Dynamic Epigraphy: New Approaches to Inscriptions

Chapter 1

Introduction: thoughts on the nature of inscriptions

Eleri H. Cousins

In the cobbled pavement in front of the university chapel of St Salvator’s in St Andrews sits a monogrammed PH (Figs 1.1 and 1.2). An observer stationed for a day within sight of it would see passersby engaging with it in a variety of different ways. Some people might walk by, on, or over it without any seeming awareness. Others would seem to avoid it deliberately – leaping over it, veering round it, walking at a distance but with a careful glance. Others still might seem to stop and gaze at it deliberately, in groups or by themselves, pointing or not, accompanied by human guides or book ones.

The reason for this range of behaviours lies in the monogram’s role in the mythos of St Andrews student life. It marks the spot where, supposedly, the sixteenth-century Protestant martyr Patrick Hamilton was burnt at the stake. As such, undergraduates are told that the monogram bears a curse: anyone who steps on Hamilton’s initials while still a student will undoubtedly fail their degree. Hence the way the monogram shapes the flow of human bodies in front of St Salvator’s: the contortions to avoid it by students, the spotlighting of it by tourists, the complete indifference from academic staff. For the latter, the monogram may exist more as concept than as physical text; as a lecturer at the University in the 2010s, I knew from my students that the initials existed somewhere, but must have walked over them countless times before I finally realized where that somewhere was. Hardly surprising: the monogram’s design and organic integration into the cobbles mean that the letters can serve as background visual noise if one is not already alert to their presence and meaning.

Fig. 1.1: PH monogram, St Andrews (view towards St Salvator’s Chapel). Photo © Myles Lavan.

Fig. 1.2: PH monogram, St Andrews (view towards North Street). Photo © Myles Lavan.

The papers collected in this volume are deliberately diverse in their approaches to epigraphic material, together seeking to push the boundaries of epigraphy as a discipline and to demonstrate the analytical fruits of interdisciplinary approaches to inscriptions. The nature of the material they explore is equally diverse, though perhaps particularly focused on the Roman world; however, the emphasis throughout is on using their various case studies not as an end in themselves, or to illuminate any one period or place, but as a means of exploring broader methodological and theoretical issues to do with how we use inscriptions as evidence. Together, they offer a vision of a more dynamic epigraphy: both in the sense of inscriptions themselves, and how we study them. I have started this introduction with the St Salvator’s PH in part as a nod to the origins of this volume in a panel¹ at the 2018 Celtic Conference in Classics, held in St Andrews. But the monogram also serves as an excellent opening gambit for exploring the dynamics of text in the material world, and for the intertwined themes and questions concerning the nature of epigraphy and our study of it that are raised by the chapters collected here. What is involved in an embodied experience of epigraphy? How do epigraphic texts merge with their surroundings and blur the lines between word, image, and landscape? How do the capacities of epigraphic language enable or hinder epigraphic communication? And to what extent are inscriptions perceived rather than read, and what roles do storytelling and intertextuality play in the conveyance of an inscription’s meaning(s)? These are all questions that are offered up by individual chapters in this volume, but especially by the interplay between them. This introduction, therefore, seeks to draw out this interplay, highlighting what I believe makes the chapters in this volume not only vibrant and exciting individually, but also how they come together as more than the sum of their parts to illustrate the ongoing potential of inscriptions and the way in which we think about them.

Epigraphy as an academic genre

Historians have long mined inscriptions as historical sources, of course, but until fairly recently studying inscriptions for themselves was almost entirely the preserve of epigraphers. As similar sub-disciplines – for instance, numismatics or pottery studies – can bear witness, a need for specialist expertise can be a double-edged sword. The scholarship that results is usually extraordinarily rigorous within the bounds of the field and completed to a high technical standard. Yet the results, to outsiders, can often feel dry, perhaps even barren, and their capacity to contribute to wider debates can be opaque. Meanwhile, the high specialist technical barrier means that scholars from outside the sub-discipline rarely engage with the material in more than a passing way – and if they do engage in-depth, often leave themselves far too easily open to the charge of dilettantism. What results, then, is two parallel academic conversations, hyper- and hypo-specialized, neither of which do full justice to the material.

