1The Lindian Chronicle, a monumental stele-inscription composed in 99 BCE, catalogues the dedications made at the sanctuary of Athena Lindia at Rhodes throughout its history, as well as four recorded epiphanies of the goddess. Many or most of the dedications themselves are no longer extant by the time of the inscription’s composition (the temple burned in a fire of 392/1 BCE), and the authors are thus exhorted to reconstruct “whatever details are fitting (ἁρμόζοντα) about the offerings and the epiphanic appearance of the goddess” from the available sources.1 The stele has already provided fertile ground for examining the relationship of text and object, both in its individual entries and as a singular, composite monument. It has been interpreted, and rightly so, as a “relic of relics,” a record of the temple as “community museum,” and a document of a “lost and partially imagined world.”2 Perhaps most pertinent here, Platt has called it a “rematerialization” of the lost items, an analysis that calls to mind the physical substance of writing and its power to conjure long-lost things.3 The stele’s engagement with objects and their materials, as well as its own perceived purposes, continues to warrant study and discussion. In particular, the dedicatory inscriptions of the Chronicle allow special insight into the reception of archaic inscriptions by late Hellenistic officials. These inscriptions-within-the-inscription form a small corpus unto themselves, a collection of para-dedications functioning both in conjunction with and independently of their supports.

2Beginning with the premise that the Lindian Chronicle from its inception emphasizes the materiality of inscriptions, this paper examines the peculiar interaction between dedicatory object and dedicatory text in a context in which both have been lost.4 The analysis draws on Bill Brown’s Thing Theory and understanding of “objects” in distinction to “things” – the former, functional items with recognizable purposes and histories; the latter, physical and temporally indistinct masses of matter.5 Brown’s specifically temporal characterizations offer ways of interpreting items with complex pasts; I argue here that the compilers of the Chronicle recreate the items they list as layered objects and things, and that the dedicatory inscriptions quoted on them mediate between these layers.6 The second part of the paper considers this artifactual layering in the case of the Chronicle’s most elaborate entry, for three painted pinakes dedicated as victory-offerings. Here, I suggest, the compilers of the Chronicle or their sources construct an elaborate amalgam of past object and present thing by combining archaic artifacts and an anachronistic poetics focused on the key term σῆμα. This analysis has two broader ramifications. It illuminates the peculiar “thingness” of objects in the pre-modern world, and it suggests an expanding, diachronic interpretation of σῆμα in the post-Classical world. It ultimately emerges that the underlying tensions between objects and things are not merely products of modernity but are alive and well in 99 BCE.

3The compilers of the Chronicle explicitly present inscriptions (ἐπιγραφαί) not as floating texts but as physical entities with lives of their own. In the prescript to the Chronicle, the dedicatory inscriptions receive almost equal billing to the treasures themselves. The main reasons motivating the creation of the Chronicle are stated as (a) the temple has a long tradition of beautiful dedications and epiphany and (b) “it happens that many of these dedications along with their inscriptions (ἐπιγραφᾶν) have been destroyed (ἐφθάρθαι) on account of time” (A3-4).7 Presented thus, the inscriptions not only rival the importance of the dedicatory objects but also are afforded a material status, conceived of as objects in their own right. The stele thus interrogates the very nature of text as a transmittable medium and collapses the distinction between texts and non-textual objects. Like the sanctuary’s φιάλαι, jewelry, armor and pottery, inscriptions too are subject to the deleterious forces of time, can degrade, and must thus be reconstructed on the stele.8 While a modern reader might contend that the inscriptions in a sense have not been completely destroyed – after all, the compilers’ sources have preserved the content of the texts – the Chronicle treats written letters too as relics, whose essence consists in the marks of the chisel and not just the memory of words. In this sense they can not only deteriorate, but can also then be recreated by new chisels, as those that have inscribed them here. Thus the material nature of inscriptions impinges both on the contents of the Chronicle and, in a meta-textual way, on its own usefulness.9

