In 1901, the French archaeological mission to Persia discovered a colossal inscribed bronze astragalos on the acropolis of Susa, now in the Louvre. It represents one half of the estimated ca. 186-kg dedication of two men named Aristolochos and Thrason to a certain Apollo, looted, it is believed, by Darius in 494 BCE (I.Didyma 7). As is typical before the renewal of the oracle post-334, the god is not called Didymeus, and so we rely on epigraphic criteria to give this extraordinary artifact a primary context in Ionia, ca. 550–525 BCE (SEG XXX 1290).[1] Such is the paradox of the oracular shrine of Apollo at Didyma and what might distinguish it from Delphi — a touchstone for the global history of the ancient world from Pharaoh Necho to Julian, but also the center of a rather limited catchment area. As Catherine Morgan puts it, we should “consider Didyma as a civic oracle on the grand scale which is typical of many aspects of Ionian culture (a phenomenon worthy of investigation in its own right).”[2]
Study of the inscriptions of Didyma, then, is mostly a local affair with short commutes of 18 km up the Sacred Way to Miletos, from whose Delphinion, state processions in turn departed for Didyma. Günther presents here a lifetime of work at both sites. The editor has labored at Didyma since 1966, published a 1971 dissertation on the epigraphy of the oracle in Hellenistic times, and since then authored dozens of articles that present the ed. pr. of many inscriptions revisited here. His oeuvre centers around key themes in the corpus: the building of the younger temple(s) of Apollo (a 500-year affair, ca. 300 BCE–ca. 300 CE); the prosopography of the Milesian elite who succeeded the Branchidai in the sanctuary; Milesian foreign relations, especially with kings and emperors; and the functioning of the oracle.[3] This volume, for now, completes the collected inscriptions of Didyma (I.Didyma)—and indeed of Miletos as a whole, along with Milet I 2, 3 (which includes I.Delphinion), and I.Milet 1–3. It supplements Albert Rehm’s Didyma, II. Die Inschriften (1958). Yet Rehm had not included inscriptions from the Prussian excavations of 1906–13 and 1925, which are gathered here, along with finds from both digging and survey since 1962. Much was lost in a fire that consumed the dig house in 1921, but Günther was able to work from squeezes. In total, 291 inscriptions are added to Rehm’s 615—for epitaphs, in particular, a twofold increase. All are now available in digital form.[4] Many of the true gems are not brand new, but the lion’s share are first editions. Günther also provides an appendix of epigraphic testimonia for the oracle from Miletos and elsewhere to complete Joseph Fontenrose’s “Catalogue of Didymaean Reponses.”[5]
The volume covers nearly an entire millennium of activity and yet still leaves us with little idea of what went on between Darius and Alexander. The hint of continuity of cult in the Molpoi Inscription (Milet I 3 133) receives no corroboration, and just four sculptures dated Classical based on style appear in Didyma III 5. For the archaic period, not much is new here. 618 is an inscribed kouros that describes itself as a first fruits offering of ληΐη (λεία?), which appears to mean simply profit, not plunder. A new reading for the first line of 616, a late archaic lex sacra, exchanges a form of καθαίρειν (purify) for a form of καθαιρεῖν (slaughter), in part, on the basis of a parallel from Chios. However, we are missing Ionic psilosis and CGRN 38 (Lines A10–12) still prefers “purify” for the would-be parallel.
For the Hellenistic period, we learn of foreign entanglements beyond the critical relationship with the Seleukids, whose dynastic cult of Apollo may have begun here, perhaps when Nikator returned the statue of Kanachos from Ecbatana (Paus. 8.46.3). Already, though, in the 270s or 260s, a Ptolemaic presence is glimpsed in honors for Naukratis (737; see also I.Didyma 394). 739 is a new Athenian decree, the fifth from Milesian territory but the first from the sanctuary. Importantly, it dates to the shadowy pre-229 period.[6] The three new building documents (624–6) can be combined with I.Didyma 31–7 to revise the old view of a severe drop in building activity after ca. 200. On the contrary, construction was especially intense ca. 170, perhaps funded by the Attalids or other monarchs, all which carried forward third-century designs.[7] 624 also gives us new information about limestone quarries and public slaves.
