The Character of the Evidence
Although some Delian inscriptions had been discovered before 1872, the real wealth of finds began only with the onset of French excavations. Many of the temple accounts—as well as decrees, treaties, and other documents—first saw print in a series of articles in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique or in monographs by Théophile Homolle, Felix Durrbach, and others.[12] A corpus of the Delian inscriptions was planned as volume 11 of Inscriptiones Graecae, but World War I intervened and postwar tensions prevented further cooperation.[13] The accounts are thus divided between two series, both edited by Felix Durrbach:
Inscriptiones Graecae XI 2 (Berlin, 1912), which contains nos. 135–289; and
Inscriptions de Délos: Comptes des Hiéropes(nos. 290–371) (Paris, 1926); and Inscriptions de Délos: Comptes des Hiéropes (nos. 372–498),Lois ou règlements, contrats d'entreprises et devis (nos. 499–509) (Paris, 1929),
to which must be added important new readings and restorations offered over the years by Gustave Glotz, Maurice Lacroix, J. H. Kent, Jacques Tréheux, and others.[14]
The accounts were the responsibility of the hieropoioi, the chief administrators of the Temple of Apollo during the years of independence. The magistracy was annual; a full panel consisted of four members, but the Delians often had to do with only two, and sometimes just one. Their duties touched on every aspect of the administration of the temple's business.
[12] For full details, see the lemmata in IG XI 2 and ID.
[13] See the rather cryptic remarks of Felix Durrbach in ID (1929), p. vii.
[14] See Appendices III and IV.
They oversaw the rental of sacred estates and houses and the collection of rent; hired and paid laborers; granted loans to individuals from the temple funds; disbursed payments to contractors (whose work, however, was supervised by special boards of
The accounts give, in a fairly straightforward fashion, income and outgo of the temple during the hieropoioi's year in office. For the most part the information is simply listed in categories, which include the total amount of cash received from their predecessors; collections in the form of loans and rents; outlays by month for ritual and other purposes; outlays for the maintenance, repair, and construction of temple buildings; and the total amount of money passed on to their successors. The reverse sides of the stones generally carry inventories, ordered by the treasury in which the goods were stored. Additional (late) payments are often recorded on the narrow sides.[16]
The annual publication of prices was not intended as economic data; like most ancient accounting, it kept officials honest and provided records that anyone who wanted to challenge the officials could review.[17] This is perfectly clear from the layout of the data on the stelai themselves. The order-
[15] Vial, 111–12, 151–54, 156–58, 216–32. Slaves purchased at ID 290.113–15.
[16] Good examples include IG XI 2.199 and 287 and ID 442.
[17] On the probable absence of a power of euthynai in the Delian logistai, see Vial, 161. IG XI 2.203A62 records pay for a heliastic court that heard a case brought against Euboulos, hieropoios in 273 B.C . (see IG XI 2.199B98). The case brought against the contractor Simon for unknown delinquencies may have rested on specifics of his contract; a number of these documents have been preserved (for the case, see IG XI 2.163Bg18, cf. 165.37; contracts at ID 500–502, 504–8). Cf. Finley, Ancient History, 32, on the purpose of documents. On ancient accounting in general, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, "Greek and Roman Accounting," in Studies in the History of Accounting, ed. A. C. Littleton and B. S. Yamey (London, 1956), 14–74, who, however, has nothing specific to say about Delos (31 n. 10). Richard H. Macve, "Some Glosses on Ste. Croix's 'Greek and Roman Accounting,'" in Crux: Essays in Greek History Presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, ed. P. A. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (London, 1985), 233–64, adds nothing of substance. For a good overview, see now Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-CenturyA.D. Egypt, 331–35, 369–87.
ing follows category of income or outlay: rents from estates, rents from houses, payments from the farmers of concessions (like the ferry to Mykonos or Rheneia), interest payments, defaults, expenditures by month, expenditures ordered by the boule (such as for special purification sacrifices), payments to contractors, and so on. It is easy to check whether the hieropoioi collected someone's loan payment, or whether the payment to the contractors building the theater was made with approval of the architect and board of overseers; but to check, say, pig prices over the year required a laborious search through an undifferentiated mass of monthly data, as well as review of other sections (like that for payments ordered by the boule, or the accounts of festivals like the Posideia) where payments for pigs might be recorded. The hieropoioi clearly had no intent to facilitate collection and comparison of time-series of data, and the fact that this is possible is only an accidental consequence of the real reasons so much detail was committed to stone.[18]
As a result many of the data from Delos, as abundant as they may be, are useless for economic analysis. There are hundreds of instances of payments to unskilled laborers for cleaning, carrying roof tiles, hauling building stone, or transporting wood, but only very rarely do the hieropoioi tell us enough to compare any two such payments. Generalizations about the "level of wages" or attempts to reconstruct a budget or cost of living from such data are very hazardous.[19] Likewise, the lack of figures for quantity bought for some goods (such as charcoal and rope) and the absence of any descriptive information (weight, length, cost of manufacture) for other items (such as rakes) render the abundant recorded prices useless.[20]
These inherent limitations have determined the kinds of data I have been able to work with. In every case, prices must be accompanied by enough information to be sure we are dealing with the same good or object
[18] That the Athenian administrators abandoned the Delians' practice after 167 and published only summary accounts proves the point.
[19] Because the data are almost never comparable—that is, we have no idea how long a job took, exactly what work was involved, and sometimes not even how many workers divided the pay—studies of Delian wages offer far less than they appear to: cf. Glotz, Journal des Savants 11 (1913): 206–215, 251–60; Larsen, 408–14. W. W. Tarn, in The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge, 1923), 115–27, founders in a mass of circular argument (p. 121: skilled workers at Delos "practically always get two drachmae" per day; p. 124: "a lump sum of 140 drachmae, which at the usual two drachmae a day means 70 days' work") and unsubstantiated assumptions (such as that workers received their entire annual income from temple employment). Budgets at Larsen, 408–14.
[20] Gustave Glotz, REG 45 (1932): 241–49, is too sanguine about the usefulness of some of these data.
over time. In practice, these requirements have meant confining my investigation to wheat and barley, olive oil, firewood, and pigs; the agricultural estates owned by Apollo, identified by name, and inventoried every ten years; and the buildings also owned by the god and identified by name.