I.i General Introduction

The aim of this quinquennial survey remains the same as its predecessor, as for the most part does the format, though the team is regrettably reduced by one.Footnote ¹ With an eye to the study of the Roman world, we hope to signal the most important newly published inscriptions, significant reinterpretations of previously published material, new trends in scholarship, recent studies that draw heavily on epigraphic sources, and noteworthy developments in the various aids to understanding inscriptions (both traditional printed material and electronic resources). In the context of this journal, the geographical range and chronological scope reflect the contours and history of the Roman state from its beginnings down to the end of the seventh century. As such, not only does the survey naturally take in Greek as well as Latin texts, but also epigraphic material in other languages relevant to the Roman world. In the hope that they might usefully reflect the various fields of primary interest to readers of this journal, we have maintained the categories established in the last survey. These comprise, after material of general interest and significance, principal divisions under the headings of (II) Government, law, and authority, (III) Cities, (IV) Funerary epigraphy, (V) Religions, and (VI) Language, literature, and onomastics. The structure of the first section has been changed somewhat in order to give greater prominence to those inscriptions here singled out as historical highlights. The organization of the discussion within each section (or subsection) generally moves between the thematic, chronological, and geographical, as seems to suit the material best.

As noted already in the introduction to the last survey, the quantity of new material and studies published within a five-year period has now reached such a level that it is neither possible nor desirable to offer comprehensive coverage. An indicator of the volume is the fact that the annual round-up of L'Année épigraphique now regularly runs to over 1,800 entries, which, as its editor has observed, is due as much to the greater attention paid to fragmentary and non-monumental texts as it is to new discoveries.Footnote ² Nevertheless, two areas in particular account for significant numbers of new finds. Not only economic development but also, and increasingly, locally directed archaeological excavations in Turkey mean that the Anatolian provinces continue to yield a rich harvest of epigraphic finds. The most spectacular examples in recent times have come not so much from the traditionally productive areas of Ionia, Lydia, and Caria but from the Tekke peninsula (ancient Lycia), the subject of a three-day conference concerned with the impact of this new material on the history of the region.Footnote ³ The other growth area continues to be the bronze diplomas issued to military personnel, mostly turning up unprovenanced on the antiquities market but almost certainly largely deriving from the Balkans. The number of new examples published in a year sometimes exceeds thirty or so, although many are fragments rather than complete artefacts. Accordingly, we are compelled to be selective and are not able to engage as closely with each publication as it may deserve. By way of compensation we have registered in the notes fuller summaries and reviews where they exist. Given the limits of our knowledge and expertise, it is also probable that our choices in particular areas are somewhat arbitrary and unrepresentative. For the specialist, the survey cannot substitute for the annual instalments of AE or the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum nor for that essential bibliographic tool, the Guide de l'épigraphiste, which has recently reached its fourth edition and has already received its first annual supplement (now available free of charge as a download).Footnote ⁴ A handy online register of new publications of and on Latin inscriptions of the late antique and early medieval West was established by M. Handley in 2010.Footnote ⁵ Navigation of past issues of the annual commentary on new finds and studies in the field of Greek inscriptions provided by the Bulletin épigraphique of the Revue des études grecques has been assisted in two respects: as well as the consolidated, revised, and indexed collection of D. Feissel's commentaries on the later Roman material from 1987 to 2004, signalled in the last survey,Footnote ⁶ the notices of the later years of M. and Mme Robert (1978–1987) have recently received full indices.Footnote ⁷

Probably the most substantial single publication to be considered for this quinquennium is the proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, held in Barcelona in 2002.Footnote ⁸ Despite the diversity of their contents, these two volumes offer particularly rich pickings — a result of the Congress's thematic focus upon the provinces of the Roman Empire as seen through the epigraphic evidence. The regrettable absence of any indices to the limited edition printed version of the acts might represent a major impediment to their consultation, were it not for the publication of the proceedings on searchable CD-Rom. Nevertheless, although the congress was organized into thematic panels, aside from the opening and closing addresses, the published papers are presented strictly in alphabetical order of author's name. It might then be helpful to pick out the plenary lectures and, for the majority that did make it into print, to signal their location in the published acts. The plenary sessions covered new finds in Greek epigraphy (A. D. Rizakis, V. Kontorini) and Roman epigraphy (G. Paci, M. Corbier),Footnote ⁹ epigraphy of the transition between Republic and Empire (S. Panciera),Footnote ¹⁰ cultural diversity in the Spanish provinces (F. Beltrán, A. U. Stylow),Footnote ¹¹ Greek epigraphy as a reflection of the development of the polis (C. Roueché), socio-geographic mobility (H. Solin, O. Salomies),Footnote ¹² Greek epigraphy in the West (M. L. Lazzarini),Footnote ¹³ interplay between text and monument (I. Di Stefano Manzella),Footnote ¹⁴ and prosopography and provincial government (A. R. Birley).Footnote ¹⁵ In comparison, the Thirteenth Congress, held in Oxford in Reference Birley2007, on the theme of epigraphy and the historical sciences, was more balanced in its coverage of matters Greek (Archaic to Hellenistic) as well as Roman. Although comprehensive acta have not been produced, the summaries of all contributions, including even the posters, were published at the time.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed the poster, as a format for short communications at these meetings, came into its own for the first time in Oxford, with eighty displayed, about half of which were also submitted electronically and, for the time-being at least, remain freely accessible.Footnote ¹⁷ Meanwhile the plenary lectures are due to appear in print in time for the fourteenth CIEGL in Berlin.Footnote ¹⁸ Rivalling the acts of the Barcelona Congress in scale and diversity is the three-volume publication of the conference of 2006 in honour of Silvio Panciera. The papers are arranged into thematic sections covering the republican period, the city of Rome, municipalities and coloniae, the aristocracy, the military, and the practice of epigraphy.Footnote ¹⁹ As with the acts of the Barcelona Congress, the frustrating lack of any indices is (at least to some extent) compensated for by the availability of a searchable PDF from the publisher's website.Footnote ²⁰

Noteworthy among the trends observable from the material collected in this survey is the fact that the development and consultation of electronic resources has become such an everyday part of the work of recording, cataloguing, and studying inscriptions that it may be redundant to devote a separate section to such matters in the future. That said, the proportion of the scholarly journals most significant for Greek and Latin epigraphy that is available in digital form remains still relatively low. The phenomenon of handbooks and companions to various fields of research has also been an increasingly prominent feature of recent academic publishing. Whatever misgivings one might have about the genre, it is encouraging that sections on epigraphy are regularly included in such volumes.

I.ii Major Historical Highlights

The highlights chosen for this quinquennium are geographically balanced, with new inscriptions illustrating Roman provincial administration in both Latin West and Greek East. They bring to the foreground considerations about the relationship between Rome and its provinces, the rôle of the emperor and his officials in responding to problems brought to their attention, and the potential impact of an emperor's own predilections on the way he made decisions. They also coincidentally fit into the expected pattern of the use of bronze in the Latin West and stone in the Greek East (a neat pattern which has, however, been somewhat challenged by other recent discoveries, on which see further below).

A new Spanish bronze tablet, excavated at Osuna (ancient Urso) from a late antique context where it had been reused, preserves some new chapters of thelex coloniae Genetivae Iuliae.Footnote ²¹ The tablet has been published in detail in a book containing chapters devoted to its appearance (with detailed comment on letter-forms, cutting-technique, dimensions, and spacing), archaeological context, metallurgical analysis, and process of conservation, as well as a diplomatic transcription, translation into Spanish, linguistic and historical commentaries, and photographs. It is argued that the actual bronze tablet was inscribed some time between 20/17 b.c. and a.d. 24, rather than during the Flavian period, as previously thought.Footnote ²² The tablet is incomplete, but its edges to top, bottom, and left side are preserved, and it is inscribed with two columns of text. The text itself is clearly identifiable as chapters 13–20 of the lex Ursonensis, helpfully indicated by the numbers that are clearly marked at the start of each new chapter. The new chapters are important for revealing more details about the internal workings and initial establishment of the Caesarian colonia. In summary, they cover the following topics: the financial probity of the town's magistrates (ch. 13); the requirement for decuriones to own property in the colonia with no fewer than 600 tiles, and — a striking addition to the text of the lex for Tarentum — for coloni of 300 tiles (ch. 14); a list of the town's twenty-four voting-curiae — the majority of these are named after leading Roman familes (including an Asinia, in recognition of the rôle of C. Asinius Pollio in acting as Caesar's representative in establishing the colonia), whilst others have connections with Rome's mythological past (ch. 15); the requirement for duoviri to assign coloni to curiae (ch. 16); how a colonus can be co-opted as decurio, if he is judged dignum idoneumque (ch. 17); an indication that local magistrates were regarded as possessing imperium giving them the authority to conduct elections (ch. 18); the procedure for announcing candidates for election, on publicly-displayed whitened boards (ch. 19); and finally, only a tiny fragment of ch. 20 remains. As an addendum, we note the publication of some minor modifications for the lex municipalis from Segusio, and a bronze fragment from an unidentified municipium in Baeturia Turdulorum in the conventus Cordubensis.Footnote ²³ A volume entitled Gli statute municipali offers a rich collection of essays on many different aspects of municipal statutes, including a history of the discovery of municipal laws from 1755 to 1903, and a detailed discussion of the lex Irnitana.Footnote ²⁴

Another Spanish bronze, known as the Bronze of Agón, also deserves special mention, preserving as it does roughly two-thirds of what has been called the lex rivi Hiberiensis, a set of detailed regulations of Hadrianic date relating to the maintenance and management of an irrigation channel by communities along the river Ebro.Footnote ²⁵ Both the specific topic and rural context are unusual for epigraphic material. These rural communities, or pagi, are associated with the two cities of Caesaraugusta and Cascantum. Le Roux has proposed as another possible restoration of the document's title the [lex de aqua ducend]a rather than the [lex paganic]a.Footnote ²⁶ He examines the meaning of the words pagus and pagani within the context of the towns in the Iberian peninsula, and how the relationship between city and rural communities in its territory was negotiated by the municipal authorities. He argues that the pagus was a formal way of integrating territory and city, and points out that this is the first clear instance of the magistri pagi carrying out judicial functions. Nevertheless, he rather plays down the institutional nature of these pagus communities, suggesting that the magistri were in fact the only permanent institutional structure in the pagus, and that reference to a concilium was not to a general, regular assembly, but to an occasional one dealing with specific matters. A Roman provincial official, [—Fu?]ndanus Augustanus Alpinus, the emperor's legate (either propraetorian or iuridicus) appears at the end of the document as the authority by whom the regulations have been issued, in response to a request by the pagani Caesaraugustani, evidently as a result of a dispute of some sort between the various communities whose interests were involved.

Moving eastwards, the remarkable collaborative edition of the Neronian Customs Law of Asia (lex portorii Asiae) from Ephesos (sometimes rather bombastically known as the Monumentum Ephesenum) by Michel Cottier, Michael Crawford, Charles Crowther, Jean-Louis Ferrary, Barbara Levick, Olli Salomies and Michael Wörrle has been well worth waiting for.Footnote ²⁷ This inscription, which records regulations concerning the collection of customs dues in the province of Asia between 75 b.c. and a.d. 62, is of outstanding significance for understanding Roman economic history and government, as well as Rome's relationship with its provinces in general and the development of the province of Asia in particular. There is not space here even to summarize all the interesting issues arising from the inscription: the document's preface alone gives valuable new insights into the workings of the public archives in Rome. In addition to offering a minuscule text, translation, and commentary of the inscription, the volume also includes a Latin version of the Greek text (composed by M. H. Crawford), which offers a perspective on how the document was translated into a Greek that is of a much higher quality than the poor translations of senatorial decrees often found during the Republic.Footnote ²⁸ Furthermore, the volume contains a series of thought-provoking essays upon different aspects of the inscription, covering its historical, administrative, and financial contexts. Chapters by Mireille Corbier, Stephen Mitchell, Onno van Nijf, Dominic Rathbone and Greg Rowe offer reflections upon the rôle of central government in taking the initiative in having this set of regulations disseminated and published; the document's possible relationship to Tacitus, Annales 13.50–1; the political geography of the province of Asia; the financial administration at Rome; and the social context of tax collection in the Roman Empire. The inscription as a whole presents a vivid picture of the extent to which Rome sought to exploit its provinces economically and to protect its tax revenues.

