Understanding Roman Inscriptions

Lawrence Keppie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134746163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Lawrence Keppie's book offers the non-specialist a comprehensive and enjoyable guide to undestanding the texts of Roman inscriptions, as well as explaining the numerous different contexts in which they were produced.
Every area of Roman life is covered, including:
* the emperor
* temples and altars to the gods
* imperial administration
* gravestones and tomb monuments
* local government and society
* the army and the frontiers
* Christianity
* trade, commerce and the economy
* the later Roman Empire.
For each inscription cited, the book provides the original Latin, an English translation and a commentary on the piece's significance. Illustrated with more than 80 photos and drawings, this is the ideal introduction to the most important source for the history and organisation of the Roman Empire.

1

INTRODUCTION

The value of inscriptions as historical material is so great that it can hardly be exaggerated. Apart from modern forgeries, which are rare and in general easily detected, they are contemporary and authoritative documents, whose text if legible cannot be corrupt, and whose cumulative value, in the hands of scholars accustomed to handling them in the mass, is astonishing. They are the most important single source for the history and organisation of the Roman Empire.
(R.G.Collingwood)¹

The subject of the following pages is a substantial and ever-growing resource for archaeologists and historians of the Roman world. It can be estimated that over 300,000 inscriptions are known; this mass of evidence grows at upwards of 1000 items per year, and the volume of new discoveries shows no sign of diminishing. Inscriptions provide valuable confirmation and amplification of our often meagre and selective literary sources. They can provide details of events not reported at all by the Roman historians, or can attest the careers and activities of officials and officers otherwise completely unknown. Inscriptions of the latter type are a major source of material for the scholarly pursuit of prosopography, which seeks to reconstruct administrative hierarchies and family relationships, and thereby illuminate ancient society. Equally important, inscriptions cover a wide, though by no means complete, socio-economic spectrum of the community, bringing before us a vast number of people who have no place as individuals in the pages of the Roman historians. The evidence of inscriptions is especially useful in reconstructing the story of provinces far from Rome. Above all they provide an enormous reservoir of incidental information on the world of the Romans and the organization of their empire.

First, a definition. The term ‘Roman inscriptions’ is used in modern times to denote the texts inscribed on a variety of materials which have survived from antiquity. The study of inscriptions has come to be known as epigraphy, from a Greek word, epigraphe, meaning literally an ‘inscription’. Latin terms for an inscribed text are inscriptio² and titulus,³ the latter word encompassing both the text and the panel on which it is inscribed.

In Italy and the western provinces the language used was chiefly Latin. But it should be remembered that the common language of Roman provinces east and south of the Adriatic was Greek, which was the language of law and administration as well as the day-to-day lingua franca of much of the eastern Mediterranean world. Many ‘Roman’ inscriptions from these lands were inscribed in Greek. There are bilingual, even trilingual texts, in the manner of the well-known Rosetta Stone.⁴ Local languages and scripts such as Punic, Thracian and Palmyran can be found alongside Latin and Greek. In the following pages, however, the emphasis will be on inscriptions in Latin. Sometimes the word ‘inscriptions’ is used to refer more casually to the stones or other materials which have been marked, written on, or chiselled with a formal message which the dedicator frequently intended would be seen, admired, and perhaps pondered on. Often the setting up of an inscription was a public act, for public consumption.

Not all inscriptions were, however, on stone. Bronze was an important medium, used often for legal documents.⁵ After a fire had destroyed the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in Rome in AD 69, the new emperor Vespasian had a search made for copies as replacements for the three thousand bronze tablets, many relating to the early history of the Roman state, that had been lost.⁶ The poet Horace claims in a well-known line that his poetry constituted a record aere perennius, even longer-lasting than bronze.⁷ Nowadays inscriptions on bronze constitute a very small proportion of surviving texts; they were much more susceptible to damage, melting down and re-use in antiquity and after.⁸ Where such documents survive, even in fragments, they preserve for us important historical information, such as laws, treaties, edicts, religious texts and dedications.

Wooden panels were employed for public notices. It was presumably on a painted wooden board that Julius Caesar displayed at his Triumph in 47 BC the simple but powerful text, VENI, VIDI, VICI (came, saw, conquered).⁹ Such boards are shown, held by attendants, in the triumphal procession depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome (below, p. 45).

