A community set in stone? Monumental decrees as instruments of greek interactions

This chapter evaluates civic inscriptions in Greek cities as media for coordinating cooperation during the late Hellenistic and early Imperial periods. J.L. Austin's notion of "speech act theory" and Michael Chwe's concept of "rational rituals" serve as foils to Ferraris's understanding of documents as the material representations of social acts. The prevalence of inscribed civic documents to record inter-city relations suggests their role in documenting and performing community-building in Hellenistic and Roman Greece. In the transition to Empire, civil decrees may have lost their agency to foster diplomacy between poleis, but nonetheless remained "informational beacons" within communities about their relationship with Rome.