A good deal of Roman and late antique history is now based on an analysis of inscriptions. A regional assembly, such as that illustrating the vitality of urbanism in fourth-century North Africa (Lepelley 1979-81), may tell an unexpected story, while inscriptions in bulk often underpin quantitative or analytical studies (Bodel 2001b: 30-9). Fundamental investigations of the ancient economy rest as often on epigraphic evidence as upon the amphorae, bricks, and shipwrecks revealed by archaeology (Duncan-Jones 1974; Harris 1993). Studies of and debates about the age of Roman girls at marriage (Shaw 1987a) or the structure of the Roman family (Saller and Shaw 1984; Mann 1985; Martin 1996) rely heavily upon inscriptions analyzed in aggregate. Without the mass of more ordinary inscriptions, the lives of the urban lower classes would be even more poorly understood. Epigraphic evidence, for instance, makes it possible to talk more confidently about the working lives and self-representation of the servile, freed, and freeborn population of early imperial Rome, Pompeii, or Ostia (Joshel 1992; Mourtisen 2005), or about prostitution in the Roman world (McGinn 2004). And although consensus remains elusive, studies of literacy continue to marshal epigraphically informed arguments (Cooley 2002; Ward-Perkins 2005: 151-67).
Some of the studies just mentioned included among their data inscriptions from late as well as earlier antiquity (for example, Shaw 1987a). But recognition of the distinct features and qualities of late antique inscriptions has also encouraged investigations designed to take specific advantage of later texts. The more consistent inclusion of the precise time of the deceased’s death in Christian epitaphs, for example, may make it possible to plot a ‘‘seasonal curve’’ for the cycle of mortality (excluding infant deaths) on display in this ‘‘data in bulk’’ (Shaw 1996). Furthermore, beyond revealing shifting patterns of nomenclature and epithets, epigraphy, together with archaeology, is a rich source of information about the late antique Jewish community in Rome. Though the majority of the epitaphs from Rome’s Jewish catacombs preferred Greek to Latin, the naming (onomastic) practices, references to age at death, and propensity to advertise community-related offices in these epitaphs suggest that Jews interacted regularly with gentiles, while also maintaining their distinction among their pagan and Christian contemporaries (Rutgers 1995).
Similarly, the elite commemorative practices that persist into and beyond the fourth century remain the sine qua non of Roman prosopography. The dedicatory, honorific, and funerary inscriptions of the Roman aristocracy are fundamental to a reconstruction of the late empire’s administrative structures as well as the career patterns, naming practices, and genealogical relationships of the Roman aristocracy. Thus, both a pioneering study of the urban prefects of Rome (Chastagnol 1962) and a more recent work on the administration of late Roman Italy (Cecconi 1994) rest as solidly on epigraphic as on literary foundations. Those foundations, in turn, have been shored up or undermined by pursuit of the principles of late Roman nomenclature, principles often deduced to an unavoidable degree from the epigraphic data itself (Kajanto 1966; Alan Cameron 1985b). Further rarified, these same inscriptions often undergird conclusions about the rate and nature of aristocratic conversion to Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries (Salzman 2002), or reveal the competition and jockeying for status still endemic to this class (Niquet 2000).
Several examples can serve to illustrate the range and depth of the epigraphic horizons of Late Antiquity. The Casket of Proiecta is perhaps the most renowned item among the exquisite vessels and objects that comprise the Esquiline Treasure (Shelton 1981; Painter 2000). On the embossed and engraved lower front panel of this silver gilded box is depicted a young woman attended by servants as she dresses her hair before a mirror. Immediately above, on the front panel of the lid, is a depiction of Venus at her toilet, naked, seated on a shell, and attended by Centauro-tritons and Erotes, a ‘‘visual simile’’ of the real-life scene below it (Shelton 1981: 27). In the central panel on the top of the lid, encircled by a wreath held by two more Erotes, appear a husband and wife, suggesting the casket may originally have been a wedding gift. While these and the casket’s remaining scenes of domestic and public life, especially the procession to the public baths that adorns the back panel of the lid, may evoke the fourth-century ‘‘world of elite women’’ (Elsner 1998: 40), it is the inscription running across the horizontal front rim of the lid - ‘‘Secundus and Proiecta, may you live in Christ (vivatis in Chri[sto])’’ - that has made the object even more tantalizing. Proiecta’s casket - with its conflation of erotic and mythological imagery, its visual allusions to the mundane activities of its aristocratic female proprietor, and its exhortation to the Christian life - has taken a rightful place within modern debates about the aesthetic and artistic agenda, the compromises and the tensions, that accompanied the conversion of the Roman elite to Christianity in the mid and later fourth century (Kitzinger 1977; Alan Cameron 1985a; Shelton 1985).
