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

266 W. KENDRICK PRITCHETT
Leges where two separate houses are allotted to each citizen.43 Aischines, the only
Attic orator in whose writings the word is preserved, writes: " He walled her up in
an empty house - - - and to this day the oikopeda of that house stand in your city, and
that place is called -- -."4 This reference might be to the substructure of the house,
and be in accord with the definition preserved in Bekker and Photius (see above).
There are several non-Attic inscriptions in which oikopeda is used in connection
with allotment or division of land.45 We note one in particular, an inscription of
Sardis,46 where an oikopedon is referred to as requiring three artabas of seed. Here
the word clearly refers to a plot of ground, although possibly one designed to be used
for a dwelling.
Oikopeda occurs in several Egyptian papyrological sources in which the editors
feel that the word is used interchangeably with oikia or oikos. This has been the conclusion
of Kraemer and Lewis,47 Boak,48 and Youtie and Pearl.49 Waiving the question
of the significance of Egyptian usage for Attic meaning, it should be noted that proportionately
the word here more commonly means ' building-site ' or ' house-lot.'
Thus, in the third volume of the Michigan papyri, where Boak has noted that the
twice-used phrase rO'IrwV OtKOVE8a has to do with buildings, there are more than twenty
examples of the use of oikopeda where the respective editors have translated the word
as ' building-site ' or the equivalent.50 This includes two examples in Boak's document.
In the Youtie-Pearl document, oikopeda refers to the entire parcel of a half share of
a house with land. It would seem, then, that the specific meaning of the word must
be determined from the context. It might refer to a building-site; at other times the
site seems to have contained a building or at least the substructure of a building.
In our Stele, the word is qualified by two adjectives, EAX and XEppov.5' The latter
means ' without a crop.' 52 Concerning E'Xt which occurs only here, Meritt has written,
" the word EXv is known only from Hesychius (where it is written ELXi) and supposedly
means the same as ILE'Xav." It may be supposed, on the other hand, that the
word means 'swampy ' and is to be connected with EXog or tA.54 In any case, our
43 Lg., V, 745 e and VI, 776 a. See Jowett's commentary ad Pol., 1265 b.
4 I, 182. Cf. I.G., JJ2, 1672, line 75: ra? o'Ko7re8a Tr?) tLepac otKLag.
45 See Dittenberger, Syll.3, no. 141, and A. Wilhelm, " Neue Beitrage, III " in Sitzungsber. der
k. Akad. der Wissenschaften in Wein, Phil.-hist. Kl., 175, 1 Abh., 1913, pp. 11-12.
46 W. H. Buckler and D. M. Robinson, Sardis, VII, Part 1, Leyden, 1932, no. 1.
47 T.A.P.A., LXVIII, 1937, p. 380.
48 Michigan Papyri, III (ed. J. G. Winter), Ann Arbor, 1936, p. 215.
49 Michigan Papyri, VI, Ann Arbor, 1944, p. 135.
50 It is perhaps worth noting that the modern meaning of the word is 'building lot.'
51 VI, 100.
52 Cf. I.G., II2, 2492, line 16.
53 Hesperia, VIII, 1939, p. 75.
54Cf. Liddell-Scott-Jones, addenda, p. 2068; and Buck and Petersen, Reverse Index, p. 747.