MANTO x AIO

written by Greta Hawes

Workng in ancient world studies constantly reminds me that the world is small. Two years ago, I was at a conference in Patras, heard an antipodean accent, and had the pleasure of meeting Chris de L’isle, who like me had been an undergraduate in the wonderful Classical Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington.

But this encounter also gave me yet another example of how siloed our field is. My memory is that, on discovering that Chris edits Attic Inscriptions Online, I asked him how much mythic material this corpus had, and he told me about an ephebic decree from 184/5 CE that contains a long narrative of Theseus’ journey from Troizen to Athens and the miscreants he killed along the way. Now, I had recently finished work on a co-authored book chapter (“Theseus’ Imperial Topographies”) that did a deep dive into Roman-era accounts of this mythic episode that focussed on Apollodoros, Pausanias, and Plutarch, and had not realised that this inscription existed. Too often we — still — study texts separately from material culture not least because we do not know what else exists outside of our usual silo.

Bringing together all kinds of ancient sources for Greek myth has been the lietmotif of my work with MANTO over the last few years. We made good progress through 2023 and 2024 on our capacity to add artifacts; late last year I tackled epigraphy and papyri with the able assistance of Rosemary Selth and Ewan Coopey.

Chris’ enthusiasm for collaboration meant that we could start experimenting by adding to MANTO three inscriptions he pointed us to in AIO:

Ephebic Decree at Athens (EMA 9506 etc; IG II, 2, 1125; 2291a; SEG 50.155; PHI 4527; PHI 3340)

Hymn to Apollo by Limenios at the Athenian Treasury at Delphi (Delphi 489; PHI 239435; PHI 238501)

Hymn to Apollo by Athenaios at the Athenian Treasury at Delphi (Delphi 517; PHI 238500; PHI 239433)

Joining these three inscriptions we now have some two dozen others, including the Parian and Lindian Chronicles. This is a good sample setthat allowed us to work out the most urgent issues with data collection, but by no means representative of the huge corpus; that will (hopefully) come in time. (And of course, if you can suggest an inscription or corpus with interesting mythic material, please get in touch!)

One notable aspect of the ephebic decree is that it actually cites another inscription, the epigram on the Arch of Hadrian that proclaimed Athens “the city of Theseus” and “the city of Hadrian”. If you look at the filecard for this inscription in MANTO, you will see that we have also captured this relationship: i.e. that this epigram is cited by the ephebic decree. Equally, because in this instance we have both the citation and the original inscription surviving, we can capture both the fact that the epigram mentioned Theseus and Athens, and the fact that another source (the ephebic decree) says that the epigram mentioned Theseus and Athens.

Unnecessarily complicated? Perhaps. But it is an important nuance.

As you browse MANTO, you will increasingly see connections made between different sources and distinctions made between sources that we can examine or read for ourselves, and those that we access only obliquely, in the descriptions of other ancient sources. These connections and distinctions will be the subject of a future blog.