…for these, I thank you, and I suppose that it is proper for all men in general, and your city in particular, to perpetuate special honors, suitable for the gods, in proportion to the magnitude of my father's services to the whole world. But I myself am satisfied with the more modest honors suitable for mortal men…
SEG XI.922 (Ehrenberg and Jones, Documents 102)

Introduction

Longer ago than I now care to admit, I did some work on a pair of very interesting—and important—inscriptions from a town in what was Roman Sparta. These inscriptions set out the honours that the community of Gytheum had awarded to members of the Roman Imperial family and the emperor's reply.

These inscriptions were significant for two reasons. The first contained the most detailed account that we have of the ceremonies of the Roman imperial cult. The second reinforced various ancient historical accounts that said that Augustus's adoptive son, TIBERIUS, had refused to accept imperial honours. Ever since, scholars have been arguing over how serious Tiberius's objections actually were.

Whilst working on this material, it was difficult to find photographs of the two inscriptions in time for my deadline—despite the fact that historians constantly refer to them in discussions of Roman religion. Eventually, I managed to get them from a journal published in the late 1920s via Stanford's Interlibrary Loan service. But not everyone has access to these resources.

The point of these pages is to get these images online for anyone who wants to use them for teaching or even just to look at. I have included a fairly full bibliography and I may get around to putting more discussion of these inscriptions online, but for now these pages are here just hold the images and the greek text.

If you happen to find these pages useful, why not drop me a line and let me know? And if you use these images in an essay, please include these pages in your list of citations.

One final word. The original files are big, as my main goal was to have something that I could print out and include in a written paper. They are included in the Large Files section. Consider yourselves warned.