Less well-known is an inscription of some eighty-seven lines on a similar topic, recording regulations for customs dues of the Lycian Federation, also from the Neronian period.Footnote ²⁹ This new inscription was found in Andriake, the main city of central Lycia, in 1999. The prescript alludes to Nero and his governor of Lycia, C. Licinius Mucianus, and it is followed by tariff regulations for specific goods and for specific cities, and includes four edicts issued by Nero himself, which show particular concern with the activities of publicani. The document reveals the administrative steps involved in raising dues: Rome is to receive a lump sum of 100,000 denarii from the koinon, which in turn could charge a fee to member cities, which would then have the right to collect import duties. The inscription surely deserves more detailed study than is possible in this preliminary report.

As noted below, there has been a flurry of new documents from the Hadrianic period published during this quinquennium, but one of these is certainly worth highlighting for its potential to illustrate the festival culture of the Greek East at the time. This inscription, found on sixteen fragments of a marble plaque near the agora at Alexandria Troas, contains a dossier of three letters from Hadrian written to various interested parties in relation to the organization of games. It was first published in 2006 together with an account of its excavation, text, translation and commentary, epigraphical index, black-and-white photographs, and stimulating wide-ranging discussion.Footnote ³⁰ The dossier is the result of a meeting in August/September a.d. 134 at Naples during the festival of the Sebasta Italika between Hadrian and representatives of the associations of athletes and of Dionysiac Artists, as well as delegates from various cities in the Greek East. The first letter (lines 1–56) — itself a compilation of a variety of decisions — demonstrates Hadrian's desire to ring-fence funds used for the games, and shows that he has sent other letters to a variety of recipients (governor of Syria; provincial councils; separately to the Milesians, Chians, and Ephesians) in order to tackle the problem of funding. The emperor explicitly places responsibility upon provincial governors for ensuring that his instructions are carried out properly and also refers to them the resolution of cities' financial problems. The main concern in the second letter (lines 57–84) is to resolve confusion in the festival calendar, re-scheduling festivals in different parts of the Empire to allow competitors to travel between them on a four-year cycle. The third letter (lines 85–88) deals with banquets for Artists. This dossier contains many riches which promise to stimulate further discussion: to list just a few examples, the emperor confirms that prizes are to be issued in cash; the Balbilleia and Hadrianeia festivals at Ephesos are declared to be of similar standing; the timing of an eiselasis award is clarified; the problem of agonothetes and cities trying to cheat competitors out of their prizes is revealed; major festivals last for forty days each; and finally, the Panhellenia now seems confirmed as having started in the spring of a.d. 137.

I.iii New Corpora

Two new fascicles of CIL should be mentioned here, even though strictly they fall outside the chronological boundaries of this survey, since it seems sensible not to postpone mention of them for another five years. CIL II² 14.2, edited by the much lamented Géza Alföldy, publishes the inscriptions from the coloniaof Tarraco.Footnote ³¹ The introductory material includes a survey of scholarship relating to the epigraphy of Tarraco, the history and topography of the town, and a typology and chronology of its inscribed monuments. The fascicle includes just under 400 inscriptions relating to religion, the imperial family, individuals of senatorial and equestrian status, military affairs, public officials (including imperial slaves and freedmen), and provincial priests. To be highlighted are the seventy-nine sections from the podium of the town's amphitheatre, reconstructed in a tour de force as a rebuilding-inscription of Elagabalus (no. 921). A new interpretation of seating-inscriptions mentioning representatives from Hispania Citerior proposes on the basis of their findspot that they perhaps belong to a provincial council chamber rather than the theatre (nos 1196–8). Finally, worth noting is the unusual case of an epitaph for a public slave attached to the province who has received his freedom and whose gentilician name was perhaps derived from the flamen in charge of his manumission (no. 1199). Some unexpected material is also included, such as a handful of Greek inscriptions (G1–17), some post-antique Latin inscriptions (nos 54*–56*), uninscribed milestones from the via Augusta (M1–18), and inscriptions found elsewhere which refer to individuals from the region (E1–6). The other important addition to the series is a supplement toCILIV, with addenda and corrigenda for electoral dipinti and edicta munerum.Footnote ³² The extensive commentaries and bibliographical notes make this a welcome tool for better understanding Pompeian public notices. There is also a new volume of images of the painted inscriptions of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other nearby sites published in CIL IV. This is an invaluable collection of archive photographs, particularly since very many of the inscriptions are no longer preserved; the photographs (some in colour) give a sense of the juxtaposition of the dipinti, how they overlap, and their relative scale.Footnote ³³

At first glance, the publication of a set of indices may not seem terribly exciting, but the fascicle of indices forCILVI by Arthur and Joyce Gordon, which appeared posthumously in 2006 (CIL VI.6.3), offers a goldmine of material for understanding the ways in which Latin was used in the city of Rome.Footnote ³⁴ It contains noteworthy grammatical forms and carving errors, as well as peculiarities such as Claudius' archaizing letters. Deciding on what to include under these headings presents something of a challenge, and the editors comment on the impossibility of judging the extent to which colour may have been applied to the stones to correct stonecutters' errors, as well as the problems posed by potential misreading of inscriptions now missing. Given the way in which language develops over time, it is not a straightforward task to decide on which grammatical forms and spellings count as ‘standard’ and which as ‘anomalous’. The data are listed in two different ways: one index presents for each entry the anomalous form in bold, followed by the standard form, whilst a second index lists the data in the opposite way. This reveals, for example, that fifty-five variants of the word vixit alone are to be found in the inscriptions of Rome. The volume may be of particular use in studying Greek-Latin bilingualism since it is now possible to track patterns such as the use of a genitive singular ending in –es in the first declension. There are also now available online a ‘keyword-in-context’ index to CILI² 2, 4 (1986) and an index for the milestones in CILXVII/4.1.Footnote ³⁵

Preparations for the new CIL XVIII covering Latin metrical inscriptions are continuing, and a preview of some of the material from the Iberian peninsula is now available.Footnote ³⁶

As in our previous survey, we now turn to important new corpora arranged by geographical location. Starting with Italy and then jumping across to the Latin provinces of North Africa, the sequence then proceeds in a roughly clockwise direction around western Europe and the Balkans before treating the provinces of the Greek East, finishing in Cyrenaica.

Several volumes in the Supplementa Italica series have appeared in our quinquennium: 23 – Butuntum, Firmum Picenum, Potentia, Asisium, Matilica, and Gnathia + a ‘repertorio bibliografico’; 24 – Sipontum, Pausulae, Tarvisium, + supplement for Forum Novum, Hasta and Ager Hastensis; 25 – Liternum, Aquae Statiellae + supplement for Brixia, Benacenses, Valles supra Benacum, Sabini, Trumpilini, Camunni. Vol. 21 includes an index to volumes 15–20.Footnote ³⁷ Of these, we draw particular attention to Giuseppe Camodeca's presentation in vol. 25 of thirty-one inscriptions from Liternum, a town completely unrepresented in CIL X. These offer some vivid insights into the connections between cities in the Phlegraean region and between Liternum and Rome. Two tablets recording membership lists for the local collegium of Augustales (nos 16–17), a generation apart from each other in the late second century a.d., illustrate the shifting membership of the collegium, enrich our onomastic knowledge of the area, and also explicitly record their involvement in emperor-worship: Augustales creati ii qui in cultu domus | divinae contulerunt.Footnote ³⁸ Small though it is, the corpus supports an impression of local enthusiasm for the imperial family, with a statue base honouring Trajan for his alimentary schemes, and other dedications to Marcus Aurelius, Caracalla, Gordian III, and even the son of Gallienus and Salonina, as well as other unidentifiable fragments of imperial dedications.Footnote ³⁹ There is also one important new volume of Supplementa Italica Imagines to report, covering inscriptions from Rome held in collections in Florence.Footnote ⁴⁰ This offers the usual superb photographic record of a whole range of inscribed monuments, including many famous ones such as the Lares altar of the vicus Sandalarius, with seven photographs showing the altar from all sides (no. 3347).

The latest fascicule of the standard corpus of Etruscan inscriptions (CIE II.1.5) includes the territory of Veii and the sanctuary of Portonaccio, where some famous names of early Rome can be found among the votive deposits.Footnote ⁴¹ One bucchero chalice (no. 6456) of c. 550 b.c. was dedicated by an Avile Vipiennas (A. Vibenna) and two bucchero jugs (nos 6454, 6419) by Karcuna and Velthur Tulumnes (cf. the fifth-century King Tolumnius of Livy 4.17).

Some interesting observations emerge from an overview of the corpus of inscriptions from Grumentum (Reg. III), which includes a cluster of building-inscriptions dating from the mid-first century b.c.: it now seems more likely that the town was not a Sullan colonia, but was established in 59 b.c. by Julius Caesar.Footnote ⁴² A new handbook to Roman epigraphy incorporates a small corpus of nineteen inscriptions from Asculum Picenum (Reg. V), among which it is worth noting an unpublished section of seating from the town's theatre, uncovered in recent excavations, which appears to include female names. Although the letters are not entirely accurately recorded, a clear photograph of the stone allows for a correct reading to be made.Footnote ⁴³ This is complemented by a corpus of the inscribed instrumentum domesticum from the town and its territory.Footnote ⁴⁴ The municipium of Attidium (Reg. VI) also now has an updated corpus of twenty inscriptions.Footnote ⁴⁵ The recent discovery of inscriptions definitely from the territory of Vettona (Reg. VI) has enabled the assembling of a corpus of some twenty-five inscriptions from that town, until now bundled together with Urvinum Hortense in CIL XI, revealing a cluster of Etruscan-style funerary cippi.Footnote ⁴⁶ Articles relating to the epigraphy of the Ager Nursinus (Reg. IV) are now usefully reprinted in a single volume, which also contains two helpful appendices, one providing information on where to find inscriptions in the museums of Cascia, Norcia and Spoleto (as of 2006), and the other with data on the geology of the stones used for the region's inscriptions.Footnote ⁴⁷

A new edition of the wax-tablets of the Sulpicii from the Murecine archive, based on study of photographs of the tablets, now offers an alternative to Camodeca's magisterial two-volume Tabulae Pompeianae Sulpiciorum (TPSulp) of 1999.Footnote ⁴⁸ It offers new ways of dividing up the tablets, offering 117 different texts in contrast to Camodeca's 127, and includes translations into German. The content of the edition itself is somewhat less rich than Camodeca's (with just transcription, apparatus, and translation, but lacking historical commentary) but it offers some useful extra indices. A well-illustrated catalogue includes eighty-three monumental inscriptions and stamps on instrumenta (some previously unpublished) from Stabiae.Footnote ⁴⁹ The historical context of the inscriptions is considered in detail. It does not include the graffiti and tituli picti that will be included in a future fascicle of CIL IV. Visitors to Pompeii can now avail themselves of a handy guide to the inscriptions preserved on the site that offers for each one a text, usually a photograph, a translation, and a brief commentary (in German).Footnote ⁵⁰ A new corpus of Christian inscriptions from Naples and its surrounding area includes the (probably) ninth-century calendar of festivals inscribed on marble and the many simple epitaphs painted in the catacombs of S. Gennaro, mostly dating from the end of the fourth to the sixth centuries.Footnote ⁵¹ The first volume in a series dedicated to the late antique and medieval inscriptions of Campania provides a thematic overview of the region's epigraphy, focusing on typology and dating, reuse, demography, social structure, and ‘cristianizzazione’.Footnote ⁵² An addition to the series Iscrizioni greche d'Italia covers Rhegium (Reggio Calabria); only eight fragments are previously unpublished, but the edition presents improved readings of several inscriptions, and photographs or drawings for each entry, useful indexes and concordances.Footnote ⁵³ There is also a bare-bones publication of thirty-six inscriptions in a new catalogue for the Museo Nazionale di Reggio Calabria.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Alpine regions were the subject of a major colloquium held in 2005 to mark the end of the research project ‘Le Alpi on-line’ at the University of Trento.Footnote ⁵⁵ This project has gathered together on a website many different types of source material relating to the Alps, including literary and epigraphic texts, archaeological sites, maps, and bibliography.Footnote ⁵⁶ Most of the chapters in the colloquium proceedings have a topographical focus, offering surveys of recent epigraphic work in a particular district. The book as a whole stimulates reflection on the nature of the Alpine region, the extent to which it should be viewed as a cohesive unit — whether it is possible to think in terms of alpinité, its relationship with adjoining territories, and the impact of its conquest by Rome. Many of the chapters harvest the fruits of recently published corpora, but others offer previews of forthcoming corpora, notably of the fascicle for Noricum which is part of the preparation for a second edition of CIL III. From the same area, a corpus of 417 Latin inscriptions from the Alpes Maritimae has been assembled.Footnote ⁵⁷ More specifically, a volume dealing with the valley of Susa will appeal to epigraphic tourists, since it sets out five itineraries around Torino, Susa, and the surrounding area.Footnote ⁵⁸ It includes directions both by car and by public transport, and useful telephone numbers for securing access to some of the more inaccessible inscriptions. It also offers photographs, full descriptions, and bibliography of the inscriptions. Moving to the eastern end of the arc of the Alps, a corpus of 165 inscriptions from Iulium Carnicum (modern Zuglio) includes a historical introduction, and a history of scholarship and of the excavations. The volume adopts an interesting, but potentially misleading, approach by presenting digitally-altered photographs of fragmentary inscriptions — offering an impression of what the original stone may have looked like. Such use of digital technology must ensure that it remains immediately clear to the viewer which parts of the photograph represent the remaining letters and which letters have been supplied. This is sometimes the case (p. 139 no. 40), but elsewhere the distinction is blurred.Footnote ⁵⁹ The inscriptions of the palaeochristian collection at Aquileia have been the subject of a fully illustrated and indexed catalogue that is organized according to the order of the display.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Christian inscriptions of Mediolanum are included in the latest volume of Inscriptiones Christianae Italiae (vol. XII).Footnote ⁶¹ Finally, forty-two inscriptions, mostly small fragments, of Jesolo have been gathered together as a small corpus.Footnote ⁶²

