In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.1 (2002) 136-140 [Access article in PDF] P. M. Petsas, M. B. Hatzopoulos, Lucrèce Gounaropoulou, and P. Paschidis, eds. Inscriptions du sanctuaire de la Mère des Dieux autochtone de Leukopétra (Macédoine). Meletemata 28. Athens: Kentron Ellenikes kai romaikes archaiotetos ethnikon idryma erevnon, 2000. 365 pp. Cloth, price not stated. The Macedonian sanctuary of the Autochthonous Mother of the Gods at Leukopetra, near Beroia, was (...) discovered by earth-moving equipment and emergency excavation in 1965, when a segment of the new national highway was being built. Although the site itself has never been fully excavated, many architectural pieces, four altars, three offering tables, stelai, and plaques were rescued and taken to the Beroia Museum. The original excavator, Photias Petsas, helped recently by a younger generation of accomplished epigraphists, has labored over the years and through many vicissitudes to publish these finds. For this was not [End Page 136] merely a sanctuary, not merely a small marble temple, but a sanctuary and temple covered with inscriptions, most of them (161 of 170 complete enough to categorize) recording the cession or consecration of slaves or children to the service of the goddess. Many of the inscriptions (127 of 194) are virtually complete and dated by local and imperial era, the earliest from A.D. 141-42 (?), the latest from A.D. 313.This handsomely produced and meticulously edited volume therefore publishes a corpus of material that contributes to a number of important topics: to the debate over the legal and actual status of the persons ceded to gods here and elsewhere; to the administration and health of a small sanctuary in the territory of a larger city in Roman Macedonia; and to the religious beliefs that may have undergirded all of the above. It also provides evidence of the erratic but apparent diffusion of Roman legal status, legal concepts, and legal practices even in the backcountry of a larger city, and thereby also sheds interesting light on what happens before and after the Constitutio Antoniniana in one specific place. All this should interest historians of Greece under the Empire, or students of the phenomenon of "Romanization," or historians of Greece keen to track continuity and change in the practices of sanctuaries and slaves.The volume itself is a pleasure to use. The lengthy introduction covers the mythical and actual history of the area (20-23); the geographical and social backgrounds of the dedicators (23-28); the goddess, her multiple names, and her financial dealings (28-33); the legal status of the consecrated (33-60, with a clear summary of a hundred-year-old controversy); onomastics (61-63); and language (63-73)--the Lefkopetra inscriptions constitute a "unique dossier" (63) for how Greek was spoken for centuries during the High Empire. How each lemma is to be laid out is then discussed (74), and the architectural and other pieces described (75-78); for the last, the drawings (figs. 37-51) are indispensable. All that is missing is a discussion of letter forms, itself noted as reserved for further study by J. Touratsoglou (75).The 194 inscriptions (plus five incerta) are clearly presented, restored when need be, translated, and discussed; all but three (nos. 79, 191, and 193) have pictures as well. Because the inscriptions themselves are also very (if not uniformly) formulaic, their readings seem relatively straightforward to me and I can make no suggestions for corrections in what seem to me to be well-read and well-restored texts except to suggest that numbers 136 and 160 belong to the same monument--a suggestion in which I have been anticipated by Marijana Ricl, who was kind enough to send me an article (forthcoming in Tyche 16, 2001) in which she discusses these inscriptions and suggests different supplements or explanations in only thirteen other cases (nos. 5, 26, 45, 46, 51, 53, 58, 63, 78, 90, 93, 115, and 150). In short, these inscriptions have been published by people who know what they are doing, and with all the proper aids and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Centre-pieceSarah Wood (bio)πoν σoν θαvατɛ τo κɛντρoν πoν σoν αδη τo νıκoςO death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?- St. Paul, 1st Letter to the Corinthians… on dit en anglais, self-centred. En vérité je rêve depuis toujours d’écrire un texte self-centred, je n’y suis jamais arrive, je tombe toujours sur les autres, cela finira par se savoir.- Jacques Derrida, ‘Mes chances’The word exists, therefore the (...) feeling exists.- Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.What makes a centre is something sharp: a goad, the point of a needle or the sting of an insect. A spur, peg, rivet or pin. One becomes aware of the possibility of a point, a douleur vive, a lively pain. For the word ‘centre’ is derived from the Greek for ‘sting.’Kentron can mean pain itself. The sting refers to an external cause of pain and to the pain as it is experienced, so it is not one but two; not two but one. And a kentron, even if it is pain and pains you or me, is not itself a perception. It arrives but it’s not given: we have to read and write towards it. For perception, as Derrida clarified in the discussion after giving ‘Structure, Sign and Play’: ‘is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language as a system of reference’(Macksey and Donato 272). Sometimes, in torment, and perhaps still looking for origin and presence, I go to the dictionary.But words have no centre. The dictionary tells me this. Figuratively a kentron is an incentive, a metaphorical goad. However there is no mention of kentron in the etymology of ‘incentive,’ which comes, according to the OED, from canere, to sing. An incentive is what makes you sing. A beautiful mistake, one suspects. But let’s make no mistake, our word kentron is the enchanted and enchanting and chance vibration of a tuning-fork in the nerves that is silence and song. It hits me-and-the-dictionary like lightning because it is part of poetry. What I am saying is: a centre has a particular relation to the part of us that is capable of feeling a desire to die. Hélène Cixous is very precise about this wish: ‘The desire to die is the desire to know; it is not the desire to disappear, and it is not suicide, it is the desire to enjoy’ (Cixous, Three Steps 34). It makes us two, she says. It follows from this, I think, that we have to be two to want to be part of the events that ensue when a poem strikes, to want to know silence from the inside. This kentron, this centre, doubles us up like a stitch.How is it possible to know and enjoy what is not? To expand on this question I can point you to two later texts by Derrida: ‘“Che cos’è la poesia?”,’ and Archive Fever. The former gives an account of poetry as ‘a stranger to all production, especially creation,’ and the latter discusses the Freudian death drive, which is ‘an aggression and a destruction’ of a particularly thorough kind (Derrida, ‘Che’ 233 / 232; Archive Fever 11). A poem enjoins its reader: ‘destroy me [détruis-moi], or rather render my support invisible to the outside, in the world … in any case do what must be done so that the provenance of the mark remains from now on unlocatable or unrecognizable.’ It will be as if the thing Freud calls the death drive had come along, working in silence ‘to destroy [détruire] the archive: on the condition of effacing, but also with a view to effacing its own “proper traces.”‘ (Derrida, Archive Fever 10 / Mal d’archive 24.) Destruction without ruin, without trace, unreadable, completely missing but not without love: what Derrida calls poematic experience entails the forbidden knowing and enjoyment of what never happens as a kind of phenomenal allure that never was, but is all the more taken to heart, loved... (shrink)