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Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World

University of California Press

A modern commonplace holds that Greek civic religion after the fourth century B.C. was an empty shell, traditional forms followed without emotion, and that the Greeks' true longings expressed themselves in the mystery religions and other novelties or in philosophy—in phenomena at once more personal and more universal than the cults of the old gods. This view owes much to hindsight, our desire to explain the rise of Christianity. An enduring source of strength of pagan cults was precisely their local and formal character: the gods of one's own city and country watched over places familiar and significant, bound up with the life cycle of the individual and the group. The holy places of one's land had each been touched by a particular god for reasons known to the community. Here were powerful roots, with which the new religions of Roman times offered little to compete, until the rise of the cult of saints. Civic religion, polytheism, would decline only with civic life itself in late antiquity.

In the Hellenistic period, certain places, either temples with their precincts or whole cities with their territories, were declared by foreign states to be "sacred and inviolable" in honor of the city's tutelary god. This episode in the history of Greek civic religion and Greek diplomacy is the concern of the present volume.

Est locus . . . The literature of the Greeks and Romans provides rich testimony to their emotional response to sacred places, where ritual, myth, dedicatory objects, or even natural setting1 betokened the presence or past action of a god.

Stat vetus et multos incaedua silva per annos; credibile est illi numen inesse loco (Ov. Am. 3.1-2; cf. Fast. 3.295-296).

Many religions, in separating the sacred from the profane,2 apply this distinction to space; places attributed to the divine are in some measure under the god's authority, and in them mortals may be bound by rules that do not pertain in secular space. In ancient Greece this boundary was especially strong: as we see in many anecdotes from both life and literature, anyone who entered a temple precinct or clasped an altar or even achieved some other physical connection with sacred space3 was to be immune from violence, for he had put himself at the discretion of the god rather than of man.4 Anyone could do it, at any sacred place. Other religions can be cited in which this barrier is less forceful or more selective. In Republican Rome such a "right of asylum" was an anomaly, specially conceded to only one or two temples: immunity from secular intrusion was not automatically a property of sacred space. Similarly, in pharaonic Egypt, temples seem not to have enjoyed immunity from the civil authorities. So is it also in the modern West: the rise of the secular state was accompanied by the gradual, and often disputed, rejection of the late antique and medieval tradition of the right of asylum of Christian churches.5 Today in the United States, a fugitive from the law will gain no immunity by fleeing to a church, synagogue, or mosque.

In A.D. 22, Roman authorities feared that the right of asylum practiced in their Greek provinces posed a threat to civic tranquility. Moderns might well sympathize; exemption from the power of the state seems on its face subversive to good order. It is worth observing, therefore, that selective territorial immunity from the law is a widely attested practice, despite which the needs of public order are successfully met. Early modern London had various neighborhoods that served as debtors' asylums, from which the instruments of public authority were excluded. These areas were left to govern themselves, and they maintained strict admissions policies; the last of them was abolished by act of Parliament in

For Greek vocabulary on the distinction see W. R. Connor, AncSoc 19 (1988) 161-188. For the distinction in Christianity see R. A. Markus, JECS 2 (1994) 257-271.

For example by a rope: so the Cylonian conspirators (Plut. Sel. 12.1); of places: Ephesus (Hdt. 1.26; cf. Polyaen. 6.50; Ael. VH 3.26); Rheneia (Thuc. 3.104.2).

See, for instance, U. Sinn, "Greek Sanctuaries as Places of Refuge," in Greek Sanctuaries , ed. N. Marinatos and R. Hägg (London/New York 1993) 88-109.

For the case of England see I. D. Thornley, in Tudor Studies ... A. F. Pollard , ed. R. W. Seton-Watson (London 1924) 182-206. Eventually Tacitus' description of the review of A.D. 22 (Ann. 3.60ff.) could be invoked to argue that these was no absolute right of asylum, that this was rather a gift of the state subject to limitations in the public interest. The Roman Senate's argument in A.D. 22 is not unlike that of Henry VIII in 1519 (who could now know the Tacitus passage): the original grantors did not intend asylum "to serve for wilful murder or for crime committed out of the sanctuary sub spe redeundi . He would have that reformed which had been encroached by abuse, and would reduce the privilege to the original plan of its founders" (Thornley 201).

the 1720s.6 The University of Heidelberg maintained its own judicial and prison system for its students until the beginning of the twentieth century. Modern embassies offer an analogy to the ancient Greek temple, places in which the host state has no sovereignty, sometimes with embarrassing consequences for the rule of law.

Greek temples were held to be automatically immune from war and all acts of violence. So the Boeotians told the Athenians who seized and exploited the temple of Apollo Delius.7 Pausanias knew stories about the vengeance of the Cabeiri upon soldiers who entered their temple (9.25.10), and Antiochus III would apologize for the violence his troops did to the temple of Artemis at Amyzon (below, p. 336). For this immunity several terms were available, being by no means the most common. From the classical period to the end of antiquity, the boundary stones of sacred property illustrate the fact.8 A fifth-century boundary of a temple in Corinth uses the word for what could be said of any Greek temple at any time (Corinth VIII.1 22 [LSCG Suppl. 34]): .

In the Hellenistic period, by contrast, Greek states began to declare some spaces in other states to be "inviolable" (of temples) or "sacred and inviolable" (of the whole city and territory), in honor of the relevant god. The documentary testimony for these declarations is voluminous. The inscriptions constitute a significant fraction of our epigraphical evidence for foreign affairs in the Hellenistic period. Most are civic decrees or royal letters declaring a temple or city to be inviolable; they reveal the form and something of the historical circumstances of such declarations. Because in some quarters of the Hellenistic world it became fashionable to inscribe civic titles on coins, we also have as evidence the coinages of dozens of cities. These let us place pins on a map, often with dates, and thus are crucial for tracing the spread of the civic title "sacred and inviolable."

A purely documentary definition of our topic—places that were declared "inviolable," —will reveal a coherent historical episode: the material record shows no such declaration before the 260s B.C. and none after the senatorial review of the status in A.D. 22-23, and more than ninety in between....