Turning to Latin North Africa, a substantial corpus of over 500 inscriptions from Uchi Maius covers many recently edited inscriptions and previously unpublished fragments, including a new statue base in honour of Geta (no. 42); and an architrave starting with imperial titulature, tentatively interpreted as being dedicated by a [g]ens Extric[—] (no. 57), something which would be unparalleled, but possibly in reality part of a personal name that fits comfortably with the known nomenclature of Uchi Maius, using an unusual form of abbreviation for the voting-tribe, [Arn]ens(i) Extric[atus…]. Further east, the corpus of the Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania by J. M. Reynolds and J. B. Ward-Perkins has been reissued in an enhanced online format by Gabriel Bodard and Charlotte Roueché.Footnote ⁶³ The enhancements specifically comprise new translations into English by Reynolds, maps by Hafed Walda, and full illustration from the Ward-Perkins photographic archive of the British School at Rome.

Updates for the epigraphy of the Iberian peninsula may be found in the journal Hispania Epigraphica, with the volumes published between 2006 and 2010 covering the years 2002–2007. Hispania Epigraphica Online has also now been added as a fourth database to the EAGLE portal.Footnote ⁶⁴ Highlights include a new addition from Mérida to the existing series of glass flasks depicting the urban landscape of Puetoli (HEp 12 (2006), no. 12); two rock-cut inscriptions recording Vespasian's resolution of a boundary dispute (HEp 12 (2006), nos 88, 92); and a series of forty-nine inscribed sling-shots from the Battle of Munda (HEp 15 (2009), nos 373–419), some bearing the name of Cn. Mag(nus), and others L(eg) XIII, possibly one of Pompey's legions. Latin inscriptions of all kinds dating from the Republican era have been gathered together in a well-illustrated corpus, which also contains chapters on the historical context within which Latin epigraphy developed in the peninsula and on categories of inscriptions.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rather oddly, the lex Ursonensis does not appear, perhaps excluded on the technical grounds that the preserved copy was not inscribed during the Republic. Several geographically based corpora have also appeared: the new fascicle of CIL II devoted to Tarraco itself is complemented by a corpus of just under a hundred monumental inscriptions and a further seventy or so instrumenta inscriptions from the ager Tarraconensis.Footnote ⁶⁶ This volume has an extensive introduction (including translation into English) analysing the social and geographical contexts of the inscriptions included within the catalogue. Three further volumes have also appeared in the series publishing the Roman inscriptions from the region of Valencia, Inscripcions romanes del País Valencià.Footnote ⁶⁷ Work on the verse inscriptions of the peninsula has continued, with the publication of a corpus of fifty-six carmina from the Conventus Astigitanus, Cordubensis, Gaditanus, and Hispalensis, a volume which focuses above all upon the inscriptions' literary characteristics.Footnote ⁶⁸ Two verse epitaphs have also turned up at Segobriga: a surprisingly impressive stele from the second century a.d. commemorates a sixteen-year-old slave, set up by her mother. It not only contains a twelve-line elegiac lament, but also presents an image of the deceased Iucunda as lyre-player, seemingly assimilating her iconographically to Apollo himself.Footnote ⁶⁹ The palaeochristian inscriptions of Portugal have been brought together in a corpus, usefully accompanied by a CD of images.Footnote ⁷⁰ Amongst the small number of Greek texts is one whose provenance may now be certified as Panopolis in Egypt.

The latest instalment of the Inscriptions latines de Narbonnaise (ILN VI) publishes 119 inscriptions (all texts previously known) from the territory of Alba Helviorum in the Ardèche, as well as a couple of corrigenda to ILN V (Vienne).Footnote ⁷¹ A new volume of Inscriptions latines d'Aquitaine(ILA) covers the town of Bordeaux, the civitas Biturgium Viuiscorum, with just under 400 entries (only two fragmentary inscriptions previously unpublished).Footnote ⁷² The monuments are well illustrated, with photographs from different angles. The corpus itself is preceded by an extensive introduction, with chapters dealing with the historical context, onomastics, chronology, discovery and transmission of the inscriptions. Most important perhaps is the resolution of a dispute relating to the provenance of a dedication to Gordian I (no. 31): the lettering-style of the inscription that seems so similar to ‘African lettering’ had led some scholars to doubt the claim that the stone had been found in 1828 reused in the city's fortifications. Petrographic analysis has now re-affirmed its Bordeaux origin, since the stone appears to be a limestone from l'Entre-deux-Mers (Gironde), and to be shared with other inscriptions from the area. This conclusion has important implications for the geographical spread of support for Gordian I, as it suggests that he was acknowledged beyond Africa. On the opposite side of Gaul, presenting what he describes as a ‘kaleidoscope of epigraphy’, S. Oelschig has illustrated the catalogue of the stone inscriptions held in the museum of Avenches (Aventicum) with meticulous graphic reconstructions of the many extremely fragmentary texts.Footnote ⁷³

A new corpus of just over 800 inscriptions from Cologne (IKöln ²) includes some previously unpublished inscriptions, such as a votive dedication addressed in unusually personal terms to matribus meis Suebis Hieudungis by L. Septiminius Fidelis, a negotiator and commerciator infectorius (no. 157).Footnote ⁷⁴ The volume offers extensive indices and concordances, bibliography, and an introductory history of the collection. Where possible, each entry is illustrated by a black-and-white photograph; most are frontal views, and it would have been useful to have side views too of the many altars with reliefs on their sides. Searchable electronic addenda to the corpus have also been put online.Footnote ⁷⁵ As the fifth volume of the series publishing the finds from the environs of the cathedral at Trier, A. Binsfeld has produced a corpus of 133 graffiti, some previously unpublished, from fragments of wallplaster of the late antique basilica, including the acclamation vivas in Deo (see further under Religions below).Footnote ⁷⁶

Finds of monumental inscriptions from Britain have been updated up until the end of 2006 via a third volume in the series The Roman Inscriptions of Britain (RIB).Footnote ⁷⁷ The volume includes 550 inscriptions, published in JRS and Britannia over the years. An index will be published in a separate volume. The presentation of the inscriptions now includes photographs and a transcript in majuscule alongside a reconstruction in lower-case italics. The inclusion of photographs will enable scholars to appreciate not just the texts, upon which the editors of RIB III have chosen to focus, but also their physical contexts. The volume continues the RIB practice of presenting the material geographically. Particularly striking is a tombstone for a Treveran citizen, Insus, found in 2005 at Lancaster, which offers a rather violent variation on the usual theme of auxiliary cavalryman rearing above a defeated enemy, since Insus is depicted brandishing the head of his enemy whose naked decapitated body appears beneath him.Footnote ⁷⁸ A rather more harmonious picture of the relationship between Britons and their continental neighbours emerges from a dedication at Vindolanda from the third/fourth century to the goddess Gallia: cives Galli | de(ae) Galliae | conco[r]des|que Britanni, suggesting that Gallic and British recruits may have been serving alongside each other in the army.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the absence of indices yet for RIB III a proxy for an index of persons is provided by A. Kakoschke's recent catalogue Die Personennamen im römischen Britannien (2011).

Turning now to the territory of CIL III, surveys of new epigraphic finds from Noricum and Pannonia, found within the current boundaries of Austria, continue to be published regularly in the journal Tyche.Footnote ⁸⁰ A similar service has long been provided for the territory of modern Rumania by C. Petolescu's annual round-ups of new inscriptions,Footnote ⁸¹ of which a consolidated publication of reports up to 2005 provides a stop-gap supplement to the Inscriptiones Daciae Romanae corpus.Footnote ⁸² An update of recent epigraphic finds from Dalmatia collects 152 new texts.Footnote ⁸³ The late antique epigraphy of Christian Salona, the chief city of the Dalmatian coast, has now been collected in a two-volume corpus, part of the series of publications from the Franco-Croatian archaeological mission.Footnote ⁸⁴ The corpus of 900+ Greek and Latin texts is prefaced by a series of thematic essays covering the context and characteristics of the inscriptions. Each text is illustrated and accompanied by a French translation. Despite the ‘Christian’ of the title, the corpus also includes secular and pagan texts, including the marvellous fourth-century relief bust of the tyche of M(artia) I(ulia) V(aleria) S(alona) F(elix) (no. 1), which once adorned the gateway linking the old and new towns. Nevertheless the bulk of the collection is composed of epitaphs from sarcophagi (nos 151–648), most of which are indeed Christian. Further down the Adriatic coast, from the area straddling the divide between the linguistic hegemony of Latin and that of Greek, comes a corpus collecting the Latin inscriptions found in the modern country of Albania.Footnote ⁸⁵ This amounts to 285 texts, each illustrated with a photograph or drawing and including a few unpublished texts, of which the most interesting are a couple of milestones of the period of the second tetrarchy (a.d. 305–306) (nos 281 and 282). The Greek inscriptions of Buthrotum are to be found in the recent second volume of the Corpus des inscriptions grecques d'Illyrie méridionale et d'Épire, which includes material of the Roman period.Footnote ⁸⁶

Klaus Hallof has been the driving force behind two of the three recent additions to the magisterial Inscriptiones Graecae, the volumes for the islands of Aegina and Cos respectively.Footnote ⁸⁷ The volume for Aegina (IGIV².2) boasts a very full set of photographs, though it is a pity that these are consigned to the back of the volume rather than integrated in each entry as has been achieved in recent volumes of CIL. As well as texts from the island itself (nos 746–1075), the corpus includes more than 160 inscriptions that are exotic, having been transported there in the period 1829–1834, when Aegina was the base for the national museum. Amongst the Aeginetan texts of Roman date are four previously unpublished dedications to emperors, including one to Hadrian in which curiously the emperor's names have been deliberately erased (no. 778), unless the dedication ought really to be assigned to Traianus Decius.Footnote ⁸⁸ The more sizeable volume for Cos (IGXII.4.1) collects only the public texts. Those from the Asclepieion include the republication of the lex Fonteia (no. 266), exhibiting erasure of the names of Mark Antony. The inclusion of one entirely Latin text (no. 272), discussed below, is helpful for the sake of completeness. For this and the following governor's edict, the editors were able to take advantage of the latest commentary by Feissel. Readers more comfortable with editorial commentary in German than Latin, will find helpful the latest of the prolegomena to the volume published in the journal Chiron.Footnote ⁸⁹ The IG volume for Cos is also complemented by the publication of the latest posthumous volume of Mario Segrè's corpus of Coan inscriptions, which comprises the epitaphs.Footnote ⁹⁰ This collects 832 texts, the vast majority dating to the Hellenistic and Roman periods (over 670 are previously unpublished). The notice in SEG helpfully indexes the Roman gentilicia.Footnote ⁹¹ The other addition to IG is that devoted to what some might consider the unglamorous end of Attic epigraphy: the material from Athens from after the Herulian invasion to the end of the sixth century (IGII/III².5).Footnote ⁹² With the exception of the defixiones, this now completes the replacement of the Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum = IG III (1878–1888) and offers more than just a Latinization of the editor's Late Roman and Early Byzantine Inscriptions of Athens and Attica (1997) by the addition of a very full photographic record, though this is once again consigned to a separate section of plates at the back.Footnote ⁹³ In Boiotia, thanks to the efforts of A. Schachter, the long-awaited corpus of the city of Thespiae has appeared as an electronic-only publication, available for download.Footnote ⁹⁴ For the Roman period, this includes the notable cycle of epigrams by Honestus of Corinth (nos 288–301), and a previously unpublished dedication to the emperor Valentinian (no. 452). Elsewhere in Greece, a series of separate publications from the period 1995–2002 that made up the corpus of late antique inscriptions of western Thrace and Imbros have been collected in a single volume and made navigable thanks to the provision of an index.Footnote ⁹⁵

