exemplary lists on the Acropolis like the wooden tablet of state debtors
(see examples above, pp. 31–2). Searching a single name on a simple list
in list form would be far easier than reading a continuous text. Can we
also imagine people seeking the name of a relative on the lists of war dead
(as with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington)? Descendants of the
Plataians granted citizenship may have showed the ancestor’s name on the
Acropolis stele, perhaps what is envisaged in [Dem.] 59.105. Leodamas
denied that he was ever on the stele of traitors (‹ôØ qí óôźßôÅò), and that
the name had been erased by the Thirty (Arist.Rhet. II 1400a 32–6).
People looked at these lists.
The layout of some of these stone lists implies a deliberate decision
to produce them in list form, one item below another (see fragment
from the Attic stelai, IG i
3
422, figure 2.9). The alternative, which one
also sees, is to run together the list of items (e.g., in an inventory) as a
continuous text in dense, continuous lines. It is tempting to think that
those in proper list form—more expensive in stone, one assumes—were
designed to be more easily read by those who were less educated, not
skilled readers. The ‘‘Athenian Tribute Lists’’ listing the sixtieth of the
tribute paid on to Athena as a tithe ally by ally are superbly set out so that
every name is clear: was it hoped that the tribute-payers (or their envoys)
would like to be able to check their communal entry easily on the list
for Athena?—at least if it was not on the top of the two-meter-high inscrip-
tion (see figures 2.8a, 2.8b). Such lists throw into relief the many other
inscriptions that are devoted to lists or accounts that are not written in
list form at all: inventories of temple treasures tend to be written out
continuously in full lines.^46 The first of thepoletai(‘‘sellers’’) inscriptions
listing the confiscated property of those convicted of sacrilege in 415 was
laid out in list form, very clear to the eye (figure 2.9), yet the long, impres-
sivepoletaiinscriptions of the fourth century are dense, continuous prose.^47
Perhaps we see here the difference between a big, exemplary public text
inviting people to read it and check the malefactors, and documents that
were more the technical documents of a board of officials, which they need
to publish on stone to show that they had done their job. Why was the list
form abandoned in thesepoletaiinscriptions? Or were the ‘‘Attic Stelai’’ the
expensive exception, meant as the widely visible memorial of crime and
punishment? There at least seem to be different levels of legibility for public
‘‘democratic documents.’’ The punitive power of the list probably plays a
large part here.
- Cf. (e.g.) IG ii^2 120, of 362/1, a list in continuous prose form of objects in the
Chalkotheke (or IG i^3 123). Cf. D. Harris’s interesting discussion (1994) of the inventory
lists of the Parthenon and public accountability; and D. Harris 1995. - Helpfully collected in Langdon 1991; Pritchett 1953 6 for the ‘‘Attic stelai.’’
34 Situating Literacies