Most of the chapters in this volume deal with inscriptions on stone, and here the problems have been particularly acute. These are extraordinary objects, with complex social functions and myriad methodological ramifications, but our traditional ways of dealing with them, both in publications and in museums, have rendered their scope for the imagination difficult to grasp. The printing requirements of traditional corpora, as Kelsey Jackson Williams (Chapter 2) and others have noted, all but erase the vital material component of inscriptions, reducing them to sanitized texts. Conversations with museum curators, meanwhile, almost uniformly stress the deep and understandable difficulties of displaying inscriptions in a way that catches the eye, let alone the sustained attention, of even the most committed museum-goer. As a result, epigraphic collections are often left to moulder in outdoor spaces, or, as in the case of a recent redisplay in a regional museum near my own university, removed from view almost entirely. Making inscriptions interesting can only partly be solved even by displays (the Galleria Lapidaria of the Capitoline Museums is a stand-out example) that go above and beyond in interpreting the language, the text, and the meaning of individual inscriptions to visitors, for inscriptions’ interest lies not only in their content (relatively easy to convey), but in the very idea of them (much more difficult).²

The challenges that render inscriptions difficult to appreciate as objects in their own right, alongside the constraints of traditional corpora, have contributed, then, to an academic environment that has tended to veer away from engagement with that idea of epigraphy. Epigraphic publications have traditionally focused more on the what rather than the why of inscriptions – beginning and ending with the reconstruction of the text, the establishment of linguistic and onomastic parallels, the tracing of individuals’ careers and family lineages, etc. Similarly to the identification and categorization of other forms of material culture, this is necessary preliminary work, but all too often undertaken as an end in itself, or as a prelude to using epigraphic texts solely as documentary evidence, divorced from archaeological or material context.

All this has been changing in recent years, however. Scholarship on epigraphy, from all times and places but perhaps especially from the ancient Mediterranean and Greco-Roman world, has been undergoing a revolution of sorts, driven above all by an increasingly interdisciplinary interest in inscriptions as objects, as texts, and as objects/texts. This volume is therefore part of a growing wave of academic work that searches for new ways of seeing and analysing epigraphic material that move away from the more traditional forms of epigraphy as an academic genre, while still keeping inscriptions themselves centre-stage as the objects of study. Particularly productive areas of discussion in recent years have included the interplay between image and text on inscriptions,³ the materiality of inscriptions as physical objects,⁴ and the role of inscriptions in civic landscapes,⁵ as well as the role of epigram as a genre in ancient literature,⁶ and many of the chapters here draw or build on aspects of these discrete conversations. To date, however, these conversations have largely remained parallel ones, with little cross-fertilization between them. Volumes dedicated to individual threads have given us the chance to deepen each conversation, but at the expense of the dynamism which results from the interactions between threads. This volume, therefore, attempts to break new ground by putting these separate conversations in dialogue with each other, with – as the rest of this introduction will discuss – some constructive and thought-provoking results.

Embodied epigraphy

Many of the chapters here are concerned with the embodied experience of epigraphy, and with considering human interaction with inscribed objects from a more or less explicitly phenomenological perspective. In Chapter 7, When poetry comes to its senses: Inscribed Roman verse and the human sensorium, Chiara Cenati, Victoria González Berdús, and Peter Kruschwitz use the evocative language of Latin verse inscriptions to take us step by step through a sensory exploration of epigraphy, moving beyond our accustomed focus on sight alone into considerations of sound, touch, smell, taste, and even synaesthesia. The physicality – indeed the literal handling – of inscribed objects is also brought to the fore by Alex Mullen in Chapter 3, Materializing epigraphy: archaeological and sociolinguistic approaches to Roman inscribed spindle whorls. Here, the tactile and the physical are especially important, with Mullen exploring how the playful, possibly amatory messages on the whorls intersect with the way users may have rolled the whorls down their thighs to start them spinning, or worn them around their necks when not in use. Meanwhile, in Chapter 2, Towards a theoretical model of the epigraphic landscape, Kelsey Jackson Williams draws explicitly on archaeological and anthropological conversations of phenomenology to explore the varying dimensions of human interaction with an inscription in its landscape setting – a theme that is also echoed in the methodologies of M. Cristina de la Escosura Balbás, Elena Duce Pastor, and David Serrano Lozano in Chapter 4, Written to be (un)read, written to be seen: Beyond Latin codes in Latin epigraphy, as well as the perspectives of Fabio Luci in Chapter 5 Epigraphic strategies of communication: the visual accusative of Roman Republican dedications of spoils. All three of these chapters speak to the ways in which we zoom in and zoom out during our engagement with an inscription placed into a wider landscape (physical, for the moment – below I will consider intertextual ones as well).

