• Teos to the Artists of Dionysus, 230-210 BC (presbeutes, gr. πρεσβευτής, en. envoy)

A decree passed by the people of Teos to grant a piece of land to the Association of the Artists of Dionysus (Le Guen, Technites 39) mentions a group of presb[eutai] (ll. 28-9), whose task was to inform the artists what privileges and honours they had received, and praise them. These envoys are described as ἀποδεδειγμένοι, “already appointed”. To confirm this, at the end of the decree, the only men appointed are those who have to deal with the purchase of the land (κτηματωνήσαντες, l. 33), implying that there was no need to appoint the envoys.

This detail, at first sight negligible, has its importance. This is not the first mission these envoys performed: they were appointed earlier, and their names were probably mentioned at the very beginning of the decree, unfortunately lost. A plausible reconstruction is that the Teians sent these envoys firstly to test the waters, to see if their purpose to grant land to the artists and establish them in Teos was welcome and feasible. Received a positive opinion, they proceeded to incorporate the Association of Artists in the rituality of the polis, to arrange the purchase of the land, and to further facilitate the settlement of the artists with tax exemptions (ll. 1-20). At this point, the same envoys were sent back to the artists to inform them of the concessions.

It is relevant to emphasise that if Teos resorted at least twice to envoys sent out to the Artists of Dionysus, there is no trace of the opposite case: no delegate of the artists is present in the Teos assembly at the time of the decision. Otherwise, they would have been mentioned in their turn, honoured, and probably they would have brought by themselves the decree to the Association of the Artists.

Two considerations come to mind: (1) of the two parties, Teos seems to be the initiator, and (2) the artists do not seem to reside in Teos; they probably resided elsewhere or were still itinerant, hence the need of envoys. It is true that it could be argued that the association functioned as an independent state within the polis, but there would be no point in physically bringing a copy of the decree to the Artists if they already lived in Teos. In addition, the envoys were to praise the Artists for their benevolence: if the Artists were already resident in Teos, the public praise would have taken place in a well-defined city space and period of time (e.g. the theatre, during specific festivals) and certainly not by the ambassadors, but by a magistrate.

The main implication of this reconstruction is that this inscription really dates back to the beginning of structural relations between Teos and the koinon of Artists of Dionysos, as already suggested by W. Ruge (RE s.v. Teos, col. 562: “als ob die Beziehungen zwischen T. und die Techniten noch nicht sehr alt wären”) and other scholars (e.g. Le Guen 2001, I 205) and despite the scepticism of some others (Aneziri 2003, 376).

The date of this decree, and consequently of the settlement of the Artists in Teos, was the subject of an extensive debate. Since Holleaux, the general circumstances have been identified as one of the three periods of Attalid rule over the city (either 228-223 BC, or 218-204 BC, or 188-133 BC). Today, it is possible to narrow it down to the first period or the first part of the second (Le Guen 2001, 205-6; Fanucchi 2017) for many different reasons. Firstly, we have seen that this text seems to frame the beginning of structed relations between the the city and the association. This must have occurred before the Teians used the status of asylia of the Artists as a legal precedent to claim asylia for their city (LBW 85), which dates back to the very last years of the 3rd c. BC. Secondly, the status of Teos after the Treaty of Apameia is far from clear, and there are very good reasons to think that Teos retained its freedom and was no longer subject to the Attalids (Boulay 2018; Adak, Thonemann 2022, 166-8). Thirdly, Teos seems thriving and on good terms with the Attalids. This fits in better with the first moments of the reign of Attalus I; suffice it to say that the city even voluntarily returned to the king’s sphere of influence in 218 (Polyb. V 77, 7). On the contrary, the situation seems very different towards the end of the reign of Attalus, when Antiochus III found a city in economic difficulty (cfr. Ma, Antiochos 17, ll. 12-5).

• Aneziri, S. (2003), Die Vereine der dionysischen Techniten im Kontext der hellenistischen Gesellschaft. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte, Organisation und Wirkung der hellenistischen Technitenvereine, Stuttgart.
  
• Adak, M., Thonemann, P. (2022), Teos and Abdera. Two cities in peace and war, Oxford.
• Boulay, T. (2018), ‘La liberté de Téos et le soutien d’Attale II à Alexandre Balas’, Syria 95, 133-154
• Fanucchi, S. (2017), ‘Teos. Granting of land to the artists of Dionysos’, GEI041, 10.25429/sns.it/lettere/GEI041
• Holleaux, M. (1924), ‘Une inscription trouvée a Brousse’, BCH 48, 1-57.
• Le Guen, B. (2001), Les associations de Technites dionysiaques à l’époque hellénistique, Nancy.