the attic stelai - The American School of Classical Studies at Athens

THE ATTIC STELAI 327
(Attic and Eleusinian) of the inscription, and that Pollux's quotation came from the
stelai which have disappeared. However, closer inspection will show that neither of
these conclusions is necessary, for we can after all identify Pollux's fragment with
these lines from Stele VII, and account for his variations quite simply. It is immediately
evident that Pollux's citation has been somewhat altered, for the two Kcat 's
would not have appeared on the stone. In addition, Pollux's items seem to have got
out of order; in the listing as he gives it there is no reason for the word E&epog, since
two distinct types of pinakes are being dealt with. Actually, E'pOg would only be
used in a grouping like that of Stele VII, where one item is to be distinguished from
preceding items of exactly the same sort-one small pinax with a drawing on it was
sold separately from an unknown number of others which differed only in size.2" It is
so unlikely that just these same circumstances prevailed in the sale of some other
group of pinakes, listed in some other part of the Stelai, that we can here use the text
transmitted by Pollux to restore the words missing on the stone. Eratosthenes was
apparently most interested in the pinax poikilos, which he believed to have been of the
special sort used in decorated ceilings (acr' opofbiri), and so he put it first among the
plaques which he had found in the Attic Stelai.27
I have argued that the Demioprata references were taken from the Skeuographikon,
and not from the Stelai or from an epigraphical collection, but before we can
finally conclude that Pollux made no direct use of inscriptions or their texts in preparing
Book X, there are three more passages which must be examined, for at three
points in Book X Pollux presents other bits of epigraphical evidence which have
nothing to do with the Attic Stelai. In X, 60, Pollux reports on an anathema, set up
in Athens by a certain Diogenes, which was called an analogeion. In this case, he says,
one can't turn to the work of Eratosthenes for an explanation of the term, for it is
there treated as something related to the preparation of books. Here is an explicit
statement of independence from Eratosthenes, but it does not mean that Pollux had
himself been poking about among the antiquities of the city; it is the strange term
applied to it, and not the fountain itself or any inscription it may have borne, that
interests him, and the word would come from a word-book, not from an inspection of
the monument. In X, 146 reference is made to the text of an unknown stele: E'V 8E rjj
EV 'OXv,urtra cr74XW abvayiypainrat rpvirava rpvi7ravtaq EXova. Pollux's failure to identify
this inscription any more accurately suggests that its source was not an annotated
epigraphical collection; the phrasing is much the same as that used to introduce an
Attic Stelai citation and it is easy to believe that this reference was also culled from
26 Compare the use of ZTepos in I.G., I12, 1672, lines 152 ff.
27 There are a few other variants in Pollux's citations: in X, 35, he writes xa-,evE'v for Attic
Stelai, I, 231 xaMtcrva; in X, 36, a/ cKV'aAXkOS for Attic Stelai, I, 233, 4ALKa(Xao,; and in X, 79, he
states that a stand or base for a piece of furniture in the Attic Stelai is always 6ro'TaTov, while we
find v7rocr7aOfov on the stone (Stele II, 32-34).