis which makes the connection, against the backdrop of the famous 5^th century temple, between the newly “raised” Nike on the acropolis and the circumstances in which the original statue was dedicated. The text of the decree for the Akarnanians, inscribed on the acropolis, mentions explicitly that the decree for the elder Phormio was also “inscribed on the acropolis”, thus creating a monumental “paideutic” link between the present situation and the past moments in history alluded to in the text of the inscription. This, I think, gives us a helpful perspective on a point touched on by some other speakers at the colloquium: the scarcity of new architectural and sculptural works on the acropolis in the Lykourgan period, in contrast to the frenetic activity elsewhere in the city61. Inscriptions are monuments and Athenians inscribed more laws and decrees in the Lykourgan period than during any other comparable length of time. The large majority of them were set up on the acropolis; and what did the acropolis signify to an Athenian of the 30s and 20s of the fourth century? One of the most significant pronouncements of the great inscriber Lykourgos is from his speech opposing the award of high honours to his great rival, Demades. He is comparing the small achievements and extravagant honours proposed for Demades with the massive achievements and modest honours of Pericles:

“Pericles, after capturing Samos and Euboea and Aegina, building the Propylaia, the Odeion and the Hekatompedon [all on or around the acropolis] and depositing 10,000 talents of gold on the Acropolis, was crowned with a crown of foliage62.”

22To a Lykourgan Athenian the acropolis was, I suggest, the monumental expression of the city’s glorious fifth-century past; and by setting up their inscriptions there the Athenian People were expressing in monumental form a respect for, and a desire to connect with and be educated by, that past.

23If it was in the Lykourgan period that Athens became a “Hellenistic” city, it was also arguably at this period that fifth-century Athens became “classical” Athens.