Probably dedication
created: Transcription from object (CDL)
source date: Perhaps fourth or third century BC
language: ar; en; fr; de; grc; grc-Latn; el; he
availability: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All citation, reuse or distribution of this work must contain a link back to DOI: https://doi.org/10.60760/unibo/igcyrgvcyr2 and the filename (IGCyr000000 or GVCyr000), as well as the year of consultation. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

Not published before [...] 135200.

Additional bibliography [...], p. 67, and fig. 5.

Ἡρακλείδης Ἀφροδίτῃ

Hèrakleidès à Aphrodite (?).

Heracleides for Aphrodite (?).

Herakleides per Afrodite (?).

The name Heracleides has not the dialectal form; this is rather rare for private inscriptions before the third century BC. In the port of Cyrene, it might testify of a non-Cyrenaean traveller.

What remains of the last preserved letter might belong to an epsilon. If so, it might belong to a personal name beginning with Ἀφεν(ο)-. However, father's names are not usual in such graffiti (in spite of IGCyr003100). As what remains of the transverse stroke is curved and does not wholly touch the hasta, rho seems a better reading and would allow to read Aphrodite's name. This goddess is mentioned in several inscriptions of the city of Cyrene, in an area at the South-East of the Sanctuary of Apollo, which might be the 'Aphrodite's garden', mentioned by Pindar, Pyth. 3.25-24. We had up to now no inscribed mention of the goddess in the port of the city, except a possible link with Kallikrateia (IGCyr033300, see [...]). The extramural Doric temple West of the port has been hypothetically attributed to Aphrodite because the action of Plautus' Rudens, inspired from a Greek comedy by Diphilos, takes place near a temple of Venus on the coast near Cyrene (see White in [...], p. 83). However, the place is described as isolated and the case remains obscure. This graffito should not be taken as a further clue in favour of that hypothesis, see [...].