Commemorating Pious Service: Images in Honour of Male and Female Priestly Officers in Asia Minor and the Eastern Aegean in Hellenistic and Roman Times

Abstract

The paper addresses questions associated with images erected in honour of priestly officials in the Greek cities of the eastern Aegean and Asia Minor in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial times. More concretely, it deals with the agents responsible for this specific type of tribute, the reasons behind the erection of priestly imagery, and its placement in public civic spaces and sanctuaries. Although there can be no doubt about the importance of priestly officers in Greek antiquity, an analysis of the honours, especially of those in the form of sculpted or painted images, that priests and priestesses received will lead to a necessary re-evaluation of the ways in which we understand their exact status within the social, political, and religious hierarchy of any given city. Compared to successful athletes, international mediators, or wealthy benefactors, Greek priests and priestesses were not as highly celebrated as we have always presupposed them to be.In the past fifty years, archaeological and historical scholarship on cult personnel has demonstrated a noticeable bias for priestesses, which reflects to a certain extent the imbalance in the preserved evidence. Both J.A. Turner's doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara and J.B. Connelly's recent monograph, for example, deal exclusively with imagery and social as well as religious functions of female priestly officers. 1 R. van Bremen's book, on the other hand, examines female civic participation. 2 U. Kron's influential arti-|| * I am very grateful to Marietta Horster and Anja Klöckner for inviting me to such an intellectually stimulating and productive conference at the University of Mainz. The present paper owes a great deal to all the colleagues and friends with whom I enjoyed an intensive exchange of ideas during the conference, but I would specifically like to thank Jochen Griesbach, Uta Kron, Stéphanie Paul, Oliver Pilz, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, and Eftychia Stavrianopoulou for their time and constructive criticism. I am deeply thankful to Irina Oryshkevich for improving my English. All mistakes -linguistic and otherwise -remain mine.