Originally presented as the author's thesis (D. Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2004.

The Rationes Centesimarum, inscribed accounts of a 1 percent tax paid on sales of land by Attic corporate groups (demes, phratries etc.) to individual Athenian citizens in the 4th century B.C., are an important source for the social and economic history o f classical Athens. Although some of the fragments have been known for over a century, this book is the first comprehensive edition. In addition to a new fragment, published here for the first time, it contains revised texts of the 15 fragments already k nown, based on a fresh autopsy of the stones. This has resulted in many new readings and a new arrangement of the fragments into stelai. A translation in tabular form is followed by a textual and epigraphical commentary and full notes on the 150+ indivi duals and the 60+ corporate groups mentioned in the records, a number of them identified for the first time. Prosopographical analysis enables likely dates for the sales to be established to within a few years. This forms the basis for a final discussion chapter, which identifies the inscriptions as records of a centrally organised land sale programme probably attributable to the leading Athenian financial administrator, Lykourgos.

Students of ancient Athenian politics, governance, and religion have long stumbled over the rich evidence of inscriptions and literary texts that document the Athenians’ stewardship of the wealth of the gods. Likewise, Athens was well known for devoting public energy and funds to all matters of ritual, ranging from the building of temples to major religious sacrifices. Yet, lacking any adequate account of how the Athenians organized that commitment, much less how it arose and developed, ancient historians and philologists alike have labored with only a paltry understanding of what was a central concern to the Athenians themselves. That deficit of knowledge, in turn, has constrained and diminished our grasp of other essential questions surrounding Athenian society and its history, such as the nature of political life in archaic Athens, and the forces underlying Athens’ imperial finances. Hallowed Stewards closely examines those magistracies that were central to Athenian religious efforts, and which are best described as “sacred treasurers.” Given the extensive but fragmentary evidence available to us, which consists mainly of inscriptions but includes such texts as the ps.-Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, no catalog-like approach to these offices could properly encompass their details, much less their wider significance. By situating the sacred treasurers within a broader religious and historical framework, Hallowed Stewards not only provides an incisive portrait of the treasurers themselves but also elucidates how sacred property and public finance alike developed in ancient Athens.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to ancient Athens, its topography, monuments, inhabitants, cultural institutions, religious rituals, and politics. Drawing from the newest scholarship on the city, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.

The ancient Greeks attributed great importance to the sacred during war and campaigning, as demonstrated from their earliest texts. Among the first four lines of the Iliad, for example, is a declaration that Apollo began the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon and sent a plague upon the Greek army because its leader, Agamemnon, had mistreated Apollo's priest. In this first in-depth study of the attitude of military commanders towards holy ground, Sonya Nevin addresses the customs and conduct of these leaders in relation to sanctuaries, precincts, shrines, temples and sacral objects. Focusing on a variety of Greek kings and captains, the author shows how military leaders were expected to react to the sacred sites of their foes. She further explores how they were likely to respond, and how their responses shaped the way such generals were viewed by their communities, by their troops, by their enemies and also by those like Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon who were writing their lives. This is a groundbreaking study of the significance of the sacred in warfare and the wider culture of antiquity.

This volume examines the applicability of central place theory in contemporary archaeological practice and thought in light of ongoing developments in landscape archaeology, by bringing together ‘central places’ and ‘un-central landscapes’ and by grasping diachronically the complex relation between town and country, as shaped by political economies and the availability of natural resources. Moving away from model-bounded approaches, central place theory is used more flexibly to include all the places that may have functioned as loci of economic or ideological centrality (even in a local context) in the past. Fourteen chapters examine centrality and un-central landscapes from Prehistory to the late Middle Ages in different geographical contexts, from Cyprus and the Levant, through Greece and the Balkans to Italy, France, and Germany.