Athens and Macedon: Attic Letter-Cutters of 300 to 229 B.C. (Hellenistic Culture and Society) (Volume 38)

Much of the history of Athens in the third century BC must be reconstructed from inscriptions rather than surviving narrative histories. In Athens and Macedon, Stephen V. Tracy uses the work of Attic letter-cutters—the craftsmen who carved public inscriptions—to recover evidence for a politically unsettled period in which Athens repeatedly confronted Macedonian power and changes to its own democratic institutions.

Tracy's detailed study identifies individual stonecutters through characteristic lettering and uses their work to refine the dating and interpretation of inscriptions from roughly 300 to 229 BC. The book combines epigraphy with political history, examining Athenian government under Macedonian influence before presenting a systematic study of the cutters and inscriptions themselves. For readers of Hellenistic history and Greek epigraphy, it demonstrates how close analysis of the physical production of inscriptions can sharpen chronology and reveal aspects of political life otherwise lost from the historical record.