Latin (or Greek) could also be written on metals, on baked clay tiles or bricks, on pottery, glass, wall plaster or in mosaic tesserae. All these texts come under the general heading of inscriptions, and often form a valuable corrective to more formal, official records on stone. It should be said at once that I here exclude two forms of documentary evidence from antiquity: coins and papyri, which constitute separate branches of study in modern times. Coins normally bear Latin or Greek texts often incorporating the names of an emperor, magistrates or other issuing authorities and other useful information; the texts can be instructively compared with those on stone. Papyri, a sometimes undervalued source, are found predominantly in Egypt. They give invaluable insights into the paperwork which an imperial bureaucracy generated, or report correspondence, business transactions or everyday activities which did not normally find their way on to stone (below, p. 110). Papyri, parchment sheets or wooden writing tablets served for day-to-day short-term transactions; they rarely survive in the western Roman provinces, but recent discoveries of wooden writing tablets from Vindolanda and elsewhere are pointers to how much we should know if they did (below, p. 90).

The Romans were not the first to inscribe texts. The impulse to do so is as old as writing itself. Cuneiform tablets from the end of the fourth millennium BC onwards recorded state events as well as the commercial life of Mesopotamia. Readers will recall the ‘writing on the wall’ at Belshazzar’s feast, interpreted by Daniel.¹⁰ Egyptian hieroglyphs decorated the tombs of pharaohs and nobles and the temples to the gods from about 3000 BC onwards. The Greeks made widespread use of inscriptions, in most of the major categories: building records, gravestones, dedications to the gods and public decrees. Greek settlers in Italy passed on a version of their alphabet to the Etruscans and others; soon the Romans had begun to inscribe texts, from at least the sixth century BC onwards.¹¹ As a medium of expression in the Roman world, inscriptions were being cut and erected over a period of one thousand years; the tradition of writing in Latin continued throughout the Middle Ages to modern times. Clearly therefore the surviving inscribed texts reflect and illuminate the changing vocabulary and grammatical structure of Latin over an extended period. A majority of the Latin inscriptions surviving from ancient times belongs in the first three centuries AD, i.e. from the time when Roman power was at its height.

The texts of inscriptions are frequently presented in books as neat lines of typescript. This gives a doubly false impression, firstly of a uniformity in script and lettering, and also of easy legibility, to produce a sanitized version of the text, which deprives it of much that would be interesting. The most important fact to remember about any Roman inscription is that it is inscribed on something. The text may easily not be the only decoration on the stone. The smallest and seemingly most insignificant slab can be set into the handsomest of monuments. The best place to study inscriptions is where they survive in an original location, or failing that, in a museum, preferably a museum with a large and varied collection.

This book has two aims: firstly to introduce the non-specialist reader to the subject of inscriptions and provide some guidance towards reading the Latin texts. Secondly, to get him or her to appreciate the significance of inscriptions as a resource for the historian and archaeologist anxious to know more about the Roman world. If this is the first book on inscriptions which the reader picks up, I hope it may not be the last. ‘An inscription, to the scholars of those days [early nineteenth century], was like the sound of a bugle to a warhorse’.¹² Present-day epigraphists will know the feeling still! Nowadays, Latin is no longer a universal language, and is often employed in archaeological publications by those unfamiliar with its grammatical structure. Translations offered of Latin inscriptions in the following pages deliberately follow as closely as possible the wording of the originals, for better comparison with the Latin texts, though this may on occasion lead to some inelegance in the English.

It is not the principal intention here to provide another learned handbook to Latin inscriptions (for which, see Chapter 6 and Bibliography p. 148ff.). Nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid some of the standard features of such works, such as a list of Latin abbreviations, and a list of the names, titles and dates of Roman emperors (see Appendices, p. 136) The pages that follow are here intended rather as a demonstration to the non-specialist audience of the significance of this category of ancient evidence. It is hoped that no important aspect will have been ignored, but I have made no attempt to include every subcategory of texts. The Late Republic and the Early Empire receive the bulk of attention here, at the expense of early and later periods. A bias may well also be detected in the text and in the choice of illustrations towards categories which readers are most likely to encounter in a museum, or when visiting an archaeological site. One result should be to place Romano-British texts in a wider historical and cultural context.

