Appendix 8—
The Strasbourg Papyrus and the Financial Decrees of Callias

Something should be said about the alleged relationship between the Strasbourg Papyrus, in its most recent epiphany (Wade-Gery and Meritt),^[1] and the Callias Decrees, conventionally dated in 434/3.^[2] There are two decrees of Callias, denoted A and B, inscribed on opposite sides of the same piece of marble. Since the assumption that they were carved at the same time is arbitrary, we believe that Callias A must be interpreted according to its own terms, without regard to the conjectural association with it of Callias B. Now Callias A, lines 3–4, states that monies owed to the gods (i.e., the other gods) must be repaid "since Athena's three thousand talents, which were voted, have been brought up to the acropolis."

If the decree belongs in 434/3, the 3,000 talents may be viewed as a

[1] H. T. Wade-Gery and B. D. Meritt, "Athenian Resources in 449 and 431 B.C. ," Hesperia 26 (1957), 164–88; cf. ATL, 2.61 (D13); Fornara 94.

[2] IG i 52 = ML 58 = Fornara 119; cf. SEG 34.17. Arguments presented by H. Mattingly, BCH 92 (1968), 450–85, BSA 65 (1970), 147–49, Phoros, 94–97, GRBS 16 (1975), 15–22 (see Appendix 10, n. 1, below for his bibliography), and Fornara, GRBS 11 (1970), 185–96 (cf. D. W. Bradeen, GRBS 12 [1971], 469–83; W. E. Thompson, "Internal Evidence for the Date of the Kallias Decrees," SO 48 [1973], 24–46; and D. M. Lewis, "Entrenchment-clauses in Attic Decrees," in Phoros, 82–84), who opt for 422/1 and 418/7, respectively, have been countered by Meiggs, AE, pp. 519–23, 601, and the reader must make his own determination of the relative merits of these competing views. Cf. more recently, B. D. Meritt, "Thucydides and the Decrees of Kallias," Studies . . . Eugene Vanderpool, Hesperia Suppl. 19 (1982); Ch. Triebel-Schubert, "Zur Datierung der Kallias-Dekrete," QC 6 (1984), 355–75; and H. Mattingly, AJP 105 (1984), 355–57.

massive infusion of funds accumulated in installments in prevision of the coming war.^[3] On that assumption, Wade-Gery and Meritt interpolate into the Strasbourg "Papyrus Decree of 450/49" (line 8) an anticipation of that ultimate bestowal.^[4] Though the interpolation can be dismissed as tautologous, the reason motivating it deserves attention, for it may well seem plausible that the 3,000 talents mentioned in Callias A were in fact a payment by the Athenians to themselves for the purpose conventionally alleged—that is, the accumulation of a war-chest. Something of that nature, indeed, seems required if the date of Callias A is really 434/3, for by that time the Athenians had incurred no debts of such magnitude to Athena.^[5] By the same logic, if these sums represent the cancellation of an actual debt, the date 434/3 is impossible.

The same ground need not be ploughed all over again. The context inescapably implies the elimination of state debt. "Repayment of the [other] gods" is predicated on the payment of the 3,000 talents to Athena; as the stone says, "it is resolved to pay back to the other gods the money owed them () since, now that, " Athena has received her money. Now the Athenians could hardly have conceived of the following sequence: "since we have paid Athena the installment money we obligated ourselves to give her in order to create a handsome surplus, we shall proceed to liquidate the sacred debt we have simulta-

[3] It should be observed that the notion of installments from c. 450 does not square with the accumulation of a war chest in 434.

[4] It is not a virtue of this hypothesis that it complicates what we would ordinarily suppose to have been straightforward Athenian financial management, perfectly in keeping with fifth-century practice, which did not run surpluses. The Athenians possessed 9,700 talents before 448/7 (pace ATL, 3.281, 338; cf. Meiggs, AE, pp. 65–66) and 6,000 talents in 431 or a little thereafter. The highwater mark presumably came in 454, when the size of the sum coupled with the circumstances of the transfer from Delos would have fixed it in memory. Now assuming that in 450/49 the Athenians had 9,700 talents or less (the theoricon and jury payments had probably been introduced by this time) and spent their income on their fleet and themselves (except for the quota paid to Athena), what inducement would they have had, when they possessed this fortune, to reduce their expenditures in order arbitrarily to increase their reserve?

neously incurred to the other gods." Just as the accumulation of sacred debt is a recourse incompatible with the simultaneous enhancement of a sacred surplus, so must the repayment of a sacred borrowing take priority over a secular promise to enhance a reserve; nor were the Athenians so unsophisticated as to be unaware that they were robbing Peter to enrich Paul. A certain semantic confusion seems unnecessarily to have obscured our view of this text, as if a self-imposed (and gratuitously invented) "obligation" is the same as a debt. This cannot be got around; and since independent arguments exist to date this decree to a later year, after actual debts were incurred, it seems perverse to assume, counter to the context of lines 3–6 of Callias A, that the debt to Athena was a metaphor. In any event, that conclusion cannot gain corroboration from restoration of the Strasbourg Papyrus.