With the Romans came another rupture. 723 shows the desynchrony of the prophet’s year from the city’s stephanephorate after the First Mithridatic War. When did Miletos fully regain control? 735 is a new inventory, the latest yet known, of 14/13 BCE. The fact that it was inscribed on stone used for a pair of third-century decrees (739–40) points to a serious disruption. Günther suggests that the phrase κατὰ τὸν νόμον in 735 points then to a reform that accompanied the restoration of Milesian control. Other Roman novelties: a στρατηγὸς τῆς χώρας now appears (682); the epitaph 765 is the first to refer to the office of prophet. Many texts bear on matters of money (see, s.v. “δήναριον,” many passim mentions of RPC, and the inscribed sarcophagus 799, with fine of a λίτρα of gold). 735 contains a very rare mention of cistophori, 2116 coins — separately hoarded, by implication, and deployed in the context of imperial cult.[8] Ultimately, the Romans came to favor Didyma. 745 is a new letter of Hadrian. By 177 CE, the Great Didymeia / Didymeia Kommodeia had achieved eiselastic status (655). In 651, the honorand can bequeath money to the god because of a leniency in Roman law (Ulpian Tit. 22.6) afforded to just eight sanctuaries.
Fontenrose has claimed that the oracle did not change much in the late empire, though he himself highlighted Biblical resonances in I.Didyma 217 (his B1). In some ways, this is true: consultants ask traditional questions of how to worship properly (746-7, on altars). 751 is a fragmentary oracular text, in verse, as was always typical at Didyma, from the 3rd century CE. It speaks of the priest as ἀρητήρ, an epic term familiar from archaic oracles and used in a 4th-century CE text believed to be authentic by the emperor Julian (Fontenrose 52). On the other hand, we now find our first προστάτης τοῦ Διδυμέως (713). The oracle for the Ὧραι also evinces an emphasis on song over sacrifice that may be a sign of the times (EGBR 2010, 205; SEG LXVII 751).
902 is the new constitution of Justinian of 1 April 533 published by Denis Feissel in 2004 (SEG LIV 11748). The town has been upgraded to city status (recently, perhaps, in I.Didyma 596). The new city has indeed been renamed Iustinianupolis (though the community continued to refer to the place by the “pagan” name Hieron/Jeronda until 1922.) Justinian transfers a tax burden from Didyma on to Miletos, which had acquired new coastal land from the alluviation of the Maeander. Peter Thonemann’s suggestion that the emperor’s ad hoc solution was not reconcilable with Theodosian legislation should have been mentioned.[9] A unique fiscal problem of alluvium goes back centuries here (see I.Milet 1131, 4–6) — and is now visualized in the digital Map of Miletus on iDAI.geoserver. The commentary on 902 incorporates recent work on the singularly important Latin paleography of the inscription. This is the first epigraphic attestation of the old Roman cursive script (majuscule), which Cod. Theod. 9.19.3 preserved for the imperial chancery (litterae caelestes), previously only known from papyri.
Apollo was never alone at Didyma. In the archaic period, a sanctuary on the Taxiarchis Hill belonged to a goddess whose figurines have just been unearthed, and generally, a broader pantheon appears in the site’s statuary (Didyma III 5–6). It was here that Alexander was first recognized as the son of Zeus (Strab. 17.1.43), and Caligula was briefly offered cult (I.Didyma 148). The initiative to elevate the Didymeia festival to penteteric, panhellenic status ca. 210 BCE was accompanied by the promotion of the perhaps relatively recent claim that the hieros gamos of Zeus and Leto took place there (I.Milet 1052). Artemis was everywhere, and the priestesses of Artemis Pythiê served as hydrophoros, often in the same year that her father was prophet. Interestingly, in the new dedication 644, a man pays for a refurbishment of the gold on an older cult statue of this goddess, while addressing her in a more current, late Roman manner as ἁγιωτάτη. 631 is a new dedication to Zeus with the very rare epithet Phanaios (Light Bringer), reminding us that different Zeuses co-existed here with the more well-known Soter. The existence of a sacred grove or paradeisos is highlighted by a text for Pan and one on Tyche (646, 747). Finally, it is fascinating to see Apollo Didymeus, who was reckoned as defender of Miletos (μεδέων), addressing another city’s poliad deity, perhaps another Apollo, with the same heroic term in the metrical fragment 752.
