Real estate sales and real security at Tenos and Paros

The discovery of a new month in Tenos and the identification of a letter cutter in Paros led to new hypotheses on the problem of real security in Greek law. Examination of the Tenos register (IG XII 5, 872) with a view to its re-publication revealed an error in the division between acts 17 and 18 by the previous editors, who did not recognize the name of a month, Eres[ion], equivalent to the Delian month Aresion recently attested in Andros, the neighbouring island. By removing an obscure clause from this document, this discovery leads us to re-examine the functioning of a mortgage pledge of a particular type, the dotal apotimema, to which one of the acts of the register alludes. If we accept this point, we get closer to what makes, by contrast, the particularity of the sale with the option of repurchase (prasis epi lysei): in Tenos as in Athens, it is characterized by an immediate transfer of ownership to the benefit of the creditor, by means of a deed of sale supplemented where applicable by a lease contract. The connection between a boundary marker recently discovered in Paros (SEG 54, 794) and a famous law concerning local archives, engraved by the same lapicide, finally makes it possible to clarify the relationship between the prasis epi lysei and the practices of public archiving in the Hellenistic period.