Asylia

In the Hellenistic period certain Greek temples and cities came to be declared "sacred and inviolable," meaning immune from war. A famous passage of Tacitus describes the appeals of many cities for Roman confirmation of the title. The evidence for this phenomenon - mainly inscriptions and coins - is scattered in the published record, but the material has never been collected and presented in one publication until now. In Asylia: Territorial Inviolability in the Hellenistic World, Kent J. Rigsby lays out these documents and discusses their historical implications. Rigsby argues that while a…