Taken together, then, these discussions highlight a range of points that are crucial to the concept of an embodied epigraphy – that is, both the ways in which our experience of inscriptions is an embodied one, and how we can integrate that fundamental fact into our academic discourse. Perhaps the most important thread that emerges is how we conceptualise the sensory experience of inscriptions. We are accustomed to speak of the viewer when focusing our attention on a (usually theoretical) human interacting with/perceiving/reading an inscription. Indeed, a growing emphasis on the viewer has been at the forefront of some of the most creative work on epigraphy in recent years (riffing on the same turn in art history), and as de la Escosura Balbás et al. point out in Chapter 4, the integration of ideas of the viewer into our discussion of epigraphic monuments marked a key inflection point in thinking about epigraphy as monuments, rather than solely as documentary sources. The concept is powerful. But it is fundamentally focused on sight, and the papers here draw our attention to just how incomplete a framework this is for expressing the totality of human engagement with an inscribed object and its broader context. Indeed, although Jackson Williams, de la Escosura et al., and Luci frame their discussions of epigraphic landscapes in terms of the viewer, when their chapters are placed into dialogue with Cenati et al.’s systematic, self-conscious exploration of the role of each human sense in an epigraphic encounter, we can see that they have all in fact transcended the notion of epigraphy mediated through sight alone. Even while their discussions are rooted in what a person sees (and unquestionably sight is the most immediate and obvious sense we use to encounter inscriptions), their phenomenological methodologies, with an emphasis on landscape, perspective, and above all on movement towards, from, and around epigraphic monuments, mean that fundamentally they are not basing their interpretations in the viewpoints of static, disembodied eyes, but rather around human bodies in motion. Perhaps a better term than viewer for what is happening here would be perceiver – though that still does not do justice to the sorts of active, bodily encounters that are highlighted by Mullen (and which are perhaps easiest for us to grasp when speaking about small, handle-able objects such as spindle whorls as opposed to large-scale stone monuments – but which nonetheless clearly should be placed at the heart of our conceptions for both).

Capacities of epigraphic language

The inscriptions dealt with in this volume vary from poetic texts dozens of lines long to laconic messages composed of a single word or a few letters. The authors of each chapter approach these texts and their language in a variety of different ways, but what becomes clear is that the capacity of an epigraphic text to convey meaning is not dependent on its length, and that the qualities of epigraphic language enable mechanisms of communication unique to the medium of inscriptions. This is particularly true of short inscriptions. Often abbreviated or condensed in their language, either shortening words or indeed skipping them altogether, they have not usually been read by scholars for much beyond the simple extraction of information, and certainly not close read. What the chapters here show, however, is that close reading of shorter texts is not merely possibly, but necessary, and that, rather than being a barrier to communication, the characteristics of their language can be seen as a feature, not a bug, in that they open up ways of delivering semantically complex messages that are not possible in other forms of writing.

Let us consider, for example, the phenomenon of epigraphic formulae. Repetitious, conventionalised language is near-ubiquitous in inscriptions – indeed, it is one of the key characteristics of the medium across time and place, from the royal titulatures of Achaemenid monuments to the Estd. or R.I.P. of the present-day. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the saying goes, and formulaic epigraphic language, through its sheer ubiquity, becomes an afterthought for scholarship. We pay heed instead to the elements that stand out to us as individual; we discuss not the votum solvit libens merito (or more commonly VSLM) on a given Roman votive altar, but the name of the deity, the identity of the dedicator. Unless we choose to reproduce the whole text of the inscription, the dedicatory formula may not even be mentioned, elided over in academic analysis even as its presence lurks behind – is indeed fundamentally implicated in – our very identification of the votive as a votive. And this of course is the key point: formulaic language on inscriptions may render any one particular text seemingly uninteresting, but in the aggregate, formulae, far from diluting the effectiveness of inscriptions, are in fact what endow them with social potency. Each time a formula is used, its semantic significance is strengthened, and oscillates between the particular and the collective. So, the repetition of funerary formulae in a cemetery transcends the grief and loss of any individual family, and becomes a networked statement of communal rituals of mourning – and in so doing reinforces the power of any particular headstone to convey in a few words a narrative of particularised loss.

