the excavation of the athenian agora twelfth season: 1947

EXCAVATION OF ATHENIAN AGORA, 1947 195
INSCRIPTIONS
The season's work yielded some 120 marble inscriptions, which brought the total
of the Agora collection to 6079. The majority of the season's finds came from the
area at the west end of the Middle Stoa. One stele was found re-used as a threshold
in the Civic Offices, having perhaps been damaged in the Roman sack of 86 B.C.
Another large fragment of a stele had been used as a cover slab on the drain that ran
past the end of the Stoa. Many pieces of an inscribed base were incorporated in a
wall of late Roman date. Still others were found lying at random in the deep and
much disturbed accumulation in this area. Most of the large inscribed pieces found
in the region were prytany decrees, naturally enough in view of the proximity of the
Prytanikon, i.e., the area of the Tholos in which these inscriptions were normally
erected. Some, however, came from farther afield, among them a small scrap from
the stele recording the sale of Alcibiades' chattels, a stone which is known to have
stood in the Eleusinion at the extreme southeast corner of the excavated area.
The more important inscriptions of the Greek period are published above by
B. D. Meritt (pp. 1 ff.) and W. S. Ferguson (pp. 112 ff.). Particularly interesting
among texts of the Imperial period is a large fragment of a stele of which pieces
have been found previously in various sections of the Agora and as far afield as the
south slope of the Acropolis (I 5984). The new piece comes from an early Byzantine
level to the west of the Areopagus. The whole document comprises a series of official
letters addressed to the Gerousia of Athens by Marcus Aurelius and Commodus
regarding various matters such as the cutting of trees and the setting up of imperial
portraits. The newly found fragment proves that there was at least one and possibly
two more imperial letters before what had been previously conjectured to be the
beginning of the text.'39
It is a far cry from these imperial rescripts to the private and highly personal
documents that came from a level of the third century A.D. in a well at the west foot
of the Areopagus. Here were found seventeen thin tablets of lead, some flat and some
rolled, all of them inscribed on one face with a sharp point. They are defixiones or
curse tablets of a type already well represented in the Agora by specimens from a well,
likewise of the third century, near the southwest corner of the market square.'40 The
messages are addressed to the divinities of the underworld, usually to Typhon, whose
curse is invoked against the enemy of the writer. There is a liberal scattering of
magical names and jumbled lines.
Two of the defixiones (IL 948 + 949 and 952) refer to a love affair in which
several persons are concerned."4' In the first tablet Leosthenes and Pius are cursed
131 Oliver, The Sacred Gerousia, in Hesperia, Supplement VI, pp. 108 ff., No. 24.
140 Hesperia, V, 1936, p. 43; VI, 1937, p. 383.
141 The readings are due to Mr. G. A. Stamires who is preparing a study of the defixiones.