Corpus des inscriptions de Thasos III

The excavations carried out on the island of Thasos have brought to light almost one thousand five hundred inscriptions from all periods and of very different kinds. They throw light on the political institutions, the defence, cults, society and economy of the ancient city - one of the best known in the Aegean. Sixty-five years after the publication of J. Pouilloux''s Recherches sur l''histoire et les cultes de Thasos, the present volume (CITh III) inaugurates a new Corpus des inscriptions de Thasos, organized chronologically and thematically. It contains the public inscriptions dated to between c. 400 and 30 BC. At the dawn of the fourth century the city, emerging from a long period of civil wars, began to rebuild itself, but it soon lost most of its continental possessions, which had constituted its main source of wealth. From then on, Thasos, even if prosperous, was a city of only average importance in the wider context of an Aegean dominated by Athens, then by the kingdom of Macedonia and finally by the Romans. In this volume, one hundred and twenty-seven inscriptions from the agora and from the city''s sanctuaries are published or newly edited and commented on. Among them can be found regulatory and honorific decrees, sales of citizenship, rental contracts of sacred land, dedications made by bodies of magistrates or soldiers, decrees of associations, decrees from foreign cities honouring Thasians, etc. Taken together, these inscriptions testify to the vitality of the civic community and to the multiplicity of its exchanges with the rest of the Greek world, as well as to the political engagement of its most conspicuous families, often going back over generations. The volume contains a revision of the local chronology, a study of the paleography of the inscriptions and an annotated index of one thousand or so individuals mentioned in these documents.