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

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-

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.