“The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman World”, en Ch. Bruun y J. Edmonson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy, Oxford — New York 2015, 131-148. (original) (raw)

Inscriptions and the Epigraphic Habit. The Epigraphic Cultures of Greece, Rome, and Beyond

2023

Inscriptions are a major feature of the Greek and Roman worlds, as inhabitants around the Mediterranean chose to commit text to stone and other materials. How did the epigraphic habit vary across time and space? Once adopted, how was the epigraphic habit variously expressed? The chapters of this volume analyze the epigraphic cultures of regions, cities, and communities through both large-scale analyses and detailed studies. From curse tablets in Britain to multilingual communities in Judaea-Palestine, from Greece to Rome to the Black Sea, and across nearly a millennium, the epigraphic outputs of cities and individuals underscore a collective understanding of the value of inscribed texts.

Latin Epigraphy - Syllabus - Fall 2010

This course will introduce students to the challenges of reading Latin texts preserved as inscriptions upon stone and will introduce Roman inscriptions as a critical source for aspects of Roman history and society that do not otherwise survive. It is an advanced Latin course whose goal is to practice and develop skills to read significant examples of Latin epigraphs, and to use modern techniques for encoding inscriptions and building digital corpora:

Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy. CH. 22. The City of Rome

C. Bruun and J. Edmondson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy, 2015

This chapter shows the importance of inscriptions for the study of life in the ancient city of Rome. Because of the richness of the epigraphic evidence, the city is crucial for understanding the Roman empire as a whole.

"Explaining the Epigraphic Habit In the Roman Empire: the Evidence of Epitaphs"

Journal of Roman Studies, 1990

It is now notorious that the production of inscriptions in the Roman Empire was not constant over time, but rose over the first and second centuries A.D. and fell in the third. Ramsay MacMullen pointed this out more than five years ago, with conclusions more cautionary than explanatory: ‘history is not being written in the right way’, he said, for historians have deduced Rome's decline from evidence that–since it appears only epigraphically–has merely disappeared for its own reasons, or have sought general explanations of decline in theories political, economic, or even demographic in nature, none of which can, in turn, explain the disappearance of epigraphy itself. Why this epigraphic habit rose and fell MacMullen left open to question, although he did postulate control by a ‘sense of audience’. The purpose of this paper is to propose that this ‘sense of audience’ was not generalized or generic, but depended on a belief in the value of romanization, of which (as noted but not explained by MacMullen's article) the epigraphic habit is also a rough indicator. Epitaphs constitute the bulk of all provincial inscriptions and in form and number are (generally speaking) the consequence of a provincial imitation of characteristically Roman practices, an imitation that depended on the belief that Roman legal status and style were important, and that may indeed have ultimately depended, at least in North Africa, on the acquisition or prior possession of that status. Such status-based motivations for erecting an epitaph help to explain not only the chronological distribution of epitaphs but also the differences in the type and distribution of epitaphs in the western and eastern halves of the empire. They will be used here moreover to suggest an explanation for the epigraphic habit as a whole.

Reading Epigraphic Culture, Writing Funerary Space in the Roman City

Chapter 3, Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300 (Bloomsbury Publishing) 49-64, 2013

The presence of inscriptions in funerary contexts tests the boundaries of our understanding of what it meant to be a part of an oral-literate society and a participating member of a pervasive epigraphic culture. To appreciate the significance underpinning this juxtaposition of social and cultural issues, we should consider the implications of a single question: Who made these inscriptions? Determining ‘who’ calls for the inquirer to examine how possible it was for any member of the ancient population to formulate – articulate, produce, and transmit – a written message within the extra-mural spaces of Rome’s funerary environment. The extent to which inscriptions seem to address interpretative issues of concern to the composer, the ancient society, and the modern researcher – for instance, the manner and subject of public commemoration – is a necessary addendum to the questions of literacy, epigraphic technique, and the sociolinguistic system in Classical antiquity. This finding must also address how accessible the location chosen was for any individual, and the degree of significance which that person attached to the context of memorialization. These points of inquiry lead the investigator to a discussion of modes of social mobility, kinds and numbers of intended audiences, and the thought processes, values, and beliefs shared by members of different communities under Roman rule.