This paper presents four inscriptions from ancient Pistyros, a fortified settlement on the mainland opposite Thasos, that played a significant role in local trade and metallurgy. The first inscription, a dedication to Zeus Soter and King Philip, dates to the late fourth century B.C. and provides crucial evidence of King Philip II's worship in Pistyros, likely as part of an official cult initiated by the pro-Macedonian faction in Thasos. This inscription, along with other archaeological findings and an early third-century B.C. inscription bearing the phrase << of the Thasians >>, engraved on a block of the fortification walls, provides evidence of the Thasian restoration of Pis-tyros in the fourth century, following its loss to Athens in 463. This evidence further suggests that Thasos retained control over Pistyros with Macedonian consent. Additionally, two boundary stones (horoi) dated around the middle of the fourth century B.C. exhibit a formulation that has no exact parallel in Greek epigraphy; they illustrate the process of exairesis, whereby city allocated assets for special public use. These horoi attest to civic regulation of the urban landscape and reflect measures implemented to prevent the unlawful occupation of public space.
The terms sapientia and sapiens in Latin inscriptions In Latin literature, sapientia and sapiens are terms that are used in many different ways but are nevertheless difficult to grasp. Although they also underwent certain semantic developments, they always served to characterize a person in a positive way. In Christian thought, the terms finally changed noticeably in both usage and meaning, so that their gradual Christianization can be traced, which is primarily reflected in the orientation of sapientia towards God and the Christian faith. Thus, sapientia and sapiens became a special motif of praise for outstanding Christians. How are the terms used on Latin inscriptions? To what extent are there similarities or differences to the use, semantic meanings and their changes in Latin literature? The article addresses these questions on the basis of statistical representations as well as linguistic and content-related analyses.
This paper presents a critical edition of an epitaph from the city of Lyttos, Crete, offering fresh insights into the relationship between Cretan viticulture and the Roman provisioning system. The paper argues that Cretan wine was not solely imported to Italy by independent merchants but may have also been managed as part of the duties of the praefectus annonae, the official responsible for overseeing the supply of essential goods to Rome.
The inscribed block, which is incomplete, was part of a parallelepiped base to which it was attached. The deceased, who remains unknown due to the missing parts of the inscription, was a soldier from Forum Vibi Cabarrum serving in the legion II in the centuria Q. Urvinus during the first half of the first century A.D. The authors offer to restore the testamentary clauses.
This paper deals with the study of some Latin inscriptions that have recently appeared and been sold on the Italian and international antiquities markets. These are both genuine monuments and forgeries, some of which already published. In particular, the textual analysis has allowed the authors to further investigate the historical value of the objects and, for the forgeries, to trace a set of works with common characteristics for which it is possible to suggest the same context of origin.
The paper presents a new interpretation regarding a funerary monument, namely a profiled funerary stela, discovered at Porolissum, Roman Dacia. Helped by the Highlight Reflectance Transformation Imaging (H-RTI) method, improvements on previous editions of this text are advanced. Thus, it is demonstrated that we are dealing with a Latin poetic text dedicated to a deceased person, a young female named Aelia, most likely by her parents. These new edition and interpretation have a certain importance as they bring to light one of the few funerary verse inscriptions discovered so far in Dacia, offering us, as well, glimpses on the forma mentis and funerary poetic landscapes of the Romans.
Bureaucratic formalities in a constitution for the classis Flavia Moesica alone The vast majority of imperial constitutions, of which diplomata militaria are copies, were intended for a large number of military units within a province. However, constitutions were occasionally issued for only one unit, especially in provinces where there was only one unit. Soldiers of provincial fleets were usually the recipients of a constitution together with other units of the same province; however, a small number of diplomas show that a separate constitution was sometimes issued for a fleet alone. This number can be increased by reinterpreting and supplementing two already known diplomas that have only survived as fragments. What is important in both cases is that the name of the fleet commander was given within the text pertaining to the grant, not in the recipient's part as was usually the case.
This article presents two little-known Greek inscriptions preserved at the Louvre Museum. The first, attributed to Sparta, is a dedication to Poseidon, and it has remained partially unpublished until now. The second is an epitaph attributed to Chios, but likely originating from Perinthos-Heracleia, as indicated by the analysis of the specific formulary used in the city in the Propontis.
A Greek/Latin bilingual inscription from Syros, only known from a photograph, honors Tiberius Claudius Secundus, a wealthy benefactor of Syros, who had a long career in apparitorial positions as lictor curiatus, accensus velatus, and viator tribunicius in the province of Asia (late first/early second century A.D.). Secundus was already known from inscriptions from Ephesos and Syros. He was probably the son of Tiberius Claudius Secundus Philippianus, a freedman of Claudius. The new text offers an opportunity to re-examine the hierarchical position of the viatores in apparitorial careers and their presence in the eastern provinces. Secundus was awarded the honorific attribute phi iota lambda omicron sigma upsilon rho iota omicron sigma, which belongs to a long tradition of attributes composed of phi iota lambda omicron sigma + an ethnic name. This inscription is also relevant for the study of bilingualism in the Roman East. The text was first composed in Latin; the Greek translation uses Greek equivalents for expressions that are common in Latin epigraphy. Latin influence can also be best seen in the use of the dative for the name of the honorand in the Greek text, instead of the accusative.
An Archaic law from the small polis of Dreros in northeastern Crete, first published in 1946 by van E pi enterre, has attracted considerable attention among historians, legal historians, and linguists, since it includes one of the earliest references to the word polis in the ancient Greek world. The key challenges faced by scholars are defining the concept of polis in this law, and addressing the problem of the indefinite role of the phylai in the decision-making process in seventh-century Dreros. Another significant problem is the competence of a polis official called the agretas who is considered to be either a political official who gathered the assembly or a military officer who mobilized the tribal regiments in times of war. Although much ink has been spilled on these crucial problems, they remain open for future research. This paper seeks to critically discuss the law of Dreros, to review the previous interpretations of the term agretas, and to propose a new interpretation which aims to shed some light on the unresolved questions arising from this law.
The article considers the norms of the Gortyn Code regarding donations. Donations within the family are distinguished from donations to strangers. Within the family, there are donations from the father to the daughter, from the husband to the wife, from the son to the mother. In addition to these, there are donations contained in the rules on adoption. Donations to strangers are only marginally addressed in a provision that declares them invalid if the remainder of the donor's assets are not sufficient to pay the creditors. The author underlines, in conclusion, how the legislator subjects what were probably traditional gift practices to the new requirements posed by the monetary economy.
Christian funerary inscriptions between the second and sixth centuries rarely reflect on the afterlife, which is particularly noteworthy given the vested interests in the hereafter by early Christian apologists. As belief in the resurrection and Parousia became increasingly central in the self-definition of many Christian communities, why do we not see sufficient engagement with the afterlife on epitaphs? This paper seeks to address this inquiry by offering five possible rationales for the rarity of the resurrection on early Christian funerary inscriptions.
The extensive collection of field-notes by the German epigraphist Habbo G. Lolling kept in the archives of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens contains a copy of a now-lost fragmentary inscription found in 1882 in the village of Alifaka (present-day Kastro), near the site of ancient Atrax in Thessaly. The text and partial restoration of the inscription is presented in the article, showing that it contains fragments of three manumission records of the Roman period, most probably originating from ancient Atrax.
At the end of the last century, two fragments of statue bases were found on the agora of the Pisidian polis of Malos. Due to the similarity of the monuments as well of the inscriptions, researchers had previously assumed that we are dealing with merely one honorary monument. A comparison with similar pairs of statue bases in the public spaces of Ephesos and Sagalassos leads to the conclusion that the two monuments of Malos are honours to the emperors Constantius II and Constans which were established during their joint reign (A.D. 340-350).
The edition of two overlooked inscriptions from the city of Nimes, which can be dated from an early period, reveals two people involved in business activities: a publican (publicanus) and a banker/exchanger (nummularius). Both were of Italian origin.
Epigraphic facsimiles, life-size copies of inscriptions made during autopsy, have long been used in the study of epigraphy. In recent years, digitisation projects have brought old collections to light, reigniting scholarly interest in this type of material. In order to use facsimiles in epigraphic research, we must consider what they can and cannot tell us. After presenting a taxonomy of epigraphic facsimiles, this article evaluates the facsimile types of tracings, rubbings and squeezes as epigraphic evidence. A good facsimile should faithfully represent the inscription and any surrounding decorations, and should allow as little opportunity for malicious tampering or human error as possible. Furthermore, the approach to a physical facsimile and a digitised image of the same must be different. Although some information found in the physical facsimile cannot be represented in the digitised image, digitisation projects play an important role in dissemination and preservation.
In this article we offer a new critical edition and historical commentary of the socalled "Funktion & auml;rsbrief" of Euromus. A new analysis of the fragmentary text, letter forms and content of the inscription leads to a reinterpretation of this puzzling document. Contrary to what has been suggested, the author of the missive to Euromus must have been an authority of higher rank than the dioiketes and the Ptolemy mentioned in the text. The latter was neither a king nor a son of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and there is no need to assume that the epistolary exchange took place under the Ptolemaic administration.
The following article presents five monuments with inscriptions found in Pisidian Antioch as well as in the museum of Yalva & ccedil; in recent years. Specifically, these are: a fragmentary part of a building, an honorary monument for a woman of the upper class, two small funerary steles, and fragments of a sarcophagus. After a short introduction on recent research in Antioch's epigraphic heritage, the new stones bearing inscriptions are presented and an edition of the texts including detailed commentaries is offered.
In this paper, we present the first automatic lemmatizer for Ancient Greek Inscriptions (AGILe). Lemmatization of ancient texts, the process of tagging each word with the base form equal to the dictionary entry, benefits researchers, since searches on a lemmatized corpus can retrieve all occurrences of a lemma in one query. Whereas the corpus of literary texts (e.g. the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) has been lemmatized, the vast majority of Ancient Greek inscriptions has not. Lemmatization is useful especially for inscriptions, since these are texts with a great amount of dialectal and spelling variation, but to lemmatize this vast corpus by hand would be an enormous task. We evaluated the performance of five existing automatic lemmatizers, developed for literary Greek, on epigraphic texts. Since their performance was disappointing (61.5% accuracy at best), we developed a new lemmatizer dedicated to Greek inscriptions. The performance of our lemmatizer is 85.6%. We provide a detailed error analysis as well as concrete suggestions for future improvement, as first steps towards the integration of AGILe in an online corpus of inscriptions.
The city of Aptera currently provides by far the most evidence for the importation of Italian sigillata to Crete. This study presents a group of stamps found in the excavations of the Roman villa and two other sectors of the archaeological site, as a supplement to the important number already published from this site. These stamps can be set into the context of the citywide record in order to identify 81 potters known to have supplied Aptera; the approximate date and location of their workshops, especially late Italian potters active at Pisa; and distribution patterns that might have brought their wares to Aptera, particularly from regional and intermediary ports to the north and south of Crete. The available evidence for Apteraian consumption of these fashionable red-gloss wares documents domestic as well as public consumption, and the integration of Aptera and her residents into the Roman economy and the material culture of the Roman world.
