Calling All Classicists – or – Dial E for Epigraphy!

Googling for further background I discover this post not even an hour old is already the third result of the whole wide internet for “Drako’s Law.”

The threshold insignias I’m familiar with tend to run along the lines of “Arbeit macht frei” or “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate” although there was the story of the basketball coach whose doorway cautioned, “If you can walk in here without stooping, don’t” and the Far Side cartoon “You must be at least this tall to attack the city.”

I don’t remember any playful jokes in the dialogues I’ve read

Well, that whole comedy routine with Alcibiades in Symposium . . .

My sense is that all sorts of things were inscribed on Greek temples, especially details of to whom the temple was dedicated, who built it, who gave big gifts etc (see this book by Clemente Marconi for instance). I don’t know that there was ever a particular inscription saying ‘no adikaios allowed’ over the door; would that really be needed? But I’m ready to be corrected by people who really know this stuff.

The classic study of Greek religion is still Burkert’s, I guess. There might be something relevant in there. If I weren’t too idle to check for you.

According to (sorry, link doesn’t want to embed in an ahref for some reason)
http://books.google.com/books?id=BEwIQs5xY_8C&pg=PA47&vq=threshold&dq=Greek+religion&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1
at the threshold of the temple of Olympian Zeus ‘there were two jars, one containing good, the other evil.’ I don’t know if that’s concentrated essence of good and evil (like at the end of the Time Bandits) or just some good and evil stuff: honey, say; slugs.

“adikaios” n’existe pas.

“dikaios” is the positive, true. but the privative is “adikos”.

I am now trying to imagine the equivalent in a post-literate society like ours: what symbol would you put inside the red circle to indicate “NO UNCLEAN PERSONS PAST THIS POINT”?

there are two anecdotes in diogenes laertius (6.39, 6.50–or perhaps one floating anecdote, with different details) that suggest that private persons sometimes wrote “let no evil thing [kakon] enter” over the doorway of their own private home.

aristophanes acharnians line 725 suggests that at the opening of a market-day one might sometimes say, ritualistically, “let no [various words for evil-doers] enter here.” but that’s spoken ritual, not inscription.

aeschines in timarchum 21 quotes an earlier athenian law saying that male prostitutes might not enter public temples, and the law uses a similar “let him not enter” formula, but again this is a law rather than an inscription.

plato (or the fictional representation of his uncle, critias) himself discusses temple-inscriptions at charmides 164-165, but says nothing about an inscription like this. and plutarch the platonist wrote an entire treatise on an a temple-inscription (on the ‘e’ at delphi) and never mentioned inscriptions of this kind.

there may be other evidence of temple-inscriptions saying ‘let no one [evil, unjust, unaware of all internet traditions, etc.] enter”; it’s a big corpus out there. these are just a few negative indications that come to my non-specialist mind.

that’s where a real classicist like oudemia can help out. let’s hope she weighs in.

“I’m obviously not going to try to solve this problem by deduction, but given that it would actually be a crime to be on the wrong side of the line, if you were in a certain state or condition, it would make a certain sense to mark the line and put a formal notice of warning up.”

I don’t know: this doesn’t feel right to me (intuitively speaking, rather than dusting off and actually standing upon my Classics degree). Wouldn’t you say that a temple that wanted nothing to do with menstruating women, and that wrote NO MENSTRUATING WOMEN across the door, would be sort-of, even in the expression of a negative, be inscribing the very thing it wanted nothing to do with in its sacred place? The analogy would not be with a ‘no naked flames’ situation in a petrol station; these sorts of impurity prohibitions are, you know, superstitious, miasmic, magical, not practical.

Clearly not any reference to menstruation it may or may not have contained.

Sorry, “basins” not “basis.”

“…in answer to Adam’s question, yes actual inscriptions like this in religious settings would (my friend thinks) be common enough.”

Interesting; I stand corrected.

I’m not an epigraphist, so I can’t recall any relevant inscriptions off the top of my head.

However, it seems to me that, if there were inscriptions with some sort of “let no x person enter” formula, they wouldn’t be over the temple door but would be at the border of the temple precinct, since, if the inscription were above the door, by the time anyone read it they likely would have already entered the precinct.

So I think you’d most likely find an inscription like this on herms or other sorts of boundary markers.

No answer for you, but perhaps a couple of leads (happen to be working on katharsis in the Phaedo right now). Give Parker’s Miasma a look:

“Every sacred precinct and every festival had its own distinctive rules; of precinct rules we have some knowledge through surviving examples of the inscriptions set up at the entrances, while for festival rules we are dependent on chance allusions in literary sources. (176-177). citation to H.J. Stukey TAPA 67 1936 286-95. Don’t have access to that.

And for “impure” it may or may not be a privative like akathartos. It could be a general term, miaros, agos, enages, or it could be a narrow term lexous (having given birth!– about which Parker has an interesting appendix “‘Enter pure from. . . ‘ requirements in sacred laws” which considers questions about sacred laws that require purity apo lexous (from having given birth), certain foods, contact with death, birth pollution, abortion, defloration, menstruation, sex–though he seems to be concerned with the degree of contamination of impurity in these laws.

I take it that Draco’s law is the exclusion of homicides? (Here looking at Moulinier Le Pure et l’impure 43 of which there seems to be some evidence in a 5th century mutilated epigraphic copy (?) and later oratory.)

Looks like Lois sacre’es des cite’ss greceques might be a place to look (Sokowlowski 1969), perhaps a reference there will point to an inscription.

Don’t see a lot of obvious references, in the several general scholarly works I have sitting here, to something specific like “No Shirts, No Shoes” signs–though there seems to be good reason to believe that they existed. So I’d guess–and I’m only guessing–that the reference would be later . It sounds more like the kind of thing later sources would claim was true. But that there were exclusions of a wide and varied category of the “impure” probably having more to do with contact with death and sex than justice seems likely. But, I’m not looking at the relevant collections of inscriptions.. (Can you search PHI? (http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/main)) I’ve never used it, but perhaps it might work–and I don’t really know that much about this, just have a couple of relevant books sitting right here.

Oh! I am just seeing this now, but it was called to my attention by someone who actually knows Plato and who is commenting. So tag; he’s it!

@34–

phaedo, surely?

@42 Ion you’re thinking?

Just who entered Greek (as opposed to Roman) temples?

I think the person who wanted to place the inscription (if it existed) at the entrance to the precinct rather than the temple may have been on to something.

FYI, it apparently is ageometretos, not a ageometros/tres. According to LSJ revised (but remember that a- is by the less talented Scott, not Liddell) the latter word does not exist — and the former has only late attestations.

As to occurring only in a late commentary, the value all depends on who the commentator had open when he wrote — presumably some old German dissertation has speculation on the sources, but who knows where to look?