EPIGRAPHY, LEGISLATION, AND POWER WITHIN THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE

Abstract

This paper begins by assessing the non-Athenian epigraphical evidence for state regulations in the fifth-century Aegean, and in so doing poses questions about the nature, extent, and fluctuation of the Athenian impact on the legalistic and epigraphic habits of her allies. In the second part of the paper, on the basis of a close examination of the Athenian regulations for Erythrai, I shall raise and investigate the possibility that certain Athenian regulations were couched in a rhetoric that would have seemed familiar to their allied readers.