A Silver Law in Ancient Athens
Agora I 7495 was discovered in the 1970s among the debris of older buildings. It turned out to be a rare discovery. The stone bears the text of a law enacted in 354/3 BCE, one of only a dozen surviving examples from the 4th century that were approved by the nomothetai. These “lawgivers” belonged to a special board that could pass laws with more force than the numerous decrees issued each year by the Athenian Assembly. It was proposed by a statesman named Epikrates, so we usually refer to this as the Law of Epikrates.
The stone is not in great shape. The lettering is clear on the left and right sides, but not in the middle. Some of the letters have entirely disappeared from erosion of the stone. Other areas preserve signs of letters, but they are also badly scuffed, making it hard to find the original strokes among the accidental scratches. Making things worse, the lower edge of the stone is broken, and perhaps half or more of the original stele is lost.
Still, we have recently learned much about the Law of Epikrates. In 2021, Molly Richardson published the results of a painstaking study reconstructing about half the text. Another group soon followed up in a 2024 publication, adding an independent review of what they thought is visible on the stone and filling in many gaps in the text.
The law describes raising money for the worship of Hephaistos and Athena along with general strategies for raising the outputs of the state silver mint. The text mentions the production of silver drinking cups for the gods, but it is much more concerned with the acquisition of silver and stamping of new Athenian coinage. New rules govern the exchange of silver bullion from various sources. Private individuals – including non-Athenians bringing their foreign coins to Athens – could turn over their silver and receive back an equivalent value in officially stamped Athenian coins. Later passages address potential crimes, private competition, and silver ore arriving from the state mining operations at Laurion.
In brief, Agora I 7495 is giving us a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the ancient Athenian economy.
WHAT'S AT STAKE
The Law of Epikrates is an ideal case for testing the new RDI and other imaging techniques developed by DEVA. We can compare our digital images to two different drawings independently drafted by experts.
Our first concern was whether we were missing anything important that could be seen in person. The short answer is no. Not only could we find traces of every letter shown in the drawings, but we also identified much more from our digital imagery!
The RDI images turn out to be very good at checking the broken edges of the stone. When you are studying the piece in person, it is hard to see where the lines of text end and begin, since the edges of the stone are often chipped off. Ancient Greek texts make this even harder, since there typically are no spaces between words, punctuation is almost nonexistent, and words can be split at unpredictable locations by line endings.
The line ends of Agora I 7495 are an ideal place to check the quality of our imagery, since the best preserved passages of text are near the edges, but the edges themselves are all broken. As a result, we have little doubt over which letters should be written at the damaged edges of the stone.
In fact, the DEVA imagery turned up new traces of this predicted lettering at the beginnings and ends of more than half the lines of the whole stone. We were surprised by this rate of discovery, which is much better than expected on a stone that has already been so carefully scrutinized by multiple specialists in epigraphy. DEVA is now able to add direct evidence for dozens of letters and confirm the accuracy of the proposed readings at these line endings.
Photograph of the left and right sides of I 7495
vs. the RDI layer with new strokes (yellow)
VIEW THE RDI LAYERS
Another informative example is the detail at the beginnings of lines 7–8:
The readings here could already be predicted from the adjacent texts, but the past drawings left out strokes of lettering here. The RDI and colour photographs provide direct evidence for about 15 of the hypothesized characters out of the 20 shown.
One change is that we can see the last α of νόμισμα continued from the previous line 6, which the previous editors had assumed was dropped (by elision to the next vowel). Instead, the letterer crammed unmistakable traces of the α into the start of line 7, before the now clearly visible phrase ὡς πλεῖστον. The meaning, roughly, is that “the coinage (νόμισμα) should be as plentiful (ὡς πλεῖστον)” as possible.
The next line begins a new sentence. The definite article τους followed by καταλλάττοντας means “the ones exchanging.” The statement goes about their exchanges of silver in the Agora.
The DEVA imagery makes no changes here to the recently published studies of the law, but it does confirm the wording in these lines. All of the letters restored here can be detected exactly where we would expect to find them.
RESULTS & FUTURE PROSPECTS
The detail highlights one area where the DEVA imagery performed unusually well. Still, we have found many dozens of new letters elsewhere on the Law of Epikrates. Most of them agree with the readings proposed in recent publications, but others do not. We can add some completely new text, especially in the later passages of the text that have been the hardest to read.
This is an important first step. Still, updating the current transcription of Agora I 7495 will require careful scrutiny of the marks on the stone in light of the plausible wording. Epigraphy requires a great deal of back-and-forth, searching for similar language in other ancient inscriptions and literature, trying out different grammatical constructions, and then reviewing how well the new suggestions fit the traces on the stone. Sometimes we discover new traces of letters that we had missed the first time around.
We look forward to a new academic article, including close-up views of the RDI and photos of key areas of the surface, which will improve our understanding of this important ancient Athenian law about the conversion of silver into coins and other finished products.
REFERENCES
Harris, E.M. 2022. “Notes on the New Law of Epicrates from the Athenian Agora,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 222, pp. 65–81.
Matthaiou, A.P., and R.K. Pitt. 2024. “The Law of Epikrates revisited,” in The Athenian Law of Epikrates (354/3 B.C.): Four Studies, ed. A.P. Mattaiou (Greek Epigraphic Society), pp. 11–32.
Richardson, M.B. 2021. “The Law of Epikrates of 354/3 B.C.” Hesperia 90, pp. 685–746.
- More about inscription I 7495 on the Agora Digital Collections