A word of explanation, perhaps of apology, is necessary over the title of the book. ‘Roman’ is preferred to ‘Latin’, in accordance with common usage in British archaeological circles.

This is obviously a subject that lends itself to illustration, especially by way of photographs. The illustrations offered here are from Rome and Italy and from a wide spectrum of provinces. Some may be well known, but I find no value in avoiding texts which a small percentage of readers may find hackneyed, and to field a ‘reserve side’ merely as evidence of the author’s ingenuity or wide researches. Inscriptions which seemed the best to illustrate a particular point are used here, whether familiar or not. Perhaps readers may look at even those familiar stones with new interest and awareness. Needless to say, many of these are the author’s favourites, which he has found especially helpful in lectures over the years.

My own interest in this branch of ancient evidence was generated by a Roman history class taught at Glasgow University by A.R.Burn, the distinguished historian of ancient Greece, and also author of Agricola and Roman Britain (1953) and Roman Britain: an Anthology of Inscriptions (1932 and 1969). Each week the class (in my time about four students) sat with copies of that massive, then newly available tome The Roman Inscriptions of Britain (vol. 1), which we seemed to devour almost from cover to cover as the weeks progressed; particular stones, selected apparently at random, formed the subject of special scrutiny. The great bonus was Burn’s ability to make even the apparently most uninspiring text seem interesting, and to draw out its unique contribution to our understanding of the ancient world.

It is to Robin Burn, now in his eighty-ninth year, that the present volume is affectionately dedicated.†

†  A.R.Burn died in Oxford on 17 June, 1991, at the age of 88.

2

THE STONECUTTER AND HIS CRAFT

Some idea can be formed, both from ancient literary references and from the surviving end-products, of a likely sequence of events involved in the commissioning and erection of an inscribed stone.¹ Firstly could come a decision on the part of an individual or group to have a permanent record made: a tombstone, altar or commemorative plaque of some kind. Presumably the text was then written out. A fragmentary sheet of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt may represent a draft text written in large elegant capitals (Fig. 1). It is a dedication to the emperors Diocletian and Maximian by a [v]exill(atio) leg(ionis) V M[ac(edonicae)]. ‘A detachment of the Fifth Legion Macedonica.’ It must be very likely that this was a text from which the stonecutter was meant to work.²

After drafting, the text could be taken to a stonemason’s workshop or yard (an officina), and an appropriate design selected for the stone itself. The stonemason is likely to have had a range of semi-prepared slabs and stones available for inspection. Marble came into use in Italy in the mid second century BC, and by the middle of the first was widely used in Rome, as it often was in the provinces, especially in the East. Local limestones or sandstones were also employed. Sometimes stonemasons had to work on uncompromising or difficult surfaces of whatever stone was available; the quality of the inscription suffers as a result.

Once the text had been drafted and details of cost agreed, the stonemason set to work. The front face of the stone, assuming that this was the area to be inscribed, was smoothed off. Next the stonemason might chisel a series of horizontal lines across the stone to mark the top and bottom of each row of lettering. Sometimes such lines are still faintly visible on the stone. Occasionally it seems that the actual letter-shapes were lightly inscribed with a chisel. More often, they were probably marked in chalk, charcoal or paint. Something of the style of the chalked or painted lettering can be carried forward into the inscribed text. This process of preparation and arrangement is now termed ordinatio. The lettering of the text may start large and be reduced as the lines progress; the lettering may give prominence to certain elements, for instance the name of the deceased or the emperor. Some forethought was neede...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The stonecutter and his craft
• 3 Reading Roman inscriptions
• 4 Dating Roman inscriptions
• 5 The survival of Roman inscriptions
• 6 Recording and publication
• 7 The emperor
• 8 Local government and society
• 9 The roads that led to Rome
• 10 Administration of an empire
• 11 The army and the frontiers
• 12 Temples and altars to the gods
• 13 Gravestones and tomb monuments
• 14 Trade, economy and the business world
• 15 Populusque Romanus
• 16 Christianity
• 17 The Later Roman Empire
• 18 Conclusion: the value of Roman inscriptions
• Appendices:
• Footnotes
• Bibliography
• Index