The formulae I have used above have been deliberately presented (or reiterated) in abbreviated form, since the formulaic nature of epigraphic language is what primarily enables its abbreviated characteristics. Here too, as several authors explore (most notably de la Escosura Balbás et al. in Chapter 4, Luci in Chapter 5, and Hanneke Salisbury in Chapter 6, Inscribing the artistic space: Blurred boundaries on Romano-British tombstones), the dynamism of epigraphic communication lies as much – or more – in the form as in the content of the text. As de la Escosura Balbás et al. discuss in Chapter 4, the ability to recognise the meaning encoded in an abbreviation hangs upon shared knowledge of codes and sub-codes on the part of both creator and audience, and often the abbreviation can take on new meanings and connotations of its own, separate from the original, unabbreviated form. (Their modern example of the manipulation and ultimate re-textualization of the emoticon XD in Spanish is particularly thought-provoking in this respect.) When publishing epigraphic texts, we are accustomed to expanding out the abbreviations – to solving the riddle that they present. This is in fact the antithesis of how they are experienced in an epigraphic encounter, where the meaning of a familiar abbreviation is absorbed without recourse to spelling-out. Epigraphic language, in other words, requires a different sort of fluency to spoken language, or literary language: Petronius’ freedman who famously can read his lapidarias litteras needs a very different – but perhaps no less complex – sort of literacy to someone reading Cicero or Virgil.⁷

It might be possible to push this even further, and stress the opportunities for deliberate ambiguity that may result from abbreviated language – or rather, to stress that we should be open to the possibility that an abbreviation can function polyvalently, as it were, rather than needing a single solution. As an illustration, in 1969, Duncan Fishwick, in a classic article, put forward an elegant solution for the systematic expansion of various abbreviations on Romano-British inscriptions into either numen Augusti or Numina Augustorum (distinctions with both theological and chronological implications).⁸ It surely is the case that the vast majority of the time either one or the other was intended. However, it is worth considering whether we should open ourselves up to the possibility of a multiplicity of meanings, and that abbreviations might stand in for multiple concepts simultaneously, whether deliberately on the part of the carver or commissioner, or as an after effect due to varying reader responses, even if those responses contradict or deviate from the carver’s intention. (For the latter, Death of the Author comes to epigraphy.)

Moving beyond the question of possible expansions, and focusing on the dynamics of abbreviation itself, the tendency towards abbreviated language in epigraphy can be taken to two extremes. The first, explored especially by Jackson Williams (Chapter 2), de la Escosura Balbás et al. (Chapter 4), and Salisbury (Chapter 6), is when abbreviated forms cease or almost cease to represent a word at all, and instead become understood as images – transcending the textual entirely. This is a concept that feeds into broader discussions about the interplay between art and text. One particularly interesting dimension of the latter, illuminated by Salisbury’s work on Romano-British tombstones, is how we respond in instances where word and image seemingly deviate from each other in their content and message. For instance, in one tombstone from York (RIB 685; Fig. 6.2), commemorating a family of four, the sculptured relief portraits seem to be mismatched in both age and gender from the individuals listed in the inscription. Our conditioned response here is once again to find a solution: whether that be to establish against the odds a convincing one-to-one correspondence between names and portraits, or to blame the confusion on either artisanal error (this explanation is steeped in preconceptions about provincial culture, as I shall discuss below) or mismatch between a prefabricated relief and a personalised inscription. Salisbury shows how an interpretation can in fact be reached without recourse to a tidy solution, and how the differing capacities of text and image can come together to send complementary messages, not contradictory ones. This is reminiscent of the ways in which, for example, mythological scenes in ancient art exploit the capacities of the visual medium to tell stories both different and differently from those we encounter in literature: for instance, the non-linear visual storytelling that takes place on the metopes of Temple C at Selinunte, where Medusa holds close her offspring, Pegasus, who was born from the blood of her severed neck.

