Some time in the ad 540s, some seventy years after Perpetuus erected his basilica over the tomb of Martin, a new pilgrimage site arose on the northern outskirts of Carthage at Bir Ftouha. Recent excavations have revealed the plan and structures of this remarkable Byzantine period complex (Stevens et al. 2005). Within Bir Ftouha’s buildings and peristyles, mosaic tomb inscriptions - those of the young Adeodatus and Gaudiosa, for example - decorated the floors, commemorating, as elsewhere in North Africa, the collective identity of those interred beneath (Ennabli 1991: no. 597; Stevens et al. 2005: 324-6, 332-3; Yasin 2005). Outside the basilica and around the main buildings, graves and epitaphs accumulated (Stevens et al. 2005: 571-6). The chancel area of the central basilica, stretching from the apse into the sanctuary and nave, protected at least sixteen privileged tombs (and perhaps twice that number). Though no surviving texts identify the saints honored at Bir Ftouha, there is little doubt that such inscriptions were once on display (Stevens et al. 2005: 43-7, 557-9). Epigraphic commemoration of the martyrs was by then deeply embedded in North African traditions of worship (Duval 1982): Donatist memoriae martyrum had dotted the countryside (Frend 1985) and even Augustine had composed verses for inscription (Serm. 319. 7 (Stephen); Duval 1982: 182-3 (Nabor)).
During the sixth century, however, the martyrs were also enmeshed in the political and religious confrontations introduced by the Vandal invasion and the Justinianic reconquest (Frend 2000). Traces of these conflicts still mark the epigraphic record. About a kilometer from the Bir Ftouha complex, for example, just outside Carthage at the fourth-century Basilica Maiorum (Mcidfa), an early sixth-century marble plaque (85 x 113 cm), apparently erected as part of a restoration of the church by the Arian Vandal kings and almost surely replacing earlier texts, celebrated the early third-century martyrs Perpetua, Felicitas, and their comrades (Duval 1982: 682-3, no. 6; Ennabli 1982: 7-8, no. 1; 1997: 132-5). Subsequently, inscriptions from the Byzantine period supplemented this Vandalic text (Ennabli 1982: nos. 2-3), as one shift apparently overwrote another. Meanwhile, in and around the basilica, burial continued as it had since the fourth century; and, though the epitaphs of the Vandal period are palaeographically distinct in their rough irregularity and are apparently fewer in number (Ennabli 1982: 23-5), they speak to the Germanic adaptation of epigraphic conventions.
It is tempting to look for history in such assemblies. At the Basilica Maiorum, for example, the recommemoration of Perpetua and Felicitas by the early sixth-century inscription just mentioned has been tied to the end of official persecution by the Vandals in ad 523 and the reopening of the church. Likewise, the later texts may be associated with a new phase of Byzantine rebuilding (Ennabli 1982: 23-5; 1997: 134-5). Similarly, Bir Ftouha’s recent excavators suspect that the very construction of this newly founded basilica ad corpus ‘‘commemorated Carthage’s official return to orthodoxy’’ - that is, Bir Ftouha ‘‘may have been a statement of orthodoxy, a celebration of the victory over Arianism’’ (Stevens et al. 2005: 574). In any case, it seems indisputable that the cult of the martyrs, sometimes rearticulated over time in a series of consecutive dedications, provided one durable element of continuity bridging late Roman and Byzantine North Africa.
Some two centuries after the construction of the Byzantine complex at Bir Ftouha, with Carthage’s ragged remnants in Arab hands since ad 698, a ‘‘remarkable renewal in the use of epigraphy for the monumental display of text’’ blossomed in Lombard northern Italy. Rooted in and even consciously echoing the Roman past, whose monuments were still visible in the North Italian landscape, but bent toward the propagation of a new ‘‘court ideology,’’ the epigraphic program associated with Liutprand (ad 712-44) now appears as a renaissance after the false starts of the seventh century (Petrucci 1995: 47-53; for what follows, Everett 2003: 235-76, preceding quotes 265, 251). Though the absolute number of extant eighth-century inscriptions (in stone or copies) is small by early imperial standards and the texts often present problems of dating and interpretation, the assembly testifies to royal, clerical, and monastic recognition of the social and political authority invested in inscribed words. Ornately carved, with stylized vegetal borders, the surviving verse epitaphs and building inscriptions of this ‘‘Liutprandian epigraphy’’ advertised the political pretensions, piety, and benevolence of the Lombard king, while underscoring the court’s patronage of leading monastic and clerical institutions. They proclaimed peace, order, and prosperity; equated Liutprand with Solomon; and highlighted the Lombard king’s commitment to literary culture. Favoring rhythmic meters that ran closer to the cadences of spoken Latin, the verse inscriptions of the period may even have been accessible to a relatively wide audience.
Although this rejuvenation of the epigraphic habit in eighth-century Lombardy also links Italy’s epigraphic past with trends soon to be expressed in the inscriptions of the Pavese elite, Liutprand’s ‘‘renaissance’’ may stand as our final example of epigraphy’s recurrent appeal. The Latin epigraphic habit runs like a familiar thread through the history of the ancient and late antique world, sometimes brilliantly evoking local and imperial cultures, at other times nearly fading from view. The motives that underlie the impulse to write on durable surfaces are profoundly complex and arise out of social contingencies that vary with time, place, and social location. Not all who could inscribe did so, and in some times and places, it seems, very few cared to at all. Nevertheless, nearly all the epigraphic texts surveyed here can be read as statements about individual or collective identity. Consciously and unconsciously, they express contemporary attitudes and values. Moreover, because these words were often set out in public on permanent and semi-permanent surfaces, they themselves became part of the patrimony each age bequeathed to subsequent generations. Ancient epigraphic culture, therefore, and culture shaped by epigraphy, is deeply reflexive, ever bending back even as it looks forward.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Various relevant corpora of inscriptions are referred to in the chapter but comprehensive coverage of the source material is most readily available in Berard 2000. Bodel 2001b, though largely eschewing late antique material, is a solid introduction to the study of inscriptions as historical sources. Handley 2003 is both a recent survey of general questions and a set of perceptive arguments about how to approach the epigraphic data of one region, Gaul and Spain, in Late Antiquity. Many such studies are regional, for understandable reasons. Good examples of diverse but regionally based studies include Duval 1982 (North Africa), Carletti 1986 (Rome), and Everett 2003 (Lombard Italy). Herman 2000 is a sure-footed introduction to the value of inscriptions for the history of the Latin language. Galvao-Sobrinho 1995 begins a discussion about the meaning of the epigraphic curves that can be plotted across the regions and decades of Latin Late Antiquity. Hedrick 2000 and Trout 2005 suggest other ways in which inscriptions are implicated in the issues of identity formation and public memory to which this chapter has frequently returned. In the end, however, because epigraphy is foremost a medium of expression, exemplary treatments of inscriptions will be found in many of the best studies of the cultural panorama of Late Antiquity.
World History
