Archaic Greek Epigram and Dedication : Representation and Reperformance

Archaic Greeks honored gods by offering dedications, often inscribed with epigrams. This book reconstructs ancient encounters with such dedications, arguing that, while the rite of offering was represented verbally and visually, reading and viewing produced effects of religious ritual. Epigram and dedication memorialized the dedicator's rite by generating its reperformance.

By the end of the Archaic period, Greek sanctuaries were bursting with dedications, including many that bore epigrams. This study views dedications comprehensively as sites of ritual efficacy, and in particular it recovers epigrams' reflections of and contributions to that efficacy and restores them to an important place in the panorama of Greek religious practice. In order to reconstruct the Archaic experience of reading and viewing, the book draws on studies of traditional poetic language as resonant with immanent meaning, early Greek poetry as socially and religiously effective performance, and viewing art as an active response of aesthetic appreciation. It argues that reading epigrams while viewing dedications generated effects of religious ritual and poetic performance, and that visual and verbal representation of the dedicator's act of offering associated that rite with similar effects, thereby framing the experiences of readers and viewers as reperformances of the earlier occasion.