Objects layered with things

4Thing Theory presents several ways of understanding “objects” and “things.”10 In one formulation, Brown observes that objects have stories, while things are historically opaque, analyzable only in their present, hic-et-nunc form: “As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture…A thing, in contrast [to an object], can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.”11 This distinction models well the tensions inherent in dedications of items not originally fashioned as votives but once used in everyday life: relics such as weapons, clothing, and vessels. These types of dedications both open windows to their past lives but also sit in the sanctuary as lumps of metal, fabric, and clay that serve not to injure, cover, or contain but to honor and re-honor the gods. The Lindian Chronicle, we might then say, is concerned with showing both the objecthood and thingness of what it lists. The “thingness” of the dedication is perhaps most evident in the two early entries for a phialē dedicated by Lindos (B 1-2) and an urn or pitcher (krōsos) dedicated by the Telchines (B 9-11), which both specify that “no one could figure out what it was made of,” as if their functionality and origins have become opaque.12 But the statuses of object and thing tend also to map onto two time-spaces for the items – their oldest lives as possessions elsewhere, and their more recent, but still defunct, lives as dedications at Lindos. Accordingly, entries often include details that pertain to both states. The distinction can emerge within just a few words, such as in the case of “those making an expedition with Kleoboulos against Lycia, eight shields and a golden circlet for the statue” (C 1-5), where the remoteness of the expedition is recalled in the aorist participle and the place-name, while the nearer dedicatory context emerges in the reference to the statue. The shields and circlet, meanwhile, silently metamorphose from item to dedication, perhaps illustrating what Brown has called the “thing/object dialectic,” in which (as he italicizes) “the thing seems to name the object just as it is even as it names some thing else.”13

5In one special example, the moment of dedication is itself narrated and we witness the passage from object to thing. In the first of the four epiphanies the Chronicle recounts, the Persians doubt the goddess’s power to come to the aid of the Lindians, whom they are besieging. She appears and showers rainwater on them in their need, after which one of the Persians, amazed, immediately removes his accessories and sends them to be dedicated: “mantle and necklace and armlets, as well as his headdress and short sword, and also the carriage, which had been saved before, but during the priesthood of Halios of Ekles son of Astyanax, were completely burned along with most of the dedications when the temple caught fire” (D 35-42). These same items appear in the preceding inventory as dedications of Darius (C 65-74). As Platt observes, this passage shows that “ritual responses to Athena’s epiphany mirror precisely the practices of dedication in her sanctuary;”14 at the same time, the story focuses us on the intimate mechanics of transfer between object and thing. In order to repurpose his kosmos as an adornment for the goddess, the Persian leader must remove it from use. It then leaves historic time-space and moves into the ever-reenacted dedicatory realm of the temple. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that to effect the transfer the Persian must send the items elsewhere (εἰσέπεμψε, D 36). As well as exploiting the semantics of kosmos to echo the idea in the prescript that the sanctuary has been literally “dressed” (κεκόσμηται) because of epiphany15, the account also signals the metaphor inherent in the compilers’ charge to write “whatever is fitting (ἁρμόζοντα) about the dedications and the epiphanies:” those things that are appropriate, but also “fit,” as would clothing or accessories. Thus ἁρμόζοντα encapsulates both object-possessions and thing-dedications.

