AN INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTERDEPARTMENTAL PROGRAM AT COLUMBIA

CLST Doctoral Candidate Susan Rahyab Publishes Chapter in Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy

What's Happening

In a recent chapter in Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy, Volume: 20, "The Keepers of the Agora: Contracts and the Office of Agoranomos in Epigraphic Record" (2023), Susan Rahyab considers four inscriptions from Hellenistic Greece and Asia Minor that reflect the involvement of the agoranomoi with contracts. This chapter argues that this connection with contractual obligations was not exclusive to the agoranomoi in Egypt, who are widely attested as public notaries throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Outside of Egypt, the agoranomoi frequently appear in the epigraphic records of Greek cities as honorees, benefactors, and overseers of markets. Conversely, only four inscriptions attest to a duty to contracts. The relatively meager corpus at our disposal suggests these cities rarely focused on this role in their epigraphic output, perhaps indicating that it was an ad hoc function undertaken when necessary or merely considered commonplace. This sporadic corpus stresses the importance of even a single text in the epigraphic habit of a city as it can illuminate an overlooked piece of its history; in this case, the duty of certain agoranomoi to contracts. These conclusions suggest that the agoranomoi were not irreconcilably different from their Egyptian counterparts, contrary to what a strict dichotomy in previous scholarship has implied.