The second extreme of abbreviation is when the text becomes so abbreviated that it vanishes entirely. Here, too, it is clear that we should lean into the gap rather than pretend it does not exist. Luci, discussing the role of statues as visual accusatives in the short dedicatory inscriptions of Roman Republican statue bases, stresses that translations or publications which restore the missing text detract rather than add to our understanding, ignoring how an inscription becomes more than its text. This brings us back to the issue of how epigraphic texts are published. We are now well-accustomed, as discussed above, to the notion that traditional corpora erase the material component of inscriptions, elevating the textual above all else. What we perhaps still do not sufficiently recognize, however, is the way that corpora, and the editorial conventions of publishing inscriptions, can fail to do justice to the text as well. Some obviously egregious examples are noted in this volume. On one tombstone discussed by Salisbury, for instance, the DM is deliberately placed to intersect with the name of the deceased, but in the Roman Inscriptions of Britain is published as a separate, initial, line (RIB 3074; Fig. 6.5). Mullen, meanwhile, discusses bilingual inscriptions where the two halves of a single text have been published in two different, linguistically segregated, corpora. But even epigraphic best practices can skew our experience of the capacities of epigraphic language outlined here. The expansion of abbreviations, the provision of missing words, what is or is not included in translations (when provided) – all of these create a very different text to the one confronted on the monument itself.

This way in which our experience of inscriptions is almost inevitably mediated through their publication in corpora brings me to the next dimension of our engagement with epigraphy that the papers in this volume continually bring to the fore: the issue of intertextuality.

Intertextuality

Intertextual dynamics are most obviously at play, and most explicitly considered, in the chapters that deal with longer texts, in particular those by Cenati et al. (Chapter 7), Jackson Williams (Chapter 2), and Tafaro (Chapter 8). Not coincidentally, the texts that these chapters engage with are also for the most part poetic in nature, with Cenati et al. and Tafaro focusing on Latin verse inscriptions from the Roman period, and Jackson Williams exploring Latin and Scots texts on early modern Scottish funerary monuments. These texts are self-evidently artistically ambitious, rich in allusion and imagery, with obvious affinities with literary poetic practice, and they take part in intertextual landscapes of varying sizes and scopes. Jackson Williams, for example, explores the highly localized intertextuality on the tombstone of James Lumsden in Crail, Fife, where verses in Latin and Scots play off each other on a single monument. Each in isolation emphasizes different aspects of Lumsden’s character, with the Latin verses conjuring a secular image of an educated member of the elite, and the Scots stressing a pious, Calvinist theology; together, they draw a more nuanced, multi-faceted picture of Lumsden than either can do alone. Moving beyond the stone itself, the verses are also in intertextual dialogue with similar texts on both contemporaneous and later monuments elsewhere in Fife, knowledge of which would add further dimensions to reader responses. Likewise, Latin verse inscriptions from the Roman Empire engage with an epigraphic landscape of inscribed poetry going back to the Archaic period. But the intertextual dimensions of verse inscriptions are of course not confined to monuments in stone; they cross into the world of literary verse written by hand on ephemeral media such as papyri. The ways in which written epigrams from the Hellenistic period onwards play with the tension between notionally nugatory and ephemeral literary verse and the pretensions to eternity of inscribed stone monuments have been the subject of much attention from scholars of ancient literature. Tafaro in this volume examines this tension as a bi-directional one, exploring not only how Martial riffs on the epigraphic form to construct his witty, tongue-in-cheek authorial persona, but also how analysis of the workings of Martial’s literary games allow us to recognize similar sophisticated dynamics at play in the epigraphy. Tafaro’s chapter also implicitly raises the question of a bidirectional intertextuality between literature and epigraphy not only for us as scholars, but for ancient encounters with inscriptions. Martial’s readers would have recognized the games he was playing from their own encounters with stone epigrams, but likewise at least some of the people commissioning and encountering verse epigrams would have recognized the norms from their knowledge of the literary version. Returning to the sensory, embodied, experience of epigraphy discussed above, we can see a similar dynamic at play in the concept of tasting or eating inscriptions. In their discussion of epigraphy through the lens of the five senses, Cenati et al. are almost apologetic about the absurdity of including taste in their analysis. However, not only do they themselves uncover some highly creative instances of literally eating the written word, Tafaro’s chapter also points out that the metaphor of taste when it comes to text is a common one, with Martial’s epigrams, for example, routinely playing on the double meaning (which works as well in Latin as it does in English) of taste in the sense of eating, and taste in the sense of discernment. The literary examples suggest that perhaps a conception of taste is not so far from epigraphic experience as we might expect.