6Elsewhere, an elaborated narrative does not accompany the Chronicle entries and they rather stand alone. In lieu of a grand epiphany story, quoted inscriptions tend to do the work of navigating between possession and dedication. They can do so rather telegraphically, as in the case of Kanopos, “steersman of Menelaos,” who dedicated “oars, on which it had been inscribed, ‘Kanopos to Athena and Poseidon’ ” (B 73-74).16 The two gods in the inscription signal the two stages of the oars’ existence, as Poseidon recalls their use at sea, while Athena signals their status as a dedication. More complex examples are the items that have more than one inscription, such as the krater dedicated by Phalaris, tyrant of Akragas (B 21-28). The compilers describe the object: “on one part of it the Titanomachy had been embossed (ἐτετόρευτο), and on the other Kronos snatching (λαμβάνων) his children from Rhea and swallowing (καταπείνων) them. On its lip it had been inscribed: “Daidalos gave me as a guest-gift (ξείνιον) to Kokalos.” On its base (βάσιος), “Phalaris from Akragas to Lindian Athena.” The two inscriptions correspond to the layered history of the krater, first as initially self-identified as a ξείνιον (an Ionic form that situates the krater in a different place), with possible reference to Daidalos as its maker, and second, its presence at Lindos as a dedication.17 The placement of the texts on the top and bottom of the vessel frames its center between more- and less- remote pasts, and the reader of the Chronicle is able to imagine it in both scenarios.

7By utilizing the diachronic capabilities of dedicatory inscription in conjunction with descriptions of the dedications, and without a genuine artifact to get in the way, the Chronicle seems able to accomplish leaps of space and time that other descriptive, ecphrastic, or diagrammatic objects cannot. Latour has pointed out that the technical drawing, for instance, “is a great way to draw parts, order their fabrication, stabilize specifications, verify standards, maintain inventories, and render all these operations traceable and accountable, [yet] it is nevertheless decidedly not what defines the “thingness” or the “cosmicity” of techniques”; 18 and yet the Chronicle, while a different kind of product, seems able to accomplish both, presenting a hologram of things and objects at once.19

The pinakes

8If inscriptions thus mediate between the two lives of the dedicatory object-thing, one example stands out for its more elaborate text accompanying simpler textual vehicle. Amidst the weapons, armor, jewelry and vessels of the Lindian Chronicle are three unique dedications of plaques (pinakes), presented together as a group dedicated by three named phulai (B 88-100):

τᾶν φυλᾶν ἑκάστα πίνακα [παναρχ]αϊκόν, ἐν ὧι ἦν
ἐζωγραφημένος φύλαρχος καὶ δρομεῖς ἐννῆ
πάντες ἀρχαϊκῶς ἔχοντες τοῖς <σ>χήμασι, ὧν ἑκά-
στου ἐπεγέγραπτο τ[ᾶ]ι εἰκόνι τὸ ὄνομα, κ[αὶ] ἐ-
πὶ μὲν τοῦ ἑνὸς τῶν π[ιν]ά[κ]ων ἐπεγέγραπτο·
“Ἁλιαδᾶν φυλὰ νικάσ[ασ’ ἀν]έθηκε τᾶι Λινδίαι
Ἀθάναι”, ἐφ’ ἑτέρου δέ· “Νίκας τόδ’ ἐστὶ σᾶμα· τῶν
Αὐτοχθόνων φυλὰ κρατήσασ’ ἀγλάϊ<ξ>ε τὰν θεόν”,
ἐπὶ δὲ τοῦ τρίτου· “Τελχείνων φυλὰ νικῶσ’ ἀνέθ[η]-
κεν Ἀθάναι, Λυκωπάδας δέ ὁ Λυγκέως παῖς ἐλαμ-
παδάρχει”. περὶ τούτων ἱστορεῖ Γόργων ἐν τᾶι α
τᾶν περὶ Ῥόδου, Ξεναγόρας ἐν τᾶι α τᾶς χρονικᾶς
συντάξιος.

Each of the tribes, a very old pinax, on which had been painted a phylarch and nine runners20 all being archaic in appearance. Of which the name of each was inscribed on his image, and on one pinax had been inscribed: “The tribe of the Haliadai, having won, dedicated to Athena Lindia”. On the second: “This is the sign of victory. The tribe of the Authochthonoi, having prevailed, adorned the goddess.” On the third: “The tribe of the Telchines, winning, dedicated to Athena, and Lycopadas son of Lykeus was the torch-race leader”. Concerning these things Gorgon recounts in Book 1 of his work concerning Rhodes, Xenagoras in Book A of his chronological treatise.