Overall, the volume perhaps too often reads like one large download of text. No site plan is provided and monumentality and spatial context can get lost. However conventional this is for epigraphy, the organizing principle here is in fact publication of excavation and site-survey results. Without a visual aid, one can hardly follow what transpires in 625, e.g., a breathless temple building account laced with hapax legomena. Regarding excavation, the lone photo from the trenches provides frustratingly little context for 640, a pre-Christian mosaic dedication from the so-called Südgebaüde (north of temple!), excavated and very briefly described in pers. comm. by Klaus Tuchelt. A tantalizing new text on a round base (743, announced in SEG XLVI 1444) also deserves a photo that depicts its true shape, since it bears a Hellenistic decree of Miletos that appears to prescribe statues and display contexts. If it is a statue base, 743 adds to the corpus of Didyma III 5. Its regulation of honor and date recall the Eirenias dossier of the early second century BCE (I.Didyma 142, I.Milet 1039–41). In the future, the Didyma team might remedy all this with the platform iDAI.publications. There is a (traditional) e-publication of the book on the platform but not an “enhanced edition,” such as iDAI can offer with an electronic catalog and integration to iDAI.objects/Arachne. The excavation notebooks are said to have been digitized (p. xii). A digital supplement has already been offered on the Didyma project page for iDAI.field that covers Didyma III 6, the Taxiarchis Hill excavations. Such a route may also provide the possibility of disseminating these texts — so many of them tiny fragments — in EpiDoc format to enhance machine readability.
Notes
[1] Greaves, Alan M. “Divination at Archaic Branchidai-Didyma: A Critical Review.” Hesperia 81 (2012), p. 194.
[2] Morgan, Catherine. “Divination and Society at Delphi and Didyma.” Hermathena 147 (1989), p. 18.
[3] Günther, Wolfgang. Das Orakel von Didyma in hellenistischer Zeit: Eine Interpretation von Stein-Urkunden. Tübingen, 1971.
[4] Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) already provides Rehm’s I.Didyma (nos. 1–615), along with portions, but not all of Donald F. McCabe, Didyma Inscriptions. Texts and List. “The Princeton Project on the Inscriptions of Anatolia,” Princeton (1985). Packard Humanities Institute CD #6, 1991. There seems to be a misprint in OCD online, s.v. “Didyma” (2015), which refers the reader to TLG for I.Didyma. To survey the complete corpus, one can now combine PHI with https://doi.org/10.34780/a81b-ccaa.
[5] Fontenrose, Joseph. Didyma: Apollo’s Oracle, Cult, and Companions. Berkeley, 1988, pp. 177–244.
[6] Cf. Günther, Wolfgang. “Milet und Athen im zweiten Jahrhundert v. Chr.” Chiron 28 (1970), pp. 21–34.
[7] On building chronology, see now Helmut Lotz and Sebastian Prignitz. “Ein Paradeigma für Apollon. Neues zum ältesten erhaltenen baubericht aus Didyma (I.Didyma 20).” In AA 2. Halbband 2022 (2023), pp. 102–22.
[8] Carbone, Lucia F. “The Introduction of Roman Coinages in Asia (133 BC – 1st Century AD),” in R.H.J. Ashton and N. Badoud, eds. Graecia Capta? Fribourg, 2021, pp. 233–93.
[9] Thonemann, Peter. The Maeander Valley: A Historical Geography from Antiquity to Byzantium. Cambridge, 2011: pp. 306-14.