Dedications from the Athenian Akropolis; A Catalogue of the Inscriptions of the Sixth and Fifth Centuries B. C.

Description

Immediately upon publication Dedications won itssecure place in scholarly literature. As an indispensabletool for work on Attica in the sixth andfifth centuries B.c. it became so well known to everyepigrapher, archaeologist, and historian that littleneed be said here about the scope and contents ofthe book. It has, moreover, been repeatedly andcompetently reviewed elsewhere.The volume is the result of long, devoted, andmost exacting labor, the progress of which becameknown through several preliminary publications. Inthe course of these the author showed an ever-growingmastery of "architectural epigraphy," to use adesignation which characterizes the specific approachof Raubitschek. This is not a very happy term,since it implies differences that are non-existent, andthe author himself rightly states (p. 433) : "this samemethod is obvious to anyone who has the opportunityto study the originals." Raubitschek's achievementin assembling endless dedicators is imposing,and only the overall careful study of the wholework can give an approximate idea of the enormousdifficulty of putting order into such a disturbingwealth of individual fragments. Many another wouldwith resignation have limited himself to a mereselection. Raubitschek has had the courage to giveeverything, for which we cannot thank him enough,and with it also the courage to make mistakes, whichis always a moral achievement. In view of the totalaccomplishment it may appear unjust to dwell toomuch on the negative side. A conscientious reviewer,however, has to note something Raubitschek himselfconfesses to freely and repeatedly (e.g. under nos 250and 309): many a reconstruction or attribution tocertain classes of monuments is purely hypothetical,especially when based on arbitrary restorations ofthe inscriptions. The zeal to distribute as many fragmentsas possible among the respective categories(and who would not sympathize with this desire?)was bound to produce some violence. But the lownumber of merely nine unclassified fragments, asopposed to the three hundred and eighty-four classifiedones, does not correspond to the facts and tendsto create a false impression by minimizing the factorsof uncertainty. The author should have enlargedthis section considerably.