Roughly from the same milieu, though quite different in length, medium, and function from the brief exhortation inscribed on Proiecta’s casket, we have the complex story of CIL 6. 1. 1783. The inscription filled the base of a statue erected (or restored) in ad 431 in Rome’s Forum of Trajan. The statue itself presumably represented Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, who is commemorated on the base, although he had died in disgrace more than three decades earlier at the Battle of the Frigidus River (ad 394). Indeed, CIL 6. 1. 1783, which apparently overwrote a previous inscription, announced the imperial rescue of Flavianus from the damnatio memoriae that had followed upon his miscalculated opposition to Theodosius I in the middle years of the ad 390s. Some contemporaries had quickly presented the Battle of the Frigidus, where Flavianus, portrayed as a conservative pagan, had supported the ‘‘usurper’’ Eugenius, as a new chapter in the story of Christianity’s victory over Rome’s traditional cults. The rehabilitation publicized in CIL 6. 1. 1783, then, which reprinted a florid letter of exculpation from Theodosius II and Valentinian III to the Roman senate, apparently testifies to the campaigns of revision and reconciliation then being waged to heal the wounds inflicted on the Roman aristocracy by the political and religious conflicts of the previous generation (Hedrick 2000). Exact interpretation of the amnesia and nostalgia that color CIL 6. 1. 1783 remains open to argument; but, as one of the few significant Latin ‘‘literary texts’’ of the ad 430s, this inscription must be part of any assessment of the cultural history of the Theodosian age - particularly because its publicly inscribed words, unlike those of Macrobius’ nearly contemporary Saturnalia, were shared well beyond the confines of the literary salons and villas of the Roman elite.
To walk from the domus of Proiecta on the Esquiline to the Forum of Trajan is to move from essentially private to extremely public space. But the nature of public space itself was evolving in this period, as cityscape and countryside were transformed under the impetus of the social, religious, and political changes that accompanied christianization (see Loseby, ch. 10). New churches, martyria, and monastic foundations arose both in the suburbs and within the city walls. Alternative centers of civic and religious activity emerged as older ones declined. Moreover, as Christians redrew urban topography, public writing, formal and informal, spilled over from the temples, basilicas, and fora into new kinds of social space. Between the mid seventh and the mid ninth century, for example, far removed from the Rome of the Theodosian age, at least 165 texts were carved or scratched into the walls of the sanctuary of San Michele at Monte Sant’Angelo in the Apulian peninsula of Gargano (Carletti 1980; Everett 2003: 265-74). Several of the surviving inscriptions attest to official Lombard patronage of the sanctuary. One (Carletti 1980: no. 82) records the building activities of Duke Romoald I of Beneventum (ad 663-87); another (no. 44) apparently refers to Grimoald I (ad 647-71), as well as to Romoald, his son. The two texts were expertly carved and their lettering shows affinities with the Pavian epigraphy of the north (Carletti 1980: 24). Both have been seen as further evidence for a seventh-century royal program ‘‘to unite the Arian-Catholic divisions and help foster a sense of Lombard unity’’ (Everett 2003: 267). Similarly official, though somewhat more crudely carved, is an eight-line acclamation to the Roman saints Peter and Paul inscribed near one of the sanctuary’s entrance ways, probably in the seventh century under the guidance of the site’s patrons or administrators (Otranto 1980). Though interpretation of this text remains difficult, one thing seems clear: at early medieval San Michele, monumental writing in public space was still being enlisted to promote reconciliation and assert collective identity.
