Inscription
Erastus Inscription
ee-RAS-tus in-SKRIP-shun · Modern Ancient Corinth, Corinthia, Greece · 37.9066° N, 22.8781° E
A Latin paving-stone inscription reading ERASTVS PRO AEDILIT[AT]E S P STRAVIT ("Erastus, in return for his aedileship, paved this at his own expense") — the bracketed letters are restored, not on the stone. It is very often said to confirm the Erastus named in Romans 16:23, whom Paul calls the city's treasurer. It does not. The identification is an inference, it is genuinely contested, and the dispute runs as deep as which century the block belongs to.
Archaeology
Found in 1929 by the excavation of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens under T. Leslie Shear, in situ in the paved plaza east of the theater's stage building at ancient Corinth, where it remains today — it is not in a museum. No individual finder is recorded. It was published as Corinth VIII.3, The Inscriptions 1926-1950 (1966), no. 232, whose mid-1st-century date most popular accounts assume without mentioning that it is disputed. S. J. Friesen ("The Wrong Erastus," in Corinth in Context, 2010) argues the block sits in a secondary context and was probably not commissioned before the mid-second century AD, and that the Erastus of Romans was more likely a public slave. H. J. Cadbury called the identification improbable if not impossible in 1931, an oikonomos being typically a slave and an aedileship a higher office, and J. Meggitt argued the same point in 1996. On the other side, G. Theissen equated oikonomos with quaestor, an office freedmen did hold, which removes Cadbury's objection; J. K. Goodrich argued in 2010 that oikonomos tes poleos means municipal quaestor, a treasury magistrate of real rank; and D. W. J. Gill and B. Winter have defended the identification as well. A. D. Clarke has published a second Corinthian Erastus inscription, which complicates any one-to-one match: the name was not rare. Plausible, then, and worth knowing about — but not a confirmation.
On a modern map
Further reading
Reflect
A pavement inscription may name the same Erastus Paul greeted as a fellow worker — what do you want your name associated with?
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