9This entry is unique within the Chronicle in several respects. It is the only entry for pinakes, common dedicatory offerings at sanctuaries throughout the Greek world between the 7^th-4^th centuries BCE (cf. phialai, of which there are several). It also describes objects that arguably have less intrinsic value than almost all the other dedications in the Chronicle, which are in many cases made of precious metals or belonged to legendary figures. Indeed, evidence suggests that sanctuaries were often so full of dedicatory pinakes as to produce problems of overcrowding.21 Moreover, this is the only series of objects in the Chronicle grouped together seemingly because of their similarity, despite having different dedicators. Finally, it records more elaborate inscriptions than any other entry and it describes the painted images on the pinakes in more detail than it does the adornment of other items. Somewhat surprisingly, the material of the pinakes themselves is not specified. Perhaps the compilers did not know, perhaps they thought this would be self-evident to a reader, who might assume wood or ceramic, or perhaps they were interested only in materials more precious than these.22 Whatever the case, the pinakes stand out as items that are both more commonplace than the others in the Chronicle, but also more painstakingly described. In particular, the compilers go to lengths to convince the audience of their antiquity, calling them παναρχαϊκόν (if we accept Blinkenberg’s restoration) as well as describing the figures as ἀρχαϊκῶς ἔχοντες τοῖς σχήμασι. One gets the impression that rather than having singular value as one-of-a-kind treasures in the sanctuary, they imbue the collection with a kind of archetypal archaic flavor, providing a representative sample of a dedicatory item that the 1^st century BCE viewer might expect to have filled the sanctuary alongside the relics, phialai, and statuary.

10The dedicatory inscriptions contribute to this “archetypal” quality, since they in many ways accord formulaically with extant dedications for archaic athletic victories. And yet, it is in their non-formulaic features that we can observe both the tension between “object” and “thing” and, as I shall suggest below, a fabricated chronological layering. I isolate the texts here for reference:

A. Ἁλιαδᾶν φυλὰ νικάσ[ασ’ ἀν]έθηκε τᾶι Λινδίαι | Ἀθάναι.
B. Νίκας τόδ’ ἐστὶ σᾶμα· τῶν | Αὐτοχθόνων
φυλὰ κρατήσασ’ ἀγλάϊ<ξ>ε τὰν θεόν
C. Τελχείνων φυλὰ νικῶσ’ ἀνέθ[η]κεν Ἀθάναι
Λυκωπάδας δὲ ὁ Λυγκέως παῖς ἐλαμπαδάρχει

11The inscriptions on the pinakes commemorate victories in some event, perhaps a torch-race, for three tribes named the Haliadai, Authochthones, and Telcheines.23 Already in these tribal names time seems to collapse, for while they may be historical names of Lindian tribes, they also recall the founding peoples of Rhodes at different moments of legendary history. Strabo records that the Telcheines were thought to be the original inhabitants of Rhodes, followed by the Heliadai; perhaps “Autochthones” here represents some earliest level of habitation.24 This backward-looking chronology also forms a parallel to the presentation of Rhodian history in Pindar’s Olympian 7, famously said to have graced the temple at Lindos in gold letters.25

12But a more compelling chronological layering emerges when one analyzes the three inscriptions within the generic context of victory epigram.26 Joseph Day, following upon the ideas of Leslie Kurke, has argued that archaic epigrams for athletic victors, like epinician songs, re-enact the moment of aggelia (proclamation of the victor) in formulaic terms.27 As Day explains, “a full aggelia included four rubrics: the victor’s name, his father’s name, city, and event. His age-category (if not adult) and a form of νικάω, “I win” or “defeat,” were often added.”28 We can identify several of these elements in the inscriptions here: text C includes the event, as well as a name and patronymic; all three texts name the victorious phylai and in this way identify their city, and texts A and C contain a participial form of νικάω, while B refers to the noun νίκη. Thus they accord with the archaic poetics of victory epigram (although in the last section of this paper I will discuss the exceptional case of pinax B).

