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

328 ANNE PIPPIN
the Skeiographikon. However, in X, 126, there is a reference to certain uracdda
xaXKa listed among the ancathemata on the Acropolis during the archonship of Alkibiades.
The inscription is as usual badly identified, but if this is the archon Alkibiades
of I.G., IJ2, 776,28 then the list must have been inscribed around 250 B.C., and we cannot
very well attribute it to Eratosthenes, who was by that time at Alexandria. Kohler
believed that Pollux at this point was using Polemon's IlEpt rnq 'AO4rv-q-v aKpor'nXEqo,
a collection of Acropolis dedications,29 but nowhere else in the Oomcasticou does
Pollux show any acquaintance with Polemon's work. A more realistic supposition is
that, pursuing his ordinary methods of composition, Pollux was here borrowing from
another lexicographer, an earlier grammarian who may also have supplied to Book
III, 39, its citation from the king archon's list. It was natural to him to accept occasional
descriptions of ancient monuments from the pens of his predecessors, never
allowing his eye to wander from the book in search of the relic itself. Pollux was
interested in words because he wished to use them successfully among men who considered
themselves learned, but he had no wish to study the past that had produced
the language he sought to restore.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
ANNE
PIPPIN
28
See Meritt, Hesperia, VII, 1938, p. 135. B6ckh, op. cit., I, p. 252, note f, has argued that
Pollux's inscription, like the one listing the silver drinking horn in Athenaeus, XI, 476 e, was included
in a specialized collection called Demioprata. He did not know of the later archon, and so assumed
that Pollux had mistakenly referred to the archonship of Alkibiades when the inscription named
him rather as treasurer. Thus B6ckh would see here a reference to the fifth-century Alkibiades.
29
op. cit., p. 398.