Greek Religion and Epigraphic Corpora: What’s Sacrae about Leges Sacrae?

The Latin phrase leges sacrae and its translated variants have been applied since at least the nineteenth century to various collections of inscribed documents. This rubric and the collecting of Greek inscriptions under it have always been recognized as problematically subjective, and in the last decade or so a flurry of scholarship has critiqued the corpora more directly. What has been less examined, however, is what defines the subject matter that makes these documents sacrae . What is sacred about Greek sacred law? In order to bring this question into the conversation, I approach the corpora in which the so-called sacred laws have been collected from a historiographic perspective, treating each corpus as a document that captured a scholarly moment in time and in turn influenced subsequent collections and other scholarship on the subject. By investigating the standards of the compilers of the corpora, whether spoken or not, the underlying distinctions between sacred and not sacred can be uncovered.