ABSTRACT
It is not self-evident that land belonging to the gods should be treated as a category by itself as we have chosen to do in this book. In 1952 Moses Finley lent his name to the well-known and by now universally accepted dogma that, among the Greeks, the important dividing-line as far as land ownership was concerned separated public land owned by the state from the remainder, whereas it was of no consequence, legally or otherwise, whether land was administered via temple funds or not.271 In a recent article Robin Osborne treats the leasing of land and buildings in Classical and Hellenistic Greece under one heading.272 Unlike Finley, who distinguishes, first, public (to be understood as 'land owned by the state') and, second, all other land, Osborne sets up two categories: first, public and corporate property, sometimes merely called 'public', and, second, private, as an equivalent to land 'individually owned'. Occasionally, Osborne will refer to a piece of land as 'sacred' or 'templeland', always listed under his first category.273 Here we are dealing with a practical, but not entirely closely reasoned, dividing-line into categories. Osborne agrees with Finley in finding no cogent reason why land owned by a god should be regarded as a separate category; but we, on the other hand, shall draw our conclusion from the fact that the Greeks themselves were fully aware when the question concerned land belonging to a god.274 This we shall do because it has turned out to be of great practical importance in agricultural contexts.275