13And yet while the inscriptions sound archaic, and the pinakes sound as if they look archaic, I would suggest that the two together do not fully form credible archaic artifacts, but are rather combined artificially. It is true that athletic competition was a relatively common subject to be depicted on pinakes, and Higbie cites a fourth-century example depicting runners from the Pireaus possibly analogous to the scene described here.29 Yet the juxtaposition of this kind of depiction with a dedicatory epigram seems without much parallel in extant material evidence. Extant pinakes are often painted with inscriptions, but the texts rarely include longer dedicatory verses, or details about the reason for the dedication; they often do not include even the dedicator’s name.30 Rather, they have text labeling figures depicted on them (as described in the beginning of this entry) and a brief dedicatory statement that includes a verb of dedication and god’s name, or, less commonly, the dedicator and/or artist’s name.31 One exception in the Attic corpus that may preserve part of a metrical inscription seems not to have had other figural decoration; descriptions of pinakes for Asklepios dedicated by healed patients likewise cite epigrams but not images.32 Thus it seems possible that archaic pinakes held either images or poetic text, but not necessarily both.33 These features remain fairly consistent across larger collections of pinakes, such as the painted pottery examples from Attica or Penteskouphia, and in more singular examples such as the painted wooden group from Pitsa, which may be the type of object the compilers mean for their audience to imagine.34 Meanwhile, the 5000+ terracotta relief pinakes in the vast corpus from Locri Epizephyrii are painted but uninscribed.35 Though one cannot completely rule out the plausibility of dedicatory epigrams on these groups of objects, it seems possible that the compilers of the Chronicle, or their sources, may have composed or borrowed some inscriptions to adorn their putative pinakes, imagining a hybrid archaic super-object that combined the iconographic qualities of the dedicatory pinax with the poetics of victory epigram.

14The archaic victory epigram reverberated with civic pride. As Day puts it: “[w]hen such verses were performed or read out from an epigram, the city’s kleos was sounded again, as when a herald first proclaimed the victory: representation of aggelia shaded into reperformance.”36 In the context of the Lindian Chronicle, the pinax inscriptions enact this reperformance twice over, recalling the moment of dedication, and then, further back, the moment of victory, in another instance of the layered pasts discussed above.

The σᾶμα νίκας

15For Day, however, as for Kurke, the reenacting force of the archaic epigram works in conjunction with a victor statue, which often represents the victor in the moment of celebration rather than athletic action.37 This relationship of poem and statue collapses space and time, between the place and moment of victory to the dedicatory context and its reperformance, but it depends on an interaction with the dedicatory image. Here our pinakes pose a problem. Certainly, they do not visually represent the aggelia, nor are they imposing or expensive monuments; and yet inscription B presents itself as σᾶμα νίκας. This collocation would seem to have much to recommend it for an archaic victory epigram, for it combines the archaic poetics of σῆμα – a sign to be deciphered but also a stone marker – with the context and abstract idea of victory.38 Yet the two terms together never appear in archaic dedicatory epigram. Σῆμα almost invariably denotes a tomb, or at least a monument of some sort, and is not accompanied by an abstract limiting modifier but a name.39 Σῆμα τόδε should imply a sepulchral inscription, with the name of the deceased in the genitive, but here it has been replaced by νίκης. Again, it is as if an archaic-styled form has been coopted, transferred to a new dedicatory context.

16Moreover, the idea that a pinax – as opposed to a stele or slab – can be a σῆμα νίκης causes some interpretative trouble. Certainly it is not a grand monument of the sort σῆμα usually implies. Neither is it a visible sign of the victory in the sense of a prize, which the phrase seems to denote in the closest parallel to this text, a 1st century CE inscription for victory in a speaking contest. The epigram accompanied a dedication of apples to Apollo; these were the prizes from the contest of εὐεπίη at Delphi, and are here labeled as σήματα νίκης (IG II² 3158, 1-2 = Manieri Leb. 14, 1-2 = GA App. epigram 253, 1-2):

σοὶ τάδ’ Ὀνήτ]ωρ μῆλα, πατρώιε, σήματα νίκης
Πυθῴης ἱερῆς τ’ ἀντίθεμ’ εὐεπίης·
To you, ancestral one, Onetor dedicated these apples, signs of Pythian victory and sacred eloquence.

