Repository
Cyrene Museum, 307.
Support
Fragment of a white marble block, broken off at right, below and partly above; the rear side has a recess, either original for attachment to a wall or related to a re-use (0.14; 0.135;0.6).
Layout
Inscribed on the face, beginning at 0.04 form the upmost point that seems to belong to the original upper edge.
Letters
0.018, with forked serifs; broad mu, pi with two long hastae.
Place of Origin
Findspot.
Date
Perhaps end of second or beginning of first century B.C. (lettering)
Findspot
Found before 1977 at Cyrene pleiades; HGL : exact findspot unrecorded.
Last recorded Location
Seen by C. Dobias-Lalou in 1977 in Shahat : Cyrene Museum .
Text constituted from
Transcription from stone (CDL).
Not previously published.
1 ΑΠΟΛ : ἁ πόλ[ις] : Ἀπόλ[λωνι] : Ἀπολ[λώνιος] : Ἀπολ[λόδωρος]
Intraduisible (voir le commentaire).
Not usefully translatable (see commentary).
Intraducibile (vedi commento).
This fragment raises many questions. That the main aim of the inscription is a dedication is shown by the verb at line 3. Demeter should not be the deity to whom the dedication was made because her larger sanctuary, the extra-mural one, had not been investigated between 1915 (Ghislanzoni published two inscriptions) and the period 1969-1978 (American excavations, the finds of which were published by Reynolds, 2012 Reynolds, J.M., 2012, Appendix: the inscriptions on stone and lead, in D. White (ed.), The extramural sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Cyrene, Libya, final reports VIII: the sanctuary’s imperial architectural development, conflict with Christianity, and final days, Philadelphia - see in bibliography ). Anyhow those finds would not have been kept in the main epigraphical collection of the Cyrene Museum. As to the small urban sanctuary of Demeter, situated on the agora, it has been excavated by the Italian missions (Stucchi, Bacchielli) from 1957 on and its finds are also kept in other storerooms. It is thus highly plausible that we have at line 2 a form of the personal name Damatrios.
At line 1, three main readings may be explored, as given in the apparatus. 1) If we read ἁ πόλις, the dedication (sc. of a statue of Damatrios) would be made by 'the city'. This word-order is known elsewhere, but hitherto unattested in Cyrenaica. 2) If we read the name of Apollo, it should stand at the dative case as receiving the offering from Damatrios, but the place of the god's name at the beginning would be very unusual. 3) A third possibility would be a personal name referring to Apollo (Apollonios vel sim : the relation between the two personal names should then remain unclear, for we do not know how much of the stone is lost.
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