Asia Minor continues to be an extremely productive area. A third volume of inscriptions from the excavations at Miletus is very rich in material of interest to the historian since it adds a further 560 public documents, including several previously unpublished imperial letters of the second and third centuries a.d., as well as about twenty-five altars of Hadrian.Footnote ⁹⁶ Despite being part of an on-going corpus, it thankfully functions as a stand-alone volume with its own highly-detailed indices and is accompanied by forty-five pages of high-quality plates. Two new volumes of the Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien have appeared. The first publishes material from the campaigns of W. M. Ramsay at Antioch in Pisidia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on Ramsay's notebooks, now held in Oxford.Footnote ⁹⁷ Of the 230+ texts, a good number of them in Latin from this colonia, only about fifty have not seen publication elsewhere. The transcriptions offered are supported by reproductions of the original sketches from the notebooks at the end of the volume. The second is the third part of the corpus for the Carian city of Stratonikeia and its environs, including Panamara and Lagina, bringing together the 180+ texts published between 1990 and 2009.Footnote ⁹⁸ Of the more recent discoveries two late fifth-century statue bases with metrical inscriptions stand out (nos 1529–1530). These honour local grandees Apollinarius, his wife Stratonike, and her son, Maximus, and were found in association with fragments of two stone statues depicting magistrates.Footnote ⁹⁹ Occupying a liminal position between Caria and Lycia is the city of Caunos, whose inscriptions have been gathered together in a volume that looks as though it might belong in the IK series, but is much more ambitious.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The edition of the around 250 inscriptions is prefaced by lengthy essays outlining the history of the city. About 150 of the texts appear for the first time. A majestic centrepiece to the volume is the exhaustive edition and commentary on the customs privilege of the Hadrianic period that extends for nearly fifty pages. The most notable new texts illuminating Roman matters include the second-century b.c. record of the embassy of one Stratios to the Senate to defend the Caunians' control of the territory of Telandra (no. 90) and a series of honours to Roman senatorial patroni of the first century b.c. (nos 102, 106, 109–11, 114). Staying in Caria, the online corpus of inscriptions of Aphrodisias, building on the earlier digitization of C. M. Roueché's Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity, has been expanded to take in all those inscriptions from the site recorded up to 1994, a further 1,500 texts, about a third of them previously unpublished.Footnote ¹⁰¹ A more northerly district of Roman Asia is represented by the publication of a set of new documents from the Hermus and Cayster valleys in Lydia as part of the Tituli Asiae Minoris project.Footnote ¹⁰² Amongst the most interesting is a stele from Saittai, datable precisely to a.d. 288/289, that is dedicated to Apollo Axyreos to appease the god for the dedicator's mother having dared to enter the sanctuary while menstruating.Footnote ¹⁰³ A substantial new volume of the corpus proper has appeared for Philadelphia (TAMV.3).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Of its 540 texts, the vast majority of which are of Roman date, nearly eighty are inedita, though most of the additions are of no great historical significance. One newly published text (no. 1419), known only from a nineteenth-century report, attests to the existence of an imperial letter from Trajan to the boule and demos, though the substance is lost. A more modest corpus of fifty or so Latin and Greek inscriptions from nearby Blaundos, in the Phrygian borderlands, has also been published.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Among the sixteen new texts, perhaps the most interesting is a fragmentary bilingual funerary plaque for two Roman citizens whose names began L. Peticius L.f.; the orthography suggests a late republican or very early imperial date.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The epigraphic team of the Italian archaeological mission at Phrygian Hierapolis (Pamukkale) has provided a synopsis of recent finds and research as well as an epigraphic guide to the archaeological site itself, which provides an itinerary with texts, translations, and photographs of each of the inscriptions featured.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ They have also done a great service in producing a catalogue of the exotic Greek and Latin inscriptions conserved in the museum housed in the Roman baths on the site.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These 200+ texts (of which more than 75 are previously unpublished) are from stones that have come into the museum from all over the territory of the modern Turkish province of Denizli, which extends across south-western Phrygia as well as taking in parts of Lydia and Caria. The four sites of Eumeneia, Laodicea, Heraclea Salbace and Attouda account for the majority of the texts. The entries are grouped by provenance and each one is given a critical edition and translation, in parallel Italian and Turkish versions, and an illustration at the end of the volume; what it sorely lacks are any indices. Further to the south, in the area of the Cibyratis, the city of Boubon is the subject of a historical study that incorporates what is modestly titled a catalogue but is really a proper edition of the inscriptions of the city and its territory, including fifteen inedita.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Of note is a fragmentary statue base bearing an honorary decree, presumably for some local worthy, by the neighbouring city of Oinoanda (no. 32). Further to the east, new contributions catalogue inscriptions of two areas of Pisidia. The first collects material from Termessos and its surrounding territory,Footnote ¹¹⁰ the second, the fifth instalment of the Regional Epigraphic Catalogues of Asia Minor series, catalogues the Greek and Latin holdings of the provincial archaeological museum at Burdur.Footnote ¹¹¹ All but a handful of the 270+ Burdur inscriptions date to the Roman period and many are previously unpublished. Amongst the highlights are the already well-known bilingual edict on vehiculatio by the Tiberian governor Sex. Sotidius Strabo (no. 335 = AE (1976), 653) and the rescript of the emperor Maximinus Daia to the citizens of Colbasa encouraging the renewal of persecution of Christians (no. 338 = AE (1988), 1046). Pertaining to the region of ancient Bithynia, the inscriptions (mostly tombstones) that have come into the museum at Adapazarı since its foundation in 1993 have received a proper catalogue.Footnote ¹¹² These mainly originate from the territory of Nicaea, though some also come from Nicomedia. None of the roughly thirty-five new texts is particularly significant.Footnote ¹¹³ D. H. French offers a mini-corpus of around fifty unpublished inscriptions (mostly epitaphs) from the museum collections of various towns in Cappadocia.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Staying in Cappadocia, F. Baz has assembled a corpus of the inscriptions of Comana-Hierapolis, including a number of interesting texts reporting new information on the Roman governors of the province (discussed below under ‘Governing class’).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Pertaining to the far east of Anatolia and the chronological periphery of this survey is a new corpus of early medieval Armenian inscriptions.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Over the Taurus mountains to the south, the Syrian region has seen a remarkable flurry of publications. Two further parts of the Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie have appeared in the period of this survey. J. Aliquot has contributed the volume of the inscriptions of Mount Hermon between Lebanon and Syria.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This introduces eighteen unpublished texts, the most interesting being further evidence for the beautification of a cult site at Ain Aata by one Iulius Canthurus, priest of the god and goddess, in the mid-260s a.d. (no. 16). N. Bader has put together a sister volume for the north-eastern corner of the kingdom of Jordan on the border with Syria, a collection of nearly 750 texts.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Not part of the series but in the same vein is the corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions of Tyre. In this J.-P. Rey-Coquais publishes inscriptions from excavations in the city and those from the necropolis found since his Inscriptions de la necropole de Tyr (1977). Of the former group, a highlight is the late antique commemoration of the local boy and famous jurist, Ulpian, in Latin, no doubt a product of civic rivalry with Beirut, centre of legal training in the East (no. 28).Footnote ¹¹⁹ The material of this region as a whole has been made considerably more accessible by the publication of two selections. J. B. Yon and P. L. Gatier have chosen sixty-four texts from the IGLS repertoire and provided each with translation, extensive commentary, and lavish illustration (much of it in colour).Footnote ¹²⁰ Amongst the highlights for students of Roman history are the extract from the mandata of Domitian to the procurator Claudius Athenodorus (no. 1) and the tax law of Palmyra (no. 4). The other selection is more modest in being purely textual but serves an extremely useful purpose in focusing on Aramaic documents (many of them epigraphic) of the Roman period as part of a textbook of Syrian semitic inscriptions.Footnote ¹²¹ An ambitious new project is the first part of the first volume of the multilingual Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (actually modern Israel) from the Hellenistic period to the coming of Islam.Footnote ¹²²CIIP I.1 is devoted to the inscriptions of Jerusalem down to the destruction of the second temple (a.d. 70) and is almost entirely made up of the texts of 590 inscribed stone ossuaries, dated roughly to the first century b.c./first century a.d. and recovered from the hundreds of mortuary caves in the environs of the city. The particularly monochromatic nature of the epigraphic record of the city in this period has also received a separate analysis.Footnote ¹²³ It is no surprise to learn that, on the basis of the names recorded, the vast majority of the population in this period was Jewish. The first volume of the inscriptions of the late antique province of Palaestina Tertia has received a supplement containing sixty-six new texts, mostly Christian epitaphs of the period a.d. 350–400, notable for the consistent dating by the era of the province of Arabia and one instance (no. 33) of the use of a Greek phrase (μικρῷ πρός) equivalent in function to the common Latin plus minus formula.Footnote ¹²⁴

For Egypt, a new volume publishing a further 200+ ostraka from Mons Claudianus of the second century a.d. provides information relating to the quarry's administration, for example in controlling the distribution of water, fuel, and tools; allocating the groups of different types of workers needed for a particular day's work; recording the equivalent of the army's ‘strength report’; accounting for work completed; and liaising with metal-workers on the supply of tools. There is also a sequence of letters from workers to the imperial officials in charge of the quarry, making various requests and reporting on work completed, as well as a collection of texts revealing the challenges faced by a more junior administrator, Athenodoros. It now also seems likely that the quarry's personnel consisted of free, paid labourers.Footnote ¹²⁵

Alongside these geographical corpora and museum catalogues, there have also been additions to established series of thematic corpora, notably a new volume of Epigrafia anfiteatrale dell'Occidente Romano, covering 148 inscriptions from the Hispanic peninsula.Footnote ¹²⁶ It includes extracts from the lex coloniae Genetivae Iuliae and the lex Flavia municipalis, gladiatorial epitaphs, and seating inscriptions from amphitheatres. It also extends beyond the usual scope of the series by including labels on pottery vessels made by C. Valerius Verdullus, which depict gladiatorial scenes, commemorating the names of victorious gladiators. The collection illustrates a phenomenon distinctive to the peninsula, of amphitheatres including sacred spaces, with votive dedications to Nemesis found at Emerita, Italica, and Tarraco. It also includes forty-seven ‘exclusions’, summary entries for inscriptions which do not specifically refer to munera or gladiators, but which belong to the cultural context of arena spectacles. A further instalment to an established series is the fifth volume of Roman Military Diplomas, republishing those texts known up to the end of 2003, plus a few items from the papers of the late Margaret Roxan.Footnote ¹²⁷ In total this adds a further 153 diplomas to the corpus, which, including those in CIL XVI and its Supplement, now stands at over 650 examples. The latest volume provides the established essential service of this series, which is its indexing of this very disparately published material. In this regard there is an innovation, with the addition of an index of the opening words of the inside face of the second tablet, which allows the reader to get an idea of consistency (or not) of layout at a glance. Another added feature is an illustrated appendix by A. Pangerl studying some deliberate forgeries that have been circulating on the antiquities market.