17Here, the σῆμα νίκης clearly corresponds with the prize, later repurposed into a dedication.40 Like a victor statue, the apples shuttle the viewer of the epigram from the victory to the dedication. The Lindian Chronicle pinax, however, only serves as a dedication, collapsing the idea of the later dedication with the earlier σῆμα-prize. It seems to have conflated the conventions of archaic sepulchral epigram on the one hand and Hellenistic victory prize on the other into an anachronistic self-reference. It also perhaps makes veiled allusion to the only other pinax described as containing σήματα – that which Bellerophontes carries with him to the Lycian king in Book 6 of the Iliad.41

18The ambiguous reference of σῆμα in connection to victory and also death finds a compelling parallel, and perhaps a precedent, in a difficult passage of Euripides’ Phoenissae. The messenger scene gives report of the seers’ actions before Eteocles’ and Polyneices’ battle (1255-1258):

μάντεις δὲ μῆλ’ ἔσφαζον ἐμπύρους τ’ ἀκμὰς
ῥήξεις τ’ ἐνώμων ὑγρότητ’ ἐναντίαν
ἄκραν τε λαμπάδ’, ἣ δυοῖν ὅρους ἔχει,
νίκης τε σῆμα καὶ τὸ τῶν ἡσσωμένων.

19And the prophets were slaughtering flocks and they observed the fissures of the tips of sacrificial flame, [a sign of] opposing/unfavourable moistness, and the peak of flame, which holds the defining portents of two things, the sign of victory and that of the defeated. (Mastronarde 1994).

20Here, σῆμα νίκης appears as one of two possible codes attributed to the tip of the sacrificial fire.42 While the scene literally describes the process of prophetic interpretation, where σῆμα denotes the variable “signal” to be interpreted by the seer, this part of the passage also invokes the concrete language of inscribed monuments and the diction of epigram. The flame-tips hold two possible ὅρους, which Kovacs and Mastronarde take to denote a metaphoric “landmark” or “signpost,” and which commonly denote boundary stones and inscribed stone memorials.43 In the subsequent line, the ὅροι are restated as an ambivalent σῆμα – of both νίκης “victory” and of τῶν ἡσσωμένων “the ones defeated.” Far more than just a “sign,” the fire outlines here the two types of inscribed monuments that σῆμα can denote: a victorious dedication, or, and more commonly, a tomb.44 The irony of this context, of course, is that for the brothers the σῆμα will signify both these options at once, as both Eteocles and Polyneices will simultaneously be victorious and lie dead. Thus their imagined σῆμα serves as a doubly-valent, joint affair, at once victory monument and tombstone.

21In addition to referring to an ambiguous σῆμα νίκης, this line affords some tantalizing structural correspondences to the first line of pinax B. Both are in trimeters (not the most common meter for archaic dedicatory epigram); in both lines νίκης takes the first position, with σῆμα following closely; both lines end with metrically equivalent genitive plurals (τῶν Αὐτοχθόνων ~ τῶν ἡσσωμένων). While it is possible both the Phoenissae and the apple epigram reflect archaic dedicatory formulae not otherwise attested, I am more tempted to surmise that the compilers or sources of the Lindian Chronicle composed the epigram of pinax B influenced by texts such as these.

