LILIAN HAMILTON JEFFERY

1915-1986

11. Contribution to IG I³

Some overlap was already visible with the finds from the Acropolis. She was therefore reasonably prepared when, in 1962, a small cabal persuaded Professor Klaffenbach of the Berlin Academy that I was the person to organize a new edition of Inscriptiones Graecae, I, the volume containing Attic inscriptions to 403 BC. I needed collaborators and was in particular certain that I could not move a step without Anne. Somewhat to her relief, there were fewer offers of help for the private inscriptions than for the public, and we started off, rather slowly for my part, on the basis that the bulk of the private texts would fall to her. The main attraction for her was the possibility of extending her operations on the workshops to the dedications. Raubitschek had arranged his catalogue by types of monument; she would order the texts chronologically and by workshops. At this stage, we had not really faced another major problem about private texts, how to tell whether a private gravestone was earlier than 403; that was a serious mistake, since she never felt really happy with this later material.

Anne's museum work for the task, supported by a Leverhulme grant, took nearly a year in 1967-8. Doing many other things at the same time and grumbling vigorously about the need to write in Latin, she had more or less completed her first draft by 1973; a spell as Catharine McBride Guest Lecturer at Bryn Mawr ('this blissful abode') in 1971 helped greatly here. The work remains unpublished, which cries for explanation. No clear agreement about format had been arrived at with Klaffenbach, and it turned out that, by his successor's standards, by no means always unreasonable, our presentation was often seriously inadequate. Fighting the public inscriptions through to publication as a first fascicule in 1981 was not easy, and meanwhile Anne lost impetus for tidying and improving her contribution. If bilingual word-processing had been available ten years earlier, it would have helped; some texts were typed three or four times.

What would have been sensible, as we later saw, would have been for Anne to write an article, in the middle 1970s, to show how she was extending her workshops from the gravestones into the dedications, but this was never done. Her conclusions come out fairly clearly from her arrangement and her cross-referencing, and some clarification is still perhaps possible from her notes. When the volume is finally published, the feat of organization and acute observation it involved will gradually become clear.

IG i³ 597 (Dedications on the Athenian Acropolis 317; LSAG 77.25):
Dedication by Alkmeonides c. 550-540

This is the major achievement involved in this unpublished work. Other aspects were less satisfactory. She started by being too easily satisfied with Raubitschek's treatment of verse inscriptions; the work of her pupil Peter Hansen has made a great difference here. There is a problem about dating texts before and after the Persian sack of the Acropolis in 480 BC; she had thought she had found a way of getting a more refined solution than Raubitschek's, but, with only a few months to live, she had to agree that it would not work. Tidying for publication, after she turned the material over to me, has therefore taken longer than I would have hoped.