An updated corpus of the Latin curse tablets (defixiones) is offered as a CD-ROM accompanying a recent monograph analysing them.Footnote ¹²⁸ Curiously, in a reverse of the trend towards electronic publication, what is effectively a print-out of this database is offered separately. Not only is this rather hard on the eyes but also, without indices or access to the electronic version of the database, this second book is of limited utility.Footnote ¹²⁹ More enlightening is the same author's explanation of the intellectual process of design and construction of the database.Footnote ¹³⁰ The latest contribution towards an index of the Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae has appeared, in the form of an index to the Latin words in the inscriptions in the collection at S. Paolo fuori le mura.Footnote ¹³¹ A much more substantial undertaking is a corpus of biblical quotations in the Greek and Latin inscriptions of the early Christian world from the third to eighth centuries.Footnote ¹³² Excluding paraphrases and allusions, and without having been exhaustive in surveying portable objects, the collection still amounts to more than 800 texts. In the West, Rome, Campania and Africa predominate, which accords very much with the general epigraphic habit, but in the East the domination of the provinces of Syria, Arabia and Palestina Prima would appear to reflect a specific phenomenon associated with the Holy Land and its environs.

A French team has compiled a two-volume corpus of the signatures and stamps on Roman glassware, organized typologically, though regrettably without an index to the texts.Footnote ¹³³ In a similar vein, a major new enterprise began to appear in 2008: a catalogue of makers' stamps and signatures on the terra sigillata pottery of Roman Gaul and Britain that is envisaged to run to ten volumes in total. This supersedes F. Oswald's now venerable Index of Potters' Stamps on Terra Sigillata (1931) and proceeds alphabetically, providing each entry with a drawing, transcription, provenance of kiln, and distribution of findspots, as well as approximate dating. The pace of publication is commendable, having already reached volume 6 (Masclus I-Balbus to Oxittus) by 2010.Footnote ¹³⁴

Works devoted to verse inscriptions have proliferated in the last five years. As well as the corpus of Latin verse inscriptions from Baetica mentioned above, two books intended as university teaching manuals collect the Latincarmina epigraphicaof Pannonia, Moesia, and Thrace.Footnote ¹³⁵ The first two volumes of a corpus of Byzantine epigrams surviving in ‘inscribed’ form (which is taken to include frescos) have also appeared.Footnote ¹³⁶ Of the more conventionally epigraphic categories so far covered are mosaics and inscriptions on small objects. Most entries are illustrated (some in colour) and each is provided with a German translation. Most of the examples belong to the later period, but nine are certifiably or plausibly of sixth- or seventh-century date, a notable cluster surviving in the mosaic decoration of St Demetrius in Thessaloniki but also one fragment on plaster from S. Maria Antiqua in the Forum in Rome (no. 188). Two new corpora focus specifically upon mosaic inscriptions. Thirty-four mosaic inscriptions from western Asia Minor which mention benefactors have been collected together in a catalogue, juxtaposing donors from both Jewish and Christian contexts alongside non-religious donors. It includes a palaeographical analysis in the hope of offering a basis for further study on dating mosaics in the region from lettering.Footnote ¹³⁷ The other corpus is part of a wider project examining evidence for mosaic craftsmen, their workshop organization, and social status, on the basis of the signatures that sometimes appear on mosaic pavings.Footnote ¹³⁸ This second volume reflects how much new evidence has come to light since Die Mosaizisten der Antike und ihre wirtschaftliche und soziale Stellung: eine Quellenstudie was published in 1989, particularly from the Iberian peninsula. This volume includes thirty-seven new entries, with excellent photographs of the mosaics discussed. Particularly interesting is the inclusion of mosaic inscriptions in non-Classical languages, with Near Eastern languages, and even one case of Iberian being represented.

I.iv Information Technology

Developments in this area fall into three categories: work on technical tools to aid in the examination of epigraphic artefacts; electronic editorial tools for use in the processing of texts for publication and the corpora so produced; and the compilation of databases or files that provide access or enhancements to published material, whether concordances, online indices, or supporting resources, such as images of squeezes or notebooks. A sign that this aspect of the field has truly come of age is the publication of a volume of collected studies showcasing the possibilities of digital technology for the study of Latin inscriptions.Footnote ¹³⁹ Likewise, the latest edition of the Guide de l'épigraphiste comes with a special supplement dedicated to various categories of electronic resources that — as appropriate — is also consultable online and updated annually.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ One way of keeping abreast of developments is to watch the Current Epigraphy blog established in 2007, which publishes workshop and conference announcements, project reports, and links to digital epigraphic projects.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Access to the back catalogue of the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (behind a moving wall of about four years) through the JSTOR consortium is a major boon, not least for the ability to search the journal's contents.Footnote ¹⁴² Although their full text is not available electronically, it is also worth noting that the contents lists of the journal Epigraphica and the series Epigrafi e antichità can now be consulted online.Footnote ¹⁴³

An important contribution to the documentation and assessment of the effectiveness of new techniques is the monograph by M. Terras, with contributions by P. Robertson, on the imaging system developed to aid the reading of the wooden writing-tablets from Vindolanda.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The aim of the technology is to emulate the process through which the human palaeographer makes sense of the traces to arrive at a plausible text. This computer-assisted palaeography works by extrapolating on the basis of documented patterns. The dataset, from which the artificial intelligence system (entitled Grounded Reflective Adaptive Vision Architecture or GRAVA) derived its models for the mechanized process, comprised the Old Roman Cursive forms deciphered by the human editors of the texts of Tab. Vindol. I–III. The recognition of patterns is also key in the computer-aided reconstruction of the so-called Forma Urbis Romae, the marble plan of the city of Rome. Computer-aided reconstruction algorithms were applied to find new matches and positionings amongst the surviving fragments. Using computer-generated extrapolations from the geometry of the surviving fragments and by manipulating digital reconstructions, a number of new joins have been proposed.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ A virtuoso demonstration of the application of digital technology is provided by the account of the re-reading of a wax writing-tablet from the Netherlands.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The original editor, perhaps rather too influenced by a passage of Tacitus (Ann. 4.72), had read this as the record of sale of an ox (FIRA III 137). With the aid of a technique of processing digital photographs known as ‘shadow stereo’ or ‘phase congruency’,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ this tablet has been convincingly shown to be the second leaf of a note, dated to February a.d. 29, recording a loan between an unknown debtor and one [Ande?]carus, slave of Iulia Secunda, who in turn is perhaps the wife of a T. Cassius, tribune of the legio V (Alauda).Footnote ¹⁴⁸ However, cutting-edge technology does not always yield the best results. Despite the fanfare surrounding the supposed advantages of multi-spectral imaging, A. Bülow-Jacobsen uses a series of case-studies to demonstrate that the simpler method of monospectral infrared photography, which requires far less complicated computer processing, can produce equally good results in terms of improving the legibility of papyri and ostraka: for example the dirty, eroded, and damp examples from the praesidium of Dios in the Egyptian eastern desert.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In response, an American team has reasserted the superiority of multi-spectral imaging in bringing out the contrast between text and support, at least as far as papyrus is concerned.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The effectiveness of the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) tagging to epigraphic data has also been demonstrated by an analysis of mural graffiti from Pompeii, in which the content of the texts is correlated with their spatial contexts (in this case public or private).Footnote ¹⁵¹

As well as the accession of Hispania Epigraphica to the already established group of databases working together under the EAGLE umbrella, the federation, based at La Sapienza in Rome, has undergone a period of consolidation with the entry of more texts but, more significantly, an increasing number of images of the original artefacts.Footnote ¹⁵² Despite its bilingual remit, this remains primarily a resource for Latin epigraphy. The Epigraphik-Datenbank Clauss-Slaby has seen a similar growth in available images.Footnote ¹⁵³ For Greek inscriptions of all regions and periods, the Cornell/Ohio Packard Humanities Institute Searchable Greek Inscriptions continues to be invaluable. A newcomer worth noting is the ambitious Epigraphische Datenbank zur antiken Kleinasien, based at Hamburg.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ At its launch in 2009 it covered only Galatia but has grown to take in parts of Ionia, Lydia and Paphlagonia. Among online enhancements to existing printed materials, the searchable online indices to the most recent part of the republican material in CIL (I² Pars 2, Fasc. 4, containing numbers 2829–3709) and the downloadable set of indices to the milestones of Raetia and Noricum (CIL XVII/4.1) have already been mentioned above under Corpora. In addition the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, in co-operation with the University of Münster, has also produced a simple but effective online concordance between the entry numbers for the Inscriptiones Graecae and SEG.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The Academy has also made available online in searchable form the basic Greek texts (with German translations) of all the volumes of IG published since the mid-1990s, including the three discussed above under Corpora.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The content of SEG is also now available in searchable form online from the publisher (for a subscription).Footnote ¹⁵⁷ J. Munk Højte has put online, as a searchable database, the corpus of statue bases for emperors from Augustus to Commodus that informed his Roman Imperial Statue Bases of 2005 and, in response to scholarly demand, has made available for download a topographical index to the volume.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The body of new corpora marked up using the electronic editorial conventions developed by Tom Elliott and others of EpiDoc (the Collaborative for Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML) has continued to grow,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ largely through the efforts of the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities of King's College London that has been working through J. M. Reynolds' back catalogue. Following the inscriptions of Aphrodisias (2007) and Tripolitania (2009), discussed under Corpora above, their current project is the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (IRCyr), which will publish around 2,000 texts, roughly a third previously unpublished.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Another EpiDoc enterprise is the Τελαμών project to put online all of the ancient Greek inscriptions found within the borders of modern Bulgaria.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The system of conventions used for these projects is still very much in evolution. The latest guidelines and schema can be found through the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication and one can eavesdrop on the developers' queries and solutions on the Markup list.Footnote ¹⁶² It is, nevertheless helpful that a clear and concise account of the development of EpiDoc, along with worked-out examples of coding in practice and recommendations for those intending to undertake a research project involving an online database, is now available in print.Footnote ¹⁶³

I.v Handbooks, Methods and Approaches

Students will benefit from a number of introductory studies and handbooks to epigraphy.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Briefer surveys include a chapter by Elizabeth Meyer in The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World focusing on epigraphy as a form of communication;Footnote ¹⁶⁵ a chapter by Dennis Trout on the Latin epigraphic habit in the fourth to seventh centuries a.d., in the Blackwell Companion to Late Antiquity;Footnote ¹⁶⁶ and a chapter by John Bodel in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies dealing with technical aspects of epigraphic forms of writing, the rôle of generic expectations in directing modes of reading inscriptions, and the uses of epigraphy for different modern disciplines (philology, archaeology, art history, and literature).Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The first volume of The Oxford History of Historical Writing contains a chapter reflecting upon inscriptions as a form of history-writing in the city of Rome.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

New handbooks have appeared in Spanish, Italian and French. Javier Andreu offers over 600 pages of densely-packed discussion in his Fundamentos de epigrafía latina.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The thirty colour plates are an attractive feature of his volume, although discussion of the examples and pictures tends not to be particularly well integrated into the main text of the handbook. As appendices Andreu includes a list of corpora for the Latin West (not always up to date but excellent on the Hispanic peninsula); a synoptic table of senatorial and equestrian career patterns; and a list of epigraphic abbreviations. Epigrafia latina by Lorenzo Braccesi and Ulrico Agnati represents a brief (c. 100-page) and affordable illustrated introductory manual.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ More comprehensive is Alfredo Buonopane's Manuale di epigrafia latina of roughly 300 pages, which includes a guide to e-resources and databases, and has appendices of abbreviations, imperial titulature down to Theodosius, and a guide to the Julian calendar.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The integration of photographs and epigraphic examples within the main text makes this a very useful volume. A third edition of Paul Corbier's L'épigraphie latine has 116 pages of main text, followed by lots of ‘annexes’.Footnote ¹⁷² This is a very approachable handbook, although it is a bit mean on illustrations, with only a handful of photographs, and its comparative brevity does perhaps limit its usefulness. For French readers, however, the two volumes by Jean-Marie Lassère set a new gold-standard. First published in 2005, a second edition appeared in 2007, followed by a third edition in 2011.Footnote ¹⁷³ This manual runs to over 1,000 pages, and includes detailed comment on over 500 individual inscriptions, many of which are illustrated with photographs. It offers an invaluable introduction to the political, institutional, cultural, social, and economic life of the Roman world down to the sixth century a.d. It illustrates what kinds of information inscriptions can be expected to yield for Roman historians, and offers practical help in making sense of technical issues such as chronological systems. It is a particular feature of the work that the author has eschewed the usual approach of discussing Latin epigraphy alone, in favour of integrating Latin with Greek epigraphy of the Roman world. North African epigraphy is particularly prominent among the examples discussed, and Christian and late antique epigraphy is well integrated into the manual. The volumes are divided into three parts: the individual; the city; the state. These are preceded by a substantial introduction offering an overview of the scope, history, and method of epigraphy.