22Euripidean or not, it appears that the σῆμα νίκης enjoys a robust Nachleben in Imperial and late antique poetry, where it reappears three times in the plural. In an echo of the Phoenissae passage, the admixture of competition and tomb frames its appearance in book 37 of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, which describes funeral games for Opheltes. We soon learn that Phaunos, son of Circe, tasked with making fire for the pyre, finds sulphur “where the lightning bolts falling from the sky made trustworthy signs of victory” (37, 60-61: ὁππόθι σήματα νίκης / ἠερόθεν πίπτοντες ἐπιστώσαντο κεραυνοί).

23Meanwhile, two further instances of this collocation are striking for their similarity in context to the Lindian Chronicle, as both occur in descriptions of collected treasures. First of these is Quintus of Smyrna’s account of the Achaian ships’ departure from Troy, bedecked with spoils of war, which he focalizes as the viewpoint of the heroes on board (14, 374-376):

ἀμφὶ δ᾿ ἄρα σφίσι πολλὰ περὶ πρώρῃσιν ἔκειντο
ἔντε᾿ ἀποκταμένων· καθύπερθε δὲ σήματα νίκης
῾μυρί᾿ ἀπῃώρηντο·

Around them on the prows lay much
armor of those killed, and from above manifold signs of victory
were hung.

24The passage is reminiscent of the Chronicle for its attention to heaps of legendary objects piled in heaps in once place: in Quintus’s imagination, the ships themselves have become reliquaries and treasuries. As in the victory inscription, σήματα νίκης here too must denote physical spoils, the prizes that come from defeating the enemy (perhaps in this case specifying plundered goods other than armor or weapons). Even more closely parallel to the Lindian Chronicle in premise and structure is Christodorus of Coptus’ ekphrastic hexameter inventory of bronze statues in the Byzantine gymnasium of Zeuxippus that forms book 2 of the Palatine Anthology.45 His entry for the statue of Amphitryon labels his crown as a σῆμα νίκης (GA II.367-371):

Ἀμφιτρύων δ’ ἤστραπτεν ἀπειρογάμῳ τρίχα δάφνῃ
στεψάμενος· πᾶσιν μὲν ἐύσκοπος εἴδετο μάντις·
ἀλλ’ οὐ μάντις ἔην, Ταφίης δ’ ἐπὶ σήματι νίκης
στέμμα πολυστρέπτοισιν ἐφάρμενον εἶχεν ἐθείραις
Ἀλκμήνης μενέχαρμος ἀριστοτόκου παρακοίτης.

Amphitryon sparkled, his hair garlanded with virgin
laurel. To everyone he looked like a keen-eyed seer.
But he was no seer, and for a sign of (his) victory over the Taphians,
he had a crown fitted on his spiralling locks,
he, the battle-strong husband of Alkmene, mother of a noble son.

25Christodorus presents a similar σῆμα νίκης to that of Quintus – presumably Amphitryon’s crown is a war-spoil taken from the Taphians just as the Achaians’ spoils from Troy. Regardless of its origin, the phrase seems used in these contexts as almost a technical term, a kenning of sorts for a spoil or prize, especially in the context of displayed treasure.

26A reexamination of the Lindian Chronicle dedication on pinax C within this later framework suggests that its composer may have been operating within multiple poetic systems at once, blending archaic-styled victory epigram with a later, less-formulaic idiom. In presenting the pinax as a σῆμα νίκης, the epigram fully fuses “object” and “thing.” The term comprises both the prize of victory and a most potent form of dedication, allowing for the contest and the dedication to remain ever present in the Chronicle. Thus a viewer of the Lindos stele in the 1st century BCE forms a connection to multiple temporalities: first to the remote legendary past, the competition itself and perhaps the oldest substrates of Rhodian historical inhabitants (via the tribes); but second, and perhaps more directly, to the less-remote world of the archaic and Classical sanctuary, in which viewers were imagined to engage with the objects on display. The epigrams on the pinakes, while in Lindian space, nonetheless attempt to reenact a legendary victory of deepest antiquity, transporting the 1st century BCE audience to the moment of victory through multiple material layers fused together: stone stele, pinax, and epigram.