This dissertation is the first large-scale analysis of the honorific inscriptions of Roman Athens from the Sullan sack in 86 BCE until the Herulian attack in 267 CE. Traditionally, scholars have understood the proliferation of such inscriptions, which singled out and celebrated individual excellence, as evidence for the decline of the Greek cities of the Roman period, whose increasingly oligarchical and hierarchical character deprived the average citizen of a voice. This study challenges such perspectives by interpreting the Athenian honorific inscriptions as political and social artifacts. Specifically, this dissertation contends that, far from being an empty gesture, the awarding of inscribed honorific monuments was a dynamic, integral component of civic life that made powerful statements about Athenian identity and values. To do so, it assembles a corpus of more than 1,000 honorific inscriptions set up in Athens and Attica, a number that by far outstrips that of any other Greek city in the Roman period. Chapter one studies the formal structure and conventions of Athenian honorific language and demonstrates that the Athenians adopted the nominative-accusative dedicatory formula, long the standard elsewhere in the Greek world, for their civic honorific inscriptions only in the aftermath of the Sullan destruction. Chapter two unpacks the significance of this development and employs an approach grounded in historical pragmatics to argue for the performative nature of these inscriptions, whose language forcefully presents the polis as a vigorous collective institution in action. Chapter three focuses on the civic and non-civic dedicators and shows how the honorific process depended upon the broad participation of the citizen body across the Athenian civic institutions, chiefly the Areopagos, the boule, and the ekklesia. Chapter four examines how the inscriptions both embed the honorands within traditional communitarian norms and frame their actions primarily in terms of service to the civic community. In emphasizing local context in contrast to the universalizing tendencies of scholarship, this dissertation argues for the specialness of an Athenian honorific discourse that reflects a specifically Athenian brand of euergetism.