Locrian Pinax

The texts I will examine are the dedicatory epigrams numbered 3, 4 through 6, and 9 in Gow and Page’s Hellenistic Epigrams. Poem 3 (AP 6.265), commemorating the dedication of a robe to Hera Lacinia by the author and her mother, may be paralleled with the well-known fifth-century Locrian pinax types 16 and 17 (Prückner), showing a priestess and four maidens bearing a robe as offering to the cult statue of Persephone (or Aphrodite). Poems 4, 5, and 6 (AP 9.332, 6.275, 9.605), which deal with offerings to Aphrodite by hetairai, can be brought into conjunction with archaeological evidence for archaic and Hellenistic sanctuaries of Aphrodite, with controversial testimony to sacred prostitution (Justin 21.3), and with the peculiar nature of Aphrodite’s divine personality at Locri (Sourvinou-Inwood 1978). Mention of Adonis, Aphrodite’s consort, in poem 5 is of considerable interest in view of Barra Bagnasco’s recent identification of the so-called “House of the Lions” as a site of Adonis worship (1994). Lastly, the demonstrably religious language used to describe a portrait of Sabaethis in G-P 9 (AP 6.354) may imply that she was an initiate of Pythagoreanism or some other mystery cult.