AIUK45 no. 9 Dedication to Apollo

Dedication to Apollo

AIUK 4.5 (BM, Dedications) no. 9 Date: Second half of the 4th century BC

Relief For your favour (charis), o King Paian, far-shooting Apollo, Hippokrates, son of . . . set this up.^[1]

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Greek text

References:

AIUK 4.5 (BM, Dedications) no. 9 (Translated text) (AIUK) (AIO)

IG II² 4556 (PHI)

IG II³ 4 942 (IG Online)

GIBM IV 1151

CEG 2, no. 751

Translation by: Peter Liddel, Polly Low

AIO Images: 1 2

Monument type: Relief

Inscription type: Dedication (Apollo)

Findspot: Ikarion, Attica? (BM 1805,0703.139)

Transliterations on Places on

[1] This inscription was acquired in Italy, having been moved from Attica to Rome by the late sixteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century it had come into the possession of the sculptor and restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. It is likely that he extensively repaired or reshaped the relief before selling it to Francis Russell, the Marquess of Tavistock (1739-1767). By the early nineteenth century, it had come into the possession of Francis Russell’s younger son, the Sixth Duke of Bedford, John Russell (1766-1839). Russell gave it to Charles Townley; it remained in his large collection of antiquities until Townley’s death in 1805 when it was sold to the British Museum by his cousin, Peregrine Edward Townley, along with other drawings and smaller works of sculpture. On the Townley collection, see B. F. Cook, The Townley Marbles (1985).

The inscription’s dedicatory epigram, an elegiac couplet, records Hippokrates’ gift to the god Apollo. The terms used to describe the god (“Paian” and “far-shooter”) are otherwise unattested as epithets in Attic epigraphy. However, “Paian” is quite widely used as a title or epithet of Apollo in literary texts of the Classical and Hellenistic period; “far-shooter” is a Homeric epithet for Apollo.

The term charis is frequently found in inscribed Attic dedicatory epigrams to record gratitude to a deity for a favour and is indicative of the relationship of reciprocity between dedicant and deity. Hippokrates’ precise identity must remain a mystery (the name is hardly rare: the Athenian Onomasticon records 51 individual bearers).

The relief depicts three male mortals approaching three divine figures, two (female) standing and one (male) seated. The seated god must be Apollo: this is made clear not only by the content of the dedicatory epigram, but also by the fact that he is sitting on the omphalos (representing Delphi, the "navel of the world"). The two standing goddesses are usually identified as Artemis and Leto. The representation of the mortal figures in Roman military dress is a result of the later reworking of the relief.

The original provenance of the stone is unrecorded, and neither inscription nor relief have any explicit information about the context of the dedication. The case for Attic origin of is made plausible by parallels between the iconography of this relief and that of similar dedicatory reliefs, all plausibly connected with the sanctuary of Apollo Pythios in Ikarion, Attica (see IG II³ 4, 632; and in general on the inscriptions of Ikarion, IG I³ 1015, with notes). E. Voutiras, AJA 86 (1982), 229-33 suggests that such dedications might have been intended to commemorate the Pythais, a religious procession from Athens to Delphi (on which, see IG II³ 4, 18 with notes). These processions were both spectacular and irregular (Voutiras, 232), and therefore likely candidates for this form of special commemoration. The Delphian destination of the procession would also explain why a dedication made in Attica would depict a scene which is clearly situated at Delphi. A specific association with the cult of Apollo Pythios at Ikarion also seems very plausible. As Rutherford, Rutherford, State Pilgrims, 315 notes, this inscription considered alongside others from Ikarion demonstrates how “extraterritorial religious activity is embedded in local religion”.

For fuller discussion of this inscription see AIUK 4.5 (BM, Dedications), no. 9.

Added: 15 Mar 2022
Updated: 3 Dec 2023
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