Abstract
Since the publication of H. von Prott and L. Ziehen's Leges graecorum sacrae at the beginning of the 20th century, prescriptive epigraphic texts dealing with the affairs of the gods have been referred to as " sacred laws ". At the beginning of the 21st century, such a documentary category has been widely questioned and challenged, and the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms project has proposed replacing it with the less problematic notion of " ritual norms ". But what kind of norms are we talking about, given what we've seen so far of religious norms in Greek lands ? An inscription concerning the purity of the sanctuary of Alektrona at Ialysos on the island of Rhodes is used to answer this question(CGRN 90). It provides a good example of the hierarchy of norms in matters of worship, and the difficulty of determining with certainty what is meant by the term nomos in its various occurrences. Does it refer to the official legislation of the city, recorded in writing ? Or are they customary norms preserved orally ? The reference to the patria, the " ancestral customs " of the group concerned attests to the inscription - real or fantasized - of these prescriptions over time. But this heritage was not incompatible with novelty, which was built on this background and according to it. Finally, the notion of hieros nomos, which seems to validate the label of " sacred law ", is examined in some of its occurrences, which prove to be just as plural and just as less rigid than the overall system in which they are embedded.
