HI´EREUS TON SOTE´RON
HI´EREUS TON SOTE´RON (
ἱερεὺς τῶν σωτήρων), priest of the Saviours, that is, of
Antigonus and Demetrius, who were received by the Athenians, in B.C. 307, as
their liberators with honours and flatteries of every sort. They even went
so far as to pay divine honours to these princes under the title of Saviours
(
σωτῆρες), and to assign a priest
(
ἱερεύς) to attend to their worship,
who was to be elected annually by Cheirotonia (
Plut. Demetr. 10). This continued for twenty years till the
conquest of Demetrius by Pyrrhus in B.C. 287, when the office was abolished
and these extravagant honours annulled (Id. 46). It was formerly believed,
on the authority of Plutarch, that while the
ἱερεὺς
τῶν σωτήρων lasted his name was used to mark the year in
state records and private documents (
συμβόλαια) in place of the first archon; and this
notwithstanding the fact that the magistrates of these twenty years were in
later times called archons, as, for instance, by Diodorus and Dionysius of
Halicarnassus. Clinton accounted for this by supposing that the Athenians
would not leave upon their Fasti this mark of their humiliation. (Droysen,
Geschichte des Hellenismus, 1.439; Clinton,
F.
H. 2.380; Schömann,
Antiq. Jur. Publ. Graec.
p. 359; Thirlwall, 7.331.) But it has now been convincingly proved that this
statement of Plutarch's rests on an error (Schömann,
Antiq. 1.537 n., E. T.); Grote passes it over in silence,
and, if it were true, there would naturally be evidence of it in the many
Attic inscriptions lately discovered. On the other honours paid to Demetrius
Poliorcetes, cf. Gilbert,
Staatsalterth. 1.154, 190.
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