Asylia
Subtitle: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World (Hellenistic Culture and Society)
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: March 28, 1997
Language: eng; grc; lat
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 660
ISBN-13: 9780520200982
Subjects: European history: BCE to c 500 CE; Religion; Ancient Greece - History; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Ancient Greece; Greece; Religious aspects; Ancient - Greece; History / Ancient / General; Asylum, Right of (Greek law); History; Sacred space
First sentence: Thanks above all to the work of Schlesinger and of Gauthier, the Greek terminology for legal immunity is well studied and well understood.
Description: In the Hellenistic period certain Greek temples and cities came to be declared "sacred and inviolable," meaning immune from war. A famous passage of Tacitus describes the appeals of many cities for Roman confirmation of the title. The evidence for this phenomenon - mainly inscriptions and coins - is scattered in the published record, but the material has never been collected and presented in one publication until now. In Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World, Kent J.

Rigsby lays out these documents and discusses their historical implications. Rigsby argues that while a hopeful intention of military neutrality lay behind this diplomatic gesture, the declarations of asylum did not in fact change the military behavior of the Greeks; declared inviolability in effect became primarily a civic and religious honor for which cities across the Greek world competed during the third to first centuries B.C.

Of the many civic titles for which Greek cities competed by Roman Imperial times, this was the first.

In the Hellenistic period certain Greek temples and cities came to be declared "sacred and inviolable," meaning immune from war. A famous passage of Tacitus describes the appeals of many cities for Roman confirmation of the title. The evidence for this phenomenon - mainly inscriptions and coins - is scattered in the published record, but the material has never been collected and presented in one publication until now. In Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World, Kent J. Rigsby lays out these documents and discusses their historical implications. Rigsby argues that while a hopeful intention of military neutrality lay behind this diplomatic gesture, the declarations of asylum did not in fact change the military behavior of the Greeks; declared inviolability in effect became primarily a civic and religious honor for which cities across the Greek world competed during the third to first centuries B.C. Of the many civic titles for which Greek cities competed by Roman Imperial times, this was the first.