Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/364

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314
TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES

the inscriptions I copied, was a list of citizens and metoikoi, contributors to some tax.

One of the honorary decrees confers a crown for services rendered in a maritime engagement oif the island of Cos, between the Calymnians and the people of Hierapytna in Crete. These hostihties probably took place about the 2nd century B.C., when the Archipelago was much infested by pirates.

Besides the inscriptions of the Macedonian period already enumerated, were a number which may obvously be referred to the time when Calymnos formed part of the Koman empire. The earliest of these was a dedication to Apollo by Publius Servilius Isauricus, when Consul, by which the date of this inscription is thus fixed to B.C. 79. This I dug up among the Byzantine foundations. Another dedicatory inscription by the same Servilius is built into the western wall of the church of Christos.

There were of the Roman period several other dedicatory inscriptions, one of which has been the base of a statue of Cahgiila, and twenty-five records of the manumission of slaves, a rare and cm'ious class of docimients. Some of this latter class were dug up in a garden called Blyko, near the harbour of Pothia, amid the ruins of an old Greek church, and were noticed by me in my visit in 1853.

The magistrates whose names appear at the head of the decrees of the Macedonian period are always the prostatæ. In the manumissions, the Eponymous magistrate of Calymnos is the Stephanephoros, a title adopted in many Asiatic cities. In the grants of citizenship, we get the names of several Demi, or