This two-way intertextual street between inscriptions and the written word is also addressed by Jackson Williams, in a way that raises issues for the broader study of all inscriptions, not solely verse ones. A few years after the erection of the Lumsden monument in Crail, its verse inscriptions were reproduced by John Johnston in his book the Heroes ex omni historica Scotici lectissimi, alongside other poems (epigraphic and not) commemorating other Scottish men of note. From this point on, Jackson Williams observes, any educated reader acquainted with Johnston’s book who visited the Crail Kirkyard would have read the inscribed verses in intertextual dialogue with their printed analogues.

We can apply this to the issue raised by the volume contributors who are dealing with shorter, non-literary inscriptions of the way in which epigraphic corpora and the conventions of supplying missing words and expanding out abbreviations mediate our scholarly experience of epigraphic material. What these papers dealing with longer inscriptions demonstrate is that this dynamic can in fact be framed as an intertextual one. As with the hypothetical reader of Johnston, more often than not our physical encounter with a given inscription – if it comes at all – comes after our initial encounter with a text, an image, or a description on the printed or digital page. The inscribed text on the monument itself becomes in many ways, then, an aide-memoire to the expanded text encountered through the corpus. This has the effect of reducing or erasing entirely the embodied component of an epigraphic encounter – a component which, as I have discussed above, is at the heart of what inscriptions do. However, by being alert to the ways in which our responses are conditioned by the intertextuality between catalogue and object – by self-consciously treating the publication of an inscription not as a straightforward record of the object but as a text unto itself in intertextual dialogue with that object, we can move towards a more mindful negotiation of the relationship between inscribed object, printed or digital epigraphic corpus, and our own scholarship.

Storytelling

The various threads I have discussed so far – embodied epigraphy, the nature of epigraphic language, the intertextuality that exists between epigraphic and literary texts – shed light on a much more fundamental question: how exactly do we read inscriptions? A recurrent point in many of the chapters here is the idea that, in keeping with our broader knowledge of reading processes in the ancient world, inscriptions would have been read aloud – and indeed that this is a quality that can be exploited by the genre. Some of the inscriptions explored by Cenati et al., for instance, are clearly playing with this dimension, for example by turning the reader of a funerary inscription into a mouthpiece for the deceased. De la Escosura Balbás et al., meanwhile, point out that out-loud readings would have been a mechanism by which literate – or epigraphically literate – people could convey information to non-literate companions.

But what exactly do we imagine is being said in such a reading, especially for short or abbreviated texts? As the sections above have discussed, a significant portion of an inscription’s impact was encoded in non-verbal form – e.g., its shape, material, iconography – or in its textual characteristics – abbreviations and ellipses, the physical placement of texts on a stone, the framing of textual and visual elements. These are factors that would not be conveyed by a straightforward reading of the text alone out loud, and indeed, their impact, for most viewers, was likely to be unvocalized, even subliminal. In other words, while an inscription may theoretically be read (though, already in the case of abbreviated or elliptical texts, more accurately interpreted), an epigraphic monument cannot be, at least not in any literal sense.⁹

This insight raises a further point, which is how normal is it, in fact, to convey an inscription’s meaning, either to oneself or one’s companions, via straightforward reading? Let us use, as a thought experiment, the modern experience of wandering through some space festooned with epigraphy: a historic graveyard, for example, or other sort of commemorative space – Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, perhaps. Our verbal engagement in these instances is mostly summative. We remark, for instance, on the sadness of a tombstone of a child who died young, or point out the memorial of a noted individual. Rather than repeating the information contained in an inscription verbatim, we provide commentary upon it, supplemented by our own emotional palette, knowledge of the inscription’s subject, or ways in which the monument reminds of other things we have known or seen. In other words, we do not read so much as tell stories to ourselves and our companions, stories that emerge from the intersection of the epigraphic object and our relationship to it.

This has profound implications for how we understand the social role of inscriptions