Rites and Wrongs: the Vexed Case against Nicomachus

Generations of scholars have noted the apparent weakness of the case in Lysias 30 which presents the prosecution against Nicomachus for his role on a commission of anagrapheis appointed, as the name implies, to "write up" the laws of Athens at the end of the fifth century BC. The weakness was summed up by Edwin Carawan who wrote that "it has proved difficult to determine just what crime Nicomachus was charged with". It seems clear from the text that the charge related to exceeding part of the anagrapheis' mandate concerned with determining the calendar of state sacrifices. The problem revolves around which source documents the anagrapheis used. However, in 2006 Max Nelson proposed a persuasive new reading of a garbled phrase in the manuscripts which has the effect of restricting the source documents to just kurbeis, whereas the traditional text, based upon an early-eighteenth century emendation, inserts stelae, thus adding another category of documents. Using Nelson's reading, and building upon the scholarship of many others who have pondered this vexed case, in this chapter I re-evaluate the text and associated physical and epigraphical evidence of fragments of the state calendar. I look at the motivations for the charge stemming from malice, loss of benefits and status, and the politics of the response of the Athenian democracy to oligarchic challenge in the febrile circumstances of the year 399 which saw the trial and execution of Socrates. This was mediated through the question of state responsibility for ancestral, but private, sacrifices. I conclude there is good reason to believe that Nicomachus successfully defended himself, but the calendar may have been cut back, rather than erased as generally believed.

© Hellēnikē Epigraphikē Hetaireia, 2024.