A ‘walking guide’ to the Latin inscriptions of Rome by Tyler Lansford offers a very engaging way of introducing students to Latin epigraphy of all eras, from ancient times through the Renaissance right up until 2006. Fifteen itineraries around Rome are designed to bring before the visitor's eyes no fewer than 350 inscriptions.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Epigraphically inclined visitors to Trier are now also able to avail themselves of a similar guide to the Latin inscriptions of the city in four volumes.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ A more manageable single volume equivalent has been provided for the city of Mainz.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ By contrast, the introduction to Roman inscriptions in Britain by John Rogan has little to recommend it, with its bizarre transcriptions, inaccuracies, and a generally superficial text.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Another, distinctive approach to the question of how to introduce students to epigraphy is presented by Épigraphie latine, by Mireille Cébeillac-Gervasoni, Maria Letizia Caldelli and Fausto Zevi.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ This handbook works exclusively with inscriptions from Ostia and Portus, a rich source of a wide range of inscriptions, some 100 of which feature in this volume. The selection reflects the fact that many interesting inscriptions have been published in scattered locations since the appearance of CIL XIV and its supplement: this volume therefore provides a useful entrée into an under-appreciated epigraphic landscape, and it is to be hoped that it might be translated into English at some point for the benefit of the teachers who would like to be able to introduce their students to inscriptions at Ostia. An Italian version, which includes revisions and improvements, has already appeared.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ One of the big advantages of this approach is that it allows for a detailed discussion of the archaeological and historical contexts of the examples chosen as case-studies. A similar approach is adopted in another handbook to Roman epigraphy in Italian, which discusses the uses of writing in the ancient world, and includes chapters on funerary, religious and judicial/honorific inscriptions and milestones, and then presents a catalogue of nineteen inscriptions from Asculum Picenum.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ This is inevitably less successful than the Ostia handbook, given the much less rich epigraphic tradition of the town.

Close analysis of two inscribed statue bases from Ephesos of a.d. 166/7 has offered some insight into the process behind their commissioning and carving: set up to honour T. Flavius Damianus, they are physically quite distinct, but have almost identical texts after their opening phrases, even though they were set up by two different groups. This has led to the conclusion that they both derive from the same decree passed by the boule and demos of Ephesos, and that IEph 3080 is modelled upon IEph 672, and adapted in its layout (for example with smaller letters and abbreviations) in order to fit a smaller space.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Richard Grasby has also continued to publish his series of studies, Processes in the Making of Roman Inscriptions, on the design and cutting of particular Latin inscriptions, to which he has added an introductory essay in which he describes his working methods and takes the opportunity to draw together observations and conclusions appearing sporadically throughout the individual case-studies.Footnote ¹⁸² In each case-study Grasby applies his expertise as a draughtsman and letter-carver to working out the modules of measurement underlying the construction of the letters and demonstrates through his own diagrams how the letters may have been plotted using straight edge ruler, square, and compass. Against the conventional view that the early second century a.d. marks the high point in the production of lettering of this type, he argues that the same skill and fine execution can already be found in the Triumviral period. Grasby's hope is that these studies may provide epigraphists with methods by which to supplement the lacunae of fragmentary texts, or at least control supplements proposed for them.

Reflections on the relationship between epigraphy and literature are offered through the lens of Cicero's Verrine orations in their Sicilian context,Footnote ¹⁸³ and through a rather different case-study, the ‘earliest Christian inscription’ — the epitaph of Bishop Abercius of Phrygian Hieropolis — and the hagiographic vita Abercii. Margaret Mitchell illustrates how the inscription was never intended to project a straightforward single message, and that its deliberate ambiguity and unexpected monumental appearance (a ‘pagan’ altar) perhaps go some way to explaining the key rôle of the demon in the Life in forcing Abercius to travel to Rome, as a means of accounting for the peculiarity of the bishop's funerary monument. She also demonstrates various problems with the Vatican reconstruction of this inscribed monument, and how it has unduly influenced perceptions of the original.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ A volume of collected essays deals with the relationship between art and epigraphy in the ancient world: of particular interest are chapters on the sometimes puzzling mismatch between image and text to be seen on some ash chests; the House of the Epigrams at Pompeii; the Virgilian epigram of Faustinus from Sperlonga and its relationship to the sculptures displayed alongside it; the use of labels within mosaics; and the reuse of statue bases and their bronze statues on the Acropolis in Roman Athens.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Another volume collects papers reflecting on the rôle of epigraphic evidence in tackling the question of Romanization.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Particularly notable are papers emphasizing the utility of inscriptions for the study of the specific cultural identity of individual communities and the need to integrate the study of the instrumentum domesticum into such local case-studies.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

A beautifully presented volume reprises and revises several important contributions previously published by Mireille Corbier on various aspects of epigraphic culture in the Roman world, focusing upon the ways in which their monumentality and topographical context might add to the textual messages of inscriptions.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Werner Eck has continued to produce thought-provoking methodological papers, grappling with the problem of the unrepresentativeness of surviving inscriptions in terms of different media and geographical distribution — a problem that any study of regional epigraphic density must address — and challenging the traditional category of cursus honoruminscriptions and honorific inscriptions more widely.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In a volume generally dealing with early imperial themes, Fergus Millar examines the problems posed in understanding the late antique epigrams in honour of officials that took the place of the earlier, more straightforwardly informational, prose form that we should perhaps now no longer term the ‘cursus inscription’.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ P. Kruschwitz reminds us of the limits of the surviving evidence for the types of text that were once inscribed in antiquity by drawing attention to a neglected category of inscriptions on wood, that is those on the bark of living trees.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Examining the surviving literary evidence for the practice of carving texts on trees, Kruschwitz argues that it was a regular and recognized part of the Graeco-Roman epigraphic habit — effectively a rustic counterpart to urban graffiti. Students of the Roman army or brickstamps might be taken aback by the content of R. Kurzmann's recent study of Roman military brickstamps, unless they paid heed to its subtitle, A Comparison of Methodology.Footnote ¹⁹² For she has produced a work that is genuinely methodological in that it does not study the stamps themselves but rather compares the different approaches and interpretative frameworks employed by scholars working in a variety of European traditions.

For Christian epigraphy in the western part of the Empire, there is now an authoritative sylloge of over 200 inscriptions, arranged chronologically and thematically, illustrated with black-and-white photographs. This is preceded by a detailed introduction to the gradual emergence of different aspects of Christian epigraphic culture, such as the development of martyr cults and the rôle of bishop as euergete.Footnote ¹⁹³ An introductory essay on the subject of Christian epigraphy, covering both Latin West and Greek East, is a most welcome feature of The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ A detailed palaeographical study of inscriptions dating between the fourth and tenth centuries a.d. explores the changing character of epigraphy at Rome, focusing upon ways in which the transition from ‘ancient’ to ‘medieval’ epigraphy may have occurred, and how monumental writing in churches may have been used as a means of bolstering the emergence of Christianity.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ It focuses upon the social contexts for this change, looking at the use of inscriptions by both state and Church authorities, tracing how particular styles of lettering seem to have been deliberately adopted by different groups. Of the articles in the complete volumes and fascicles of the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum to have appeared in the period of this survey, those for the province of Cyrenaica, for the term limes, for the Manes, and for Marmor contain significant epigraphic elements.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

I.vi History of Epigraphic Scholarship

There has been a considerable amount of work on the epigraphic endeavours of the humanist scholars and their early modern successors. The writings of I. Calabi Limentani on the history of Latin epigraphic scholarship have been brought together in a single volume.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Two contributions that escaped notice in the last survey are worthy of note, one arising from a conference on humanist engagement with the collection of Greek inscriptions and compilations of their texts, the other a monograph devoted to the epigraphic manuscripts of two later fifteenth-century humanists based in Rome, Timoteo Balbani and Pietro Sabino.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ The same milieu is discussed in a study that focuses on the author of the manuscript treatise Alphabetum Romanum of 1463 (Vat. Lat. 6852), the Veronese calligrapher Felice Feliciano, who was the first to reconstruct the Roman monumental capital script geometrically and produced a type that he used when he set up as a printer in 1476.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The researches into the city's funerary epitaphs of a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarians of Lyon, from Claude Bellière to Jacob Spon, are the subject of one very informative chapter of a volume devoted to funerary rites at Lugdunum.Footnote ²⁰⁰ A total of 394 inscriptions are identified by H. Solin as having belonged to the collections assembled by Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi at Rome during the first half of the sixteenth century, and which were gradually dispersed after his death in 1564.Footnote ²⁰¹ A further epigraphic manuscript of the late sixteenth century has been brought to light.Footnote ²⁰² This was the creation of the Spanish humanist Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva, a professor at Salamanca in the 1540s and later bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo (in which capacity he attended the Council of Trent). G. González Germain and J. Carbonell Manils analyse its content, comparing it with other Spanish collections of the same period and providing a concordance with CIL II. As with the collections of his contemporaries, many of the texts are now considered falsae. The process does bring to light one text that is unique to Covarrubias' manuscript, an epitaph that is again highly suspect. The acts of a conference of 2003 dedicated to Raffaele Fabretti, author of the Inscriptionum antiquarum quae in aedibus paternis asservantur explicatio (1699), have been published.Footnote ²⁰³ Several papers focus on the activity for which he is principally remembered, the excavation of Christian catacombs; one also examines his approach as the first editor of the SC de Bacchanalibus.

The rediscovery of an inscribed cupa in local limestone, whose authenticity was dismissed in CIL X 48*, has led to a fresh evaluation of inscriptions from Grumentum recorded by Francesco Saverio Roselli in 1790. Mommsen may have been over-hasty in CIL X in dismissing these texts as forgeries. It seems more likely that in some cases poor scholarship rather than intent to deceive led to some strange errors of transcription.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Another rehabilitation exercise is conducted in favour of Jose Andres Cornide de Folgueira y Saavedra, a servant of the Spanish crown, who made notes on antiquities during an inspection of Portuguese defences in 1798–1801.Footnote ²⁰⁵ In compiling CIL II Emil Hübner dismissed much of his testimony, including a peculiar text from an altar supposedly unearthed at Conimbriga that has thus remained unpublished. The text reports that C. Calpurnius Fronto and Orbia Flaccilla saw to the erection of the altar to Mars Augustus on the instruction — ex mandatu … f(aciendum) c(uraverunt) — of their son C. Calpurnius Flaccus. Parallels for the ex mandatu formula in this sort of context in texts from Italy and Pisidian Antioch published in the twentieth century may now suggest that the original report was unfairly rejected.

Moving on to the era of scientific research, two volumes appearing in the same year treat epigraphic scholarship in northern Italy during the nineteenth century. One focuses on the contributions of a wide range of local antiquarian collectors and scholars in the Veneto and Slovenia during the period of Austrian hegemony. It was into this world that the organizing genius of Theodor Mommsen forced itself. His correspondence with museum directors, librarians, and others across northern Italy (in order to collect material and recruit assistance for the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum project) is a recurring theme in the associated volume dealing with epigraphic and antiquarian research in the same region between the Napoleonic era and the unification of Italy.Footnote ²⁰⁶ This complements earlier contributions on the work of Mommsen, Voghera, and others on the inscriptions (principally the famous bronze tabula alimentaria of Veleia near Piacenza).Footnote ²⁰⁷ In the proceedings of a colloquium devoted to Mommsen's scholarly engagement with Latium, as historian and legal scholar, as well as epigrapher, S. Orlandi analyses his treatment of the epigraphic documentation and especially the vexed question of the material transmitted by Pirro Ligorio.Footnote ²⁰⁸ The initial formation and progress of CIL is also the central theme of a detailed study of Mommsen's correspondence with (and about) his French colleagues.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Early close collaboration, not just on the epigraphic patrimony of Gaul but, perhaps more significantly, also of North Africa, as well as Greece and the Middle East, was followed by a period of difficulty after the Franco-Prussian War, which led to Mommsen taking over direct management of the North African work (CIL VIII). After the appearance of its first volume (in 1881) working relations were largely restored with the next generation of French scholars but the legacy was that Franco-German collaboration was thereafter tinged with an element of patriotic competition — one beneficial outcome being the foundation of L'Année épigraphique in 1888. The study is supported by very helpful chronological tables mapping the various generations of Mommsen's French correspondents and the distribution of the letters. The current director of the CIL project, M. G. Schmidt, has brought the story up to date (to 2007) and even laid out the plans for the future (up to 2030) in a nicely illustrated booklet with parallel German and English text.Footnote ²¹⁰ Mommsen's pupil Hermann Dessau, whose name is forever inextricably linked with what may be considered the infant cousin of CIL, the Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, has been the subject of two works: a monograph illuminating his position in the network of Mommsen's pupils and a colloquium held on the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2006.Footnote ²¹¹ Both publications include several studies that, drawing heavily on the professional correspondence, explore the network of relationships that he built up working as part of Mommsen's CIL team. Besides his own personal achievement, the ever useful ILS, the other significant scholarly contributions discussed in these volumes are his work on Jewish antiquity and his interconnected work on the Historia Augusta and the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, the latter of which, like CIL, was another team project and drew heavily upon the epigraphic data.

