Promenade érudite au coeur de la Vieille Grèce : une revue critique des plus récents travaux relatifs à l’épigraphie de la Béotie (avec la Mégaride) et de l’Eubée (avec la Chalcidique)
Authors: Knoepfler Denis 
Published: February 2024

Giving in this paper his last contribution to the «Bulletin épigraphique » (Revue des Études grecques), the author has organized the bulk of his critical notes on the most recent publications as he regularly did during the twelve past years (2006-2017) : he brings together the inscriptions from — or concerning — Boeotia with those from Euboea, having been convinced for a long time that these two neighbouring regions have formed in Antiquity a geographical and culural — if not linguistic — unit, which is not to be artificialy broken anew according to a traditional practice used in epigraphical corpora and catalogues for Continental Greece and Aegean Islands. In Boeotia, whose inscriptions are to be progressively integrated, city by city, to a new collection in place of the old one (IG VII , published in 1892), many significant documents or studies (particularly from Thebes, Orchomenos, Lebadeia and Akraiphia) are analysed in detail (Nr. 17-42 et 61-130). This region has natural links with Megaris, a buffer State between Attica, Boeotia and the Peloponnese ; the excavations recently made in the city of Megara have provided more than one (still unedited) inscription, which will certainly arouse the interest of various scholars for the history of this metropolis of so many “ colonies” from Sicily to the Black Sea (Nr. 43-60). The integration of Opountian Locris to the Boeotian Confederacy is a question to be adressed separately for each city, with a special case for Opous ; another problem left in abeyance is the exact location of the small towns of Korseia and Boumeliteia (Nr. 168-170). On the other hand, Boeotia is linked in a particulary way to Euboea by the vicissitudes of the city of Oropos, an Eretrian foundation disputed later between Athenians, Thebans (or more generally Boeotians) and Euboeans : found mostly in the sanctuary of Amphiaraos, the Oropian inscriptions still remain the subject of many studies (Nr. 131-142). In the Euboea itself, the city and the territory of Eretria — with the newly discovered sanctuary of Artemis at Amarynthos — are at the very center of epigraphical and historical researches, but there are interesting new finds at Chalcis, and the publication of a great subscription list (epidosis) discovered at Kerinthos, an Homeric town, could open a new perspective about the political geography of North Euboea (Nr. 143-229). The Chalcidian peninsula being to be seen as a continuation of Euboea (at least until the Macedonian conquest, 348 BC), it is not unjustified to stread this epigraphical review to the cities of the Thracian coast established mostly during the early archaic period by colonists from Chalcis and Eretria as well (Nr. 230-240). Since the presentation in 2006, before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, of the new text of Dikaia (an Eretrian colony near the Chalcidian peninsula) by its discoverers, this document of an exceptional interest raises with acuteness the problem of the running of the Chalcidian calendar, whose Euboean origin has no more contradictors since the publication of a paper by the author in this journal (Journal des Savants,

1989, 1-2, pp. 23-59) and the convergent works of Miltiades Hatzopoulos on this subject. The emergence of a new calendar, the so-called calendar of the Twelve Gods (already mentioned by Plato) in some cities founded in the 4th century BC by the Kings of Macedonia is indeed a religious and political phenomenon which must deserve more attention. According to an hypothesis formulated here for the first time, the birthplace of this innovation could be Histiaia-Oreos, the most northern city of Euboea, which had disappeared as a polis in the second half of the 5th century before its revival soon after 404 BC.