Yet, the great majority of the texts preserved at San Michele are not official pronouncements but pilgrims’ graffiti (numbering 159). Most give only a name. Many appear to be autographs. Of the 168 men and fourteen women documented, ninety-seven have been identified on onomastic grounds as Germanic - primarily Lombards, but also Franks and Anglo-Saxons. Eighteen pilgrims identified themselves as presbyters (three of whom further self-identified as peccatores), one as a deacon, five as monks. Four are separately styled peregrinus (or pelegrinus). The high social rank of some of these visitors is indicated by the presence of ten viri honesti among the group. Twenty-three of the catalogued inscriptions also include variations on the acclamation ‘‘May you live in God [biba in deo]’’ (Carletti 1980: 18-24). Walls still attracted, as they had done for centuries, the personal testimonies of those who wished to memorialize their presence in that way, and who possessed a sufficient command of letters to write their names and a few standard phrases (Charles Pietri 1983b; Corbier 2005).
An exceptional natural catastrophe in first-century Campania has preserved unusually rich evidence at Pompeii for the allure of walls and the surfaces of public monuments in earlier Roman antiquity. Although the chances of survival are always especially slim for scratched, scrawled, or painted graffiti, a number of significant finds give a sense of what the pilgrims of San Michele could have learned from earlier late antique pilgrims. In the late third and early fourth century, visitors to the shrine of Peter and Paul on the Via Appia (soon to be the site of Constantine’s Basilica Apostolorum) scratched their names, invocations, and prayers into a plastered red wall. ‘‘Peter and Paul, intercede [petite] for us’’ or ‘‘remember us [in mente abeatis]’ appear frequently (Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae, v. 12907-13096). The two apostles were glossed as ‘‘santi martyres’’ (v: 12955). These tituli memoriales recorded the fulfillment of vows and participation in meals ( refrigeria) at the shrine (Charles Pietri 1983b: 1483-5; Donati 2000: nos. 107-8; Holloway 2004: 146-52). The assembly gives us privileged access to the ritual and social life unfolding around the tombs of the Roman martyrs in the decades before the first great wave of monumentalization overtook them.
Across Rome in the catacombs of Commodilla, a seventh-century fresco of St. Luke (roughly contemporary, therefore, with the earliest texts at San Michele) attracted thirty-seven graffiti. Again, many are simply names, often accompanied by ego, several denoting Lombards and Anglo-Saxons. Roughly a third also announced clerical rank while a few added biba or biba in deo - for example, ‘‘I, Petrus, may you live in God’’ (Carletti 1984-5). The same story can be read, at least by the early seventh century, at the small basilica ad corpus of the saints Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Labicana (Guyon 1987: 470-4). If more were known about the church of Minerve northwest of Narbonne in southern Gaul, similar devotional impulses might be identified behind some of the ninety-three names scribbled in the early Middle Ages on an altar table probably installed there in the fifth century by Rusticus, bishop of Narbonne (Le Blant 1856: no. 609; Marrou 1970: 345). Well into Late Antiquity, personal testimonies scrawled on walls and monuments continued to offer individuals a way of claiming affiliation with the ‘‘cultural milieu'' of ancient pilgrimage and of identifying themselves with others of like mind and habit (Carletti 1995; Everett 2003: 271-2; but pessimism at Ward-Perkins 2005: 163-6). But, since pilgrimage may have been informed as much by contestation as by consensus, subtle reading may reveal fault-lines as well as commonality (Elsner 2005).
Finally, again roughly contemporary with the inscriptions and graffiti of San Michele, there are a number of inscribed, circular, animal-headed fibulae of south and central Italian origin. Luxury objects, far less elaborate than the casket of Proiecta but nevertheless expressing a comparable ethos, these silver and bronze clasps demonstrate the similarly persistent desire of late antique and early medieval men and women to customize personal items by inscription. One group of thirteen fibulae displays both names and acclamations (Salvatore 1977). The names, like Lucas and Aoderada, are presumably those of the owners. A typical acclamation reads biba or bibas, in one case expanded to viva in D[e]o. The phrase D[ominu]s in nomine tuo appears once. Although these fibulae and similar items raise questions about the relationship between workshops and clients and about levels of literacy in Lombard Italy, they nevertheless show that inscribed words remained, for some, crucial markers of personal status and corporate allegiance.
Though far removed in many ways from the Rome of Proiecta and Flavianus, both the mural inscriptions of San Michele and these inscribed fibulae attest to the persistence of familiar epigraphic impulses in early medieval Italy. Before returning to the Lombard states in the final section, however, we might first consider a further aspect of the relationship between communal identity and monumental texts already suggested by the inscriptions of San Michele.
World History
