A Note on IG i² 114

Extract

The battered stone which bears the bouleutic oath and a decree of the demos about the boule has the same width as and is universally agreed to be a companion piece to IG i² 115. That text begins with a decree of 409–8 ordering the anagrapheis to obtain Draco's law on homicide (from the basileus, as R. S. Stroud will show) and write it on the stone. On the face of it, they are merely to make a copy, and, though the stray voice has been raised to suggest that they altered the text, most discussion has been about the age of the text before them and the changes that it might have undergone before 409.

The bouleutic stone is unprotected by a decree, as it stands, and encouragement for those who might wish to suppose that it represents a revised text comes from Philochorus F 140, which suggests a change in legislation about the boule in 410–9. There has not, to my knowledge, been any very great enthusiasm for massive revision or new formulation. To put it at a minimum, (1. 34) and (l. 41) do not sound like consitutional procedure or even formal language of 410, and there has been at least one attempt to carry the whole document back beyond the Persian War. The archaisms convinced even Hignett ‘that it was to some extent a copy of an earlier law’, but he found it ‘incredible that in 410, when the full democracy had just been restored after an oligarchic interlude, a law on this subject should have been no more than a faithful copy of a previous law; some additional safeguards suggested by previous experience must have been inserted.’