Abstract

An “alphabetical oracle” is a set of twenty-four responses arranged on an alphabetic principle, in a manner comparable to an acrostic. Alphabetical oracles survive only in epigraphic form and are dated to the second and the early third century CE. Eleven such inscriptions are known from the southern regions of Asia Minor, and only one from Cyprus. The study of the Cypriot text passed through several distinct stages; most unexpectedly, a text discovered in thirteen fragments was ultimately restored in full. The fragments of a marble slab bearing the inscription were found in 1930–1931 by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition near the city of Soloi, at Cholades, in the courtyard of Temple B (the temple of Aphrodite). In 1937 E. Ekman identified the text as a hymn to Aphrodite. In 1939 G. Bjorck demonstrated that the inscription was, in fact, an alphabetical oracle; his conclusion was published that same year by L. Robert, although Bjork’s own article appeared only in 1956. In 1963 excavations of the temple of Apollo at Hierapolis in Phrygia brought to light a block inscribed with an alphabetical oracle composed not in iambic trimeter, as in all previously known examples, but in hexameters. In editing that inscription, G. Pugliese Carratelli noted numerous thematic correspondences with the oracle from Soloi. In 1988 C. Brixhe and R. Hodot published an alphabetical oracle discovered by Brixhe in 1972 at the site of Timbriada in Pisidia. The text of this oracle — divergent from other iambic oracles — matched all the surviving fragments from Soloi and thus made possible the complete reconstruction of the Cypriot oracle. Yet the comparative study of the Soloi inscription alongside Asia Minor material had the effect of detaching it from Cyprus and from Cypriot scholarship. Thus, in 2012, G. Papantoniou, citing K. Hadjioannou, referred to it once again as a hymn to Aphrodite. The aim of the present article is not only to review the vicissitudes of the Soloi oracle’s scholarly afterlife, but also to restore it to the interpretive frameworks of Cypriot religious history.