As for more contemporary authors, the work and influence of Hans-Georg Pflaum has been the subject of a volume of essays, reflecting his interests in the Roman imperial administration and the prosopography of its officials.Footnote ²¹² A fourth volume of scripta varia from the pen of the late André Chastagnol has been assembled.Footnote ²¹³ There is a strong epigraphic focus to the papers, which are fully indexed (including a thorough index fontium), and the volume is prefaced by a complementary bibliography of the author covering papers published up to 2000 (four years after his death). A bibliography of Silvio Panciera's output from 1989 to 2002 is just one of the supplementary features of a three-volume collection of various published and unpublished papers, focusing on the inscriptions of the city of Rome, written between 1956 and 2005 that runs to over 2,000 pages.Footnote ²¹⁴ Many of the papers are accompanied by complementary notes updating them and the whole corpus is made newly accessible through being indexed. Also useful for those interested in Greek epigraphy of the imperial and late antique periods is the collection and indexing of thirty-five papers of Lidio Gasperini, dating between 1965 and 2007.Footnote ²¹⁵ Bibliographies of the honorands are also welcome features of Festschriften for Anthony Birley, Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais, Bernard Rémy, Eva Margareta Steinby, and Peter Weiss.Footnote ²¹⁶

II.i Republic

Fresh work casts light upon the relationship of Rome and the Greek East during this period. F. Camia has produced a general study of the epigraphically attested instances of Roman intervention in territorial disputes between poleis in Greece and Asia Minor in the second century b.c.Footnote ²²¹ A fragmentary find at Tyberissos reveals a treaty between Lycia and Rome, dating from some time between 167 and 46 b.c.Footnote ²²² The rather imprecise reference in the treaty to the δῆμος τῶν Λυκίων suggests that the text was translated into Greek at Rome. Parts of five clauses of a senatus consultum from Demetrias in Thessaly are preserved on a heavily worn block of stone found reused in the fabric of a house of the Roman period.Footnote ²²³ The senatorial decree relates to the tax exemption privileges of some of the population of the region of Magnesia, in which Demetrias was situated, and the administration of royal land. It is suggested that these measures follow on from the brief sojourn of Aemilius Paullus in the city in the spring of 167 b.c. In a reassessment of two senatorial decrees found at Priene (RDGE 10), Étienne Famerie argues that only the second decree deals with the long-standing territorial dispute between Samos and Priene. He suggests that they date to 141/35 and 135 b.c. respectively. Consequently, the existing practice of restoring the text of the first senatorial decree on the basis of the second should be avoided. He also re-examines the manuscript traditions of another inscription relating to the early intervention of Rome in the Greek East, the letter from M. Valerius Messalla to Teos of 193 b.c. (RDGE 34).Footnote ²²⁴ Two new fragments of orthostats can now be combined with the already known evidence of MAMA IX, 1988 to partially reconstruct three letters from Julius Caesar of 46 b.c. relating to the protection of the sacred land of Zeus at Aizanoi. The style of lettering, however, suggests that the letters were inscribed during the a.d. 120s, demonstrating the continuing importance of the Caesarian dossier to the city.Footnote ²²⁵

Turning to Italy, a small fragment of the fasti of consuls and local magistrates from Urbs Salvia in Picenum that has recently come to light relates to C. Marius' third and fourth consulships (103 and 102 b.c.).Footnote ²²⁶ The list, probably inscribed in the second century a.d., describes Marius in his third consulship as apsens, a wording that differs from the Fasti Antiates maiores (InscrIt XIII.1, no. 3, pp. 102–3) and echoes the elogium from Arezzo (CIL IX 1831, line 7: tertium cos. absens creatus est), and may reflect the formula of the Fasti Capitolini, which are lacunose at this point. Adalberto Giovannini continues his analysis of the implications of his hypothesis that the Tabula Heracleensis belongs in the context of a lex Iulia of 90 b.c.Footnote ²²⁷

II.ii Emperors and the Imperial Family

Before turning to individual emperors, we note a monograph dealing with the relationship between proconsuls and emperors, from the period of Augustus to Diocletian. It focuses upon the mechanisms by which proconsuls might be appointed, their powers, and their modes of communication with emperors.Footnote ²²⁸

A new inscription set up by the demos of Tyberissos-Timiussa (Lycia) honours Augustus in terms similar to those used of Pompey elsewhere in the Greek East, as ‘overseer of land and sea’ (γῆς καὶ θ[α]|λάσσης ἐπόπτηι), but additionally entitles him Σεβασ|τῶι Θεῷ. The use of such language in the dative case suggests that the inscription belongs to a context of ruler-worship.Footnote ²²⁹ At Metropolis in Ionia dedications to Augustus on two altars found in the theatre and council chamber are unusual in alluding to him as ‘bringer of reconciliation’ (ἱλαστήριος), suggesting that whoever set up the altar there was actively engaging with Augustan ideology, and not just copying standard ways of referring to Augustus.Footnote ²³⁰ Another mechanism whereby Augustan ideology spread around the Empire is illustrated by a new copy of part of the dossier of documents known from other cities concerning the calendar for the province of Asia. At Metropolis, in the meeting-place of the Presbyteroi, a stele has been found containing the edict of Paullus Fabius Maximus and an extract from the first decree passed by the Koinon of Asia, both in Greek.Footnote ²³¹ This now confirms and clarifies some of the edict's phrasing. A clearer picture of cult for the Julio-Claudian imperial family at the Letoon sanctuary at Limyra (Lycia) has emerged from excavations, with the discovery of statue bases honouring Drusus the Younger and Agrippina the Younger, along with fragments of a festival calendar recording imperial birthdays, and a fragmentary doric frieze bearing a dedication Θε[ο]ῖς Σωτῆρσι Σεβαστοῖς.Footnote ²³² The dedication to Drusus is important in illustrating how the Lycians sought to establish a good relationship with the imperial family well before their territory was annexed by Claudius. The evidence for emperor worship in Achaea from Augustus to the Flavians is also now usefully gathered together.Footnote ²³³

Two new editions and commentaries of the Res Gestae divi Augusti have appeared, each with a very distinctive flavour. John Scheid's edition presents for the first time an exemplary account of the text as it exists in its three copies at Ancyra, Apollonia, and Pisidian Antioch, rather than moulding them together into a composite version.Footnote ²³⁴ This edition should now be the first port-of-call for anyone wishing to understand the RGDA as an epigraphic text. Rather curiously Scheid chooses to minimize the contribution of Augustus himself to the composition of the text, arguing instead that the majority of RGDA would have been composed by imperial secretaries. By contrast, Augustus remains the focal point for Alison Cooley, whose edition seeks to explore the text as a personal account of his life's achievements by Augustus himself, analysing how Augustus understood his rôle in Roman society, politics and history.Footnote ²³⁵ The edition then sets this picture into the context of a developing Augustan language, as expressed both in texts and through visual images. A distinctive feature of this edition is that the Latin and Greek texts are set alongside each other, with English translations of both versions, in order to elucidate the way in which the provincial audiences of the RGDA responded to, and sometimes adapted, Augustus' words.

An exciting rediscovery in Florence has brought to light the well-known, but long thought to be lost, inscription concerning the imperial cult at Forum Clodii of a.d. 18: a photograph shows it to be a large rectangular moulded tablet with a heading and neat paragraphing of its text. The accuracy of Bormann's publication of the inscription in CIL XI 3303 can now be verified.Footnote ²³⁶ The first fragment of the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre has now been identified from outside the province of Baetica.Footnote ²³⁷ A small fragment of an inscribed bronze tablet has been plausibly identified as containing text relating to the prohibition upon mourning among Piso's family. The fragment was found in fourth-century infill during excavation of the cathedral of St Peter in Geneva and was first published in 2005 (ILN V.3 869). This archaeological context is of great importance since it strongly suggests that the inscription originated somewhere in the region. Although it seems unlikely that the senatorial decree was originally set up on bronze in Geneva itself — in a.d. 20 merely a vicus — it is entirely possible that the bronze was set up in a colonia in the district before being brought to Geneva where it was reused. This find suggests that the Senate's publication clause may indeed have been executed, although it still does not preclude enthusiastic intervention on the part of the governor of Baetica in setting it up in his province.

Excavations at Copia Thurii have uncovered a dedication inscribed on polychrome Lucullan marble from the quarry at Teos to Ti. Iul. Drus[i f(ilio)…?]| Germanic[o], reused in the paving of a fourth-century bath building.Footnote ²³⁸ It seems that this must honour the son of Drusus the Younger (i.e. Tiberius' grandson), one of the twins born in a.d. 19/20, and who died in a.d. 23. If this is correct, it suggests that even very young members of Tiberius' family were being honoured in Italian towns.

A dossier of letters from Claudius to Cos of a.d. 47/48 provides further evidence about the rôle of the emperor's doctor, C. Stertinius Xenophon, as a go-between for his home and the imperial court.Footnote ²³⁹ The letters deal with honours for Claudius and privileges for the gerousia on Cos. The Claudian pillar monument from Patara in Lycia, which was one of the highlights in the last survey, has continued to attract considerable attention, most of it focusing on the list of distances between Lycian communities inscribed on its left and right (long) sides.Footnote ²⁴⁰ The full definitive edition, accompanied by detailed archaeological commentary on the locations named, is splendidly illustrated with computer-generated reconstructions, though the supplements proposed for the lacunae in the last few lines remain rather awkward.Footnote ²⁴¹ It is also perhaps regrettable that the editors have chosen to continue to term the monument the Stadiasmus, since this privileges the list of distances, despite the fact that, arguably, it was not part of the original purpose of the monument to carry it.

Cult of divaPoppaea appears likely from a fragmentary limestone slab at Pinna Vestina (Reg. IV), which appears to have been set up in her honour by a priestess, with the occasion marked by some celebration involving men and women alike (the restoration as [se]viris seems unnecessary).Footnote ²⁴²

Again at Patara, we find Nero building a pair of lighthouses for the town in a.d. 64/65 through his legate Marcius Priscus, who, perhaps surprisingly, governed Lycia continuously for eight years, despite the upheavals of the civil wars.Footnote ²⁴³ One of the lighthouses bore an impressive monumental inscription (at least 370 cm high), with letters probably of gilded bronze, of which only the outlines still remain. This inscription shows that the construction work was completed in Nero's name, a name which appears in letters 30 cm high, whilst the rest of the text is only 20 cm. The emperor appears with a whole sequence of resonant titles and genealogy, including appropriately enough for the context of a lighthouse αὐτοκράτωρ γῆς καὶ θαλάσσης. Unusually, he is described as ‘grandson of Tiberius Caesar Augustus and of Germanicus Caesar’, perhaps reflecting the continued memory and popularity of Germanicus in the Greek East. Beneath this inscription, a statue base was added about five years later under Vespasian and inscribed in honour of the governor Marcius Priscus by the boule and demos. Priscus is praised for his continuous service under all emperors since ‘Tiberius Caesar’ (a circuitous way of referring to Nero, it seems, without alluding to him by name), his administration of justice, and his rôle in adorning the city. Two new identical inscriptions reveal that Priscus also oversaw the repair of an aqueduct at Patara following an earthquake.Footnote ²⁴⁴ In this light, Suetonius' inclusion of Lycia (Vespasian 8.4) in a list of regions whose freedom Vespasian removed, annexing them as provinces, now seems rather misleading; instead, it seems likely that Vespasian removed some other privilege granted to Lycia by Claudius.

