Ebook: Dedications from the Athenian Akropolis; A Catalogue of the Inscriptions of the Sixth and Fifth Centuries B. C.

Immediately upon publication Dedications won its secure place in scholarly literature. As an indispensable tool for work on Attica in the sixth and fifth centuries B.c. it became so well known to every epigrapher, archaeologist, and historian that little need be said here about the scope and contents of the book. It has, moreover, been repeatedly and competently reviewed elsewhere. The volume is the result of long, devoted, and most exacting labor, the progress of which became known through several preliminary publications. In the course of these the author showed an ever-growing mastery of "architectural epigraphy," to use a designation which characterizes the specific approach of Raubitschek. This is not a very happy term, since it implies differences that are non-existent, and the author himself rightly states (p. 433) : "this same method is obvious to anyone who has the opportunity to study the originals." Raubitschek's achievement in assembling endless dedicators is imposing, and only the overall careful study of the whole work can give an approximate idea of the enormous difficulty of putting order into such a disturbing wealth of individual fragments. Many another would with resignation have limited himself to a mere selection. Raubitschek has had the courage to give everything, for which we cannot thank him enough, and with it also the courage to make mistakes, which is always a moral achievement. In view of the total accomplishment it may appear unjust to dwell too much on the negative side. A conscientious reviewer, however, has to note something Raubitschek himself confesses to freely and repeatedly (e.g. under nos 250 and 309): many a reconstruction or attribution to certain classes of monuments is purely hypothetical, especially when based on arbitrary restorations of the inscriptions. The zeal to distribute as many fragments as possible among the respective categories (and who would not sympathize with this desire?) was bound to produce some violence. But the low number of merely nine unclassified fragments, as opposed to the three hundred and eighty-four classified ones, does not correspond to the facts and tends to create a false impression by minimizing the factors of uncertainty. The author should have enlarged this section considerably.

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