This is an ambitious book. According to the editors, its principal aims are: (i) to explore how ancient literary texts help us understand how inscriptions were read, interpreted and perceived; (ii) to identify convergences and discrepancies between ancient and modern approaches to epigraphy; (iii) to explore the differences (and rivalries) between ‘performances on stone’ and the performance of literary texts; and (iv) to analyse the interface between the production of inscriptions and their reception in literature. The volume delivers on all. It kicks off with a splendid introduction by the editors, who offer a broad contextualization of their approach and point to a number of other avenues for research. The sixteen essays that follow are grouped under two headings: ‘Literary epigraphy and the ancient past’ comprises papers mostly focusing on how the ancients made use of inscriptions (real or forged) to retrieve something of (or to make a point about) the past; ‘Literary epigraphy: complementarity and competition’ focuses on modes of interaction between literary and epigraphic texts. Some of the best papers bring both thematic foci together, and the volume overall benefits from a significant degree of synergy between the various contributions, which the detailed indices help to unlock.
Several chapters explore the functional equivalence of inscriptions and monuments as ‘relics’ of a vanished past. The use of such relics often involved misapprehensions, furthered by the tendency to assume that a document is contemporary with the event it describes — as Hartmann stresses in his survey of ‘Inscriptions and Other Material Relics of the Past in Greco-Roman Antiquity’. The use of inscriptions as a means of getting at an authentic past differed greatly according to period and genre. Thus Mari, in her study of how visitors and scholars responded to monuments and inscriptions in Delphi, is able to identify the mid-fourth century as the moment when a marked interest in documents first set in; but even historians seem to have recognized the historical value of inscriptions only in specific cases: when other sources (oral memories or authoritative literary narratives) were unavailable or not entirely convincing; when they wished to dispute well-established opinions; or when they tried to push a local, partial or biased reconstruction of an event. Haake's chapter on the use of psephismata in Hellenistic biographies of philosophers explores a case in point: he offers fascinating insights into how biographers used (or created) documents to buttress controversial views.
Several contributors argue that inscriptions may have been used more widely than we realize. Tzifopoulos notes instances in Pausanias where his wording in the description of a monument implies that he did see the dedication even if he does not say so. Likewise, Kosmetatou argues that Herodotus consulted documents or archives on the donations of Croesus at Delphi. In an extremely rich paper on ‘Archaic Latin Inscriptions and Greek and Roman Authors’ (which includes an impressive table of early Latin inscriptions in literary texts), Langslow draws attention to a range of phenomena that complicate the picture further: allusive gestures to inscriptions most likely known only through oral tradition rather than autopsy; the use of inscriptional language in literary texts (such as the epigraphic idiom Cicero adopts when citing laws); and the influence of literary genre on the language of epigraphic texts, as shown by differences in spelling between the titulus (archaic) and the elogium (modernizing) in the funerary inscriptions for the Scipiones.
‘Epigram’ is another unifying concern of the volume. Petrovic offers an excellent discussion of the uses (and provenance) of epigrams in the Attic orators, which intriguingly all come from speeches composed in 330 b.c. While maintaining that epigrammatic collections were probably in circulation already in the fifth century, Petrovic suggests that collections of epigrams reflecting interest in local history began to emerge in the fourth century, roughly coinciding with the increasing habit of recording copies of public documents in more than one medium. In another impressive paper, Day scrutinizes epinician poetry for signs of epigraphic literacy. Fearn stresses once more the complementarity, rather than opposition, of epinician poetry and monumental dedication. LeVen analyses Aristotle's Hymn to Arete in terms of echoes of epitaphic language. And Morrison offers a fascinating close reading of the epitaph of Simonides in Callimachus' Aetia (fr. 64 Pf.), with reference to the tradition of epigrams commemorating great figures of the past.
Other genres, too, get a hearing. Lougovaya looks at Greek comedy (lots of decrees, horoi, spondai, dikai, katalogoi, typically brought on the scene and tampered with) and tragedy (only one epitaph, a dedication and an oath — all imaginary). Dinter explores intermediality in Latin literature. Damien Nelis and Jocelyne Nelis-Clement search for reflections of the furor epigraphicus that broke out under Augustus in contemporary poetry and other literary media, concluding that Augustan poets ‘imbibed’ the epigraphic habit and used it for a variety of purposes, from political commentary to authorial self-fashioning — a line of inquiry further pursued by Houghton, with specific reference to Roman love elegy. And Zadorojnyi's exciting tour de force through late antique references to (or mentions of) inscriptions offers a fitting conclusion to the volume, with its welcome focus on the relationship between inscriptions and power.
Not all of the papers are equally compelling: some are rather general, others verge towards lists or retrace familiar territory. But the volume as a whole certainly demonstrates how much both epigraphers and literary critics stand to gain from ‘cross’ engagement.