Some impression of the uncertainties surrounding the Flavian accession has emerged from a careful re-examination of the building-inscription of the baths at Patara. Werner Eck has argued that the baths were originally sponsored by Nero, but that his name and titles were erased following his downfall.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Subsequently, Vespasian's name was inserted on top of the erasure, even though it is unlikely that he was actually involved in the construction of the baths himself. The new emperor is entitled Autokrator Kaisar Flavios Vespasianus Augustus, despite the fact that Vespasian swiftly dropped Flavius from his name, in favour of styling himself as Imp. Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, emphasizing his imperial credentials. This supports the impression that the people of Patara changed this building-inscription on their own initiative, wishing to distance themselves from the disgraced emperor as quickly as possible — as well they might, given the evidence for their enthusiasm for Nero revealed in the inscriptions discussed above.

The first definite example of the monthGermanicus, introduced in honour of Domitian in place of September, has appeared in a re-reading of a funerary relief set up in a.d. 89 by a soldier at Rome. This now offers a secure date ante quem for the introduction of the month.Footnote ²⁴⁶

The five years covered by this survey have seen the emergence of a striking cluster of new documents relating to the activities of the emperor Hadrian, mostly from various contexts in the Greek East. They provide further illustration of the distinctiveness of Hadrian's style of rule and of the impact of his own cultural and intellectual interests upon provincial activities.

The speeches to his troops made by Hadrian on his visit to Africa in a.d. 128, as recorded on inscriptions on the tribunal (surmounted by a monumental column) at the parade ground just outside the fortress of legio III Augusta at Lambaesis, have been republished in detail.Footnote ²⁴⁷ About a quarter of the original sixteen inscribed blocks survive. The edition is something of a labour of love, piecing together over seventy fragments, but the result offers an invaluable insight into the relationship between emperor and soldiers, and a reminder of Hadrian's military background. The inscription consists of a dedication to Hadrian; a speech to the legion; and a speech to the auxiliary units (addressing each one in turn with specific comments on their performance). They show how the emperor tried to boost the troops' morale, whilst offering both praise and criticism based upon his observations of their training exercises, and they also reveal details about the army's campaigning and tactics in battle. The theme of the importance of disciplina (frags 12–17) in preparing the soldiers for battle and differentiating them from their barbarian opponents matches other evidence for Hadrian's introduction of the cult of Disciplina to the Roman army. Another point of interest is the prominence given to the commanding officer Catullinus, often praised by Hadrian for his training of the troops. Alterations made to the inscriptions over time imply that the speeches remained in the army's consciousness for over a century.

A new edict of Hadrian illustrates the emperor's responsiveness to complaints from his provincial subjects.Footnote ²⁴⁸ Issued during his travels through the province of Asia in a.d. 129, the edict describes how in the course of his travels Hadrian had become aware of complaints about the abuse of the requisitioning system by Roman soldiers, and therefore issued this edict by virtue of his proconsular powers with the aim of clarifying the rights and responsibilities of both soldiers and provincials. It is tempting to see his reference to the province as an ethnos rather than as an eparcheia as showing some sensitivity towards the provincials' self-respect. This inscribed stele, virtually complete, adds to the already considerable body of evidence showing that requisitioning remained a contentious issue over a long period, as well as illustrating the way in which a travelling emperor might make himself accessible to petitioners. Another inscription from the same year illustrates in more detail the workings of the petition system. Although much of the content of the inscription is missing, its opening sections show how an individual named Hermogenes applied to the emperor for permission to receive a copy of documents relating to his dispute with Apollodotus, including Hadrian's own response to the dispute. The inscription contains an official copy, formally witnessed, of the petition as displayed in the New Stoa of a city perhaps in Lycia or Cappadocia. The inscription switches between Greek and Latin, reflecting the different types of document contained within it, with Latin being used to enforce the authority of Hadrian's reply.Footnote ²⁴⁹

A limestone slab from the agora at Kestros (Cilicia Tracheia) contains an inscription set up by a member of the local élite, Moutes son of Medesis, in honour of Hadrian as pater patriae (so a.d. 128 or later), ‘ruler of land and sea’, and ‘New Sun-God’. This language is unusual in describing Hadrian and may reflect Moutes' initiative in deciding on the format of the dedication. Although it is suggested that the dedication belongs to a Sebasteion, this link remains uncertain.Footnote ²⁵⁰

A number of fragments all appear to belong to a single inscription of a.d. 137/8, a letter to the magistrates,bouleanddemosof Pergamon from Hadrian in which he rejects their proposal to supplement the existing temples of Rome and Augustus and of Trajan and Zeus by building a temple in his honour.Footnote ²⁵¹ It shows Hadrian's concern to prevent the Pergamenes from over-stretching themselves financially. It also confirms that a cult statue of Hadrian was added to the temple of Trajan and Zeus Philios only in a.d. 138, and as a compromise, instead of another temple. It is unusual to find a negative response from an emperor recorded on a monumental inscription, but the Pergamenes evidently considered Hadrian's response to be sufficiently favourable towards them even so. The inscription clearly illustrates the way in which cities in the region acted out their local rivalries by trying to associate themselves ever more closely with the power of Rome through emperor-worship. In an appendix, Müller reassesses some inscribed fragments that belong to a dossier concerning the establishment of the Traianeia Deiphileia festival.

A letter from Hadrian to Naryka (Locris) of a.d. 138 may well record one of the last official interventions made by that emperor, and, appropriately enough, it appears to give a flavour of Hadrian's personal interests and to reflect the emerging ethos of the ‘second sophistic’ atmosphere.Footnote ²⁵² The first point of interest is the very fact that the letter is inscribed upon a bronze pedimental stele, a material thought to have been rarely used in the Greek East. The pediment has in its centre a small bust, seemingly of Hadrian himself, and some other decorative features were also originally fixed alongside; they were perhaps of gold and silver, since they appear to have been forcibly removed at some point.Footnote ²⁵³ The letter itself is designed to confirm the status of Naryka as a polis; it offers a perspective upon how a polis in the mid-second century a.d. might be defined that complements the well-known passage in Pausanias (10.4.1) dealing with the status of Panopeus.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Hadrian comments upon the fact that Naryka contributes to the Amphictyonic League and Boeotian Confederacy, and participates in the Panhellenion, laying particular emphasis upon the financial obligations of the polis. He also alludes to its civic institutions. Particularly striking are Hadrian's allusions to poetry as a means of legitimizing Naryka's status, commenting upon how the town's links to the Lesser Ajax have been paraded in both Greek and Latin poets (probably alluding to Homer's Iliad, Callimachos' Aetia, and Ovid's Metamorphoses).Footnote ²⁵⁵ The fact that Hadrian himself gives a public rôle to poetry in asserting civic status and identity also supports the impression that myth and literature could play important rôles in determining membership of the Panhellenion.

A fragmentary inscribed architrave found at Carnuntum suggests that the introduction of cult for Antinous in the Balkan region of Dardania was at the prompting of Hadrian himself, through L. Aelius Caesar, who served as governor of both Pannonias in a.d. 136/7. This new find allows for a fresh interpretation of a large plaque discovered during the 1950s in the same area, which also mentions Antinous, Hadrian and L. Aelius Caesar (AE (1972), 500): the idea that the cult of Antinous was the initiative of workers of Bithynian origin working in the local silver mines now seems unlikely.Footnote ²⁵⁶ Excavations at Sagalassos have continued to uncover imperial inscriptions and statues, with new inscriptions honouring Hadrian and Caracalla, and two identical bases for Constantius II. Caracalla's inscription in Greek betrays the influence of a Latin template in its unusual use of the abbreviation π π for pater patriae; it is set up for Caracalla as ‘saviour and founder’ by the polis of the Sagalassians, who claim to be both ‘first of Pisidia, and friend and ally of Romans’.Footnote ²⁵⁷ A statue base for Maximus Caesar, son of Maximinus Thrax, set up in a.d. 236–38 by the cavalry of an auxiliary unit based at a camp at Odiavum, reflects a wider picture of enthusiasm in the Pannonian region for this ill-fated emperor and his son, an enthusiasm reflected also in the fact that they wrongly entitle him Imperator.Footnote ²⁵⁸ A curious dedication from Phaselis in Lycia-Pamphylia, simply inscribed Παυλείνᾳ Σεβαστῇ and attributed by the editors to Domitia Paulina, the sister of Hadrian (but not known to have been titled Augusta), may possibly be the only epigraphic witness to Caecilia Paulina Augusta (PIR ² C 91), wife of Maximinus and mother of Maximus, before her death and deification some time during the first year of her husband's reign (a.d. 235/6).Footnote ²⁵⁹ A new limestone base inscribed with an honorific inscription for Gordian III from Perugia, set up by the August[a]ni Perusini in a.d. 239, adds to the impression of a cluster of inscriptions for this emperor in this area of Umbria, perhaps reflecting local support for him.Footnote ²⁶⁰ The small dossier of inscriptions relating to Saloninus, son of emperor Gallienus, now includes a monumental fragment 2.80 m long, whose dimensions suggest it originates from a public building at Tarentum dedicated in his honour.Footnote ²⁶¹

Several different aspects of the Tetrarchy have been illuminated by recent finds. A new discovery found amongst spolia built into the embankment of a canal at Salona has confirmed the full name of Diocletian's wife — Aureliae | Priscae | nobilissimae | feminae — and also reveals that she was not entitled Augusta. This dedication is inscribed upon a large base of white limestone, on the upper surface of which remain grooves for the fixing of a statue. It has been suggested that the collection of spolia belonged originally to a temple of Jupiter, something which would offer a suitable context for the honouring of Prisca, along perhaps with Diocletian himself.Footnote ²⁶² A statue base set up with a Latin dedication to Diocletian by his procurator M. Aur. Rusticus, in a.d. 289/90, indicates the presence of imperial estates in the area of Mysia Abbaïtis in Phrygia.Footnote ²⁶³ A peculiarly serendipitous discovery, the result of a tree felling, is the fact that the inscription of Diocletian's Prices Edict at Stratonicea was simply headed by three letters — e(xemplum) s(acrarum) l(itterarum) — in place of the imperial titulature found on other copies, incidentally demonstrating that the phrase sacrae litterae could refer to edicts.Footnote ²⁶⁴ Another contribution to the text of the Prices Edict integrates a stray fragment of the Aphrodisias copy with other testimony from that city and elsewhere to complete the opening of the chapter on slave prices (de pretiis mancipiorum), definitively demonstrating that eunuchs were not one of the categories envisaged by the compilers of the list of prices.Footnote ²⁶⁵ Three clusters of tetrarchic milestones in southern Israel, numbered from the caput viae at Osia, provide further evidence of the practice of painting milestone texts in that region: out of twenty-eight, fourteen are both inscribed and painted, whilst ten bear traces of paint only, so that it seems likely that the remaining few may well also originally have been painted.Footnote ²⁶⁶

Simon Corcoran argues that what are usually regarded as four separate documents (First Caesariani Decree of a.d. 305, Caesariani Letter, Edictum de Accusationibus, Second Caesariani Decree) actually all deal with the Caesariani — imperial officials involved in financial administration — and should therefore be viewed as belonging to a single dossier.Footnote ²⁶⁷ The implication of this conclusion is that the Accusations Edict, of which an abbreviated version appears in the Theodosian Code (9.5.1) where it is provided with a date of issue of 1 January 314, should be definitively removed from the legislative programme of Constantine (or his colleague Licinius). He further argues that it may have been Galerius who initiated the promulgation of these documents early in his reign, and so what has often been interpreted as a distinctive feature of the second tetrarchy would instead become the aberration of a single emperor.

A survey of inscriptions naming Helena, mother of Constantine, reveals that dedications in her honour cluster in Rome, Italy, and the western provinces, with Greek inscriptions associated with her only being a feature of a later period, often from a Christian context. Her legal status as wife of Constantius is described in the usual language of marriage relationships (coniunx, uxor).Footnote ²⁶⁸ A new inscription from Laodicea in Syria in honour of her grandson, Constantius II, celebrates the fact that he has contributed some remarkable building-work to the city, and has also allowed it to adopt his cognomen as a title. This adds further detail to our picture of the emperor's building-work and city (re)foundations in the East.Footnote ²⁶⁹

Although the epigraphic evidence does not support the notion that Julian suffered posthumous damnatio, a further example of his name having been erased from a statue base dedication and that of a Theodosius having been carved over it, has emerged at Iasos in Caria.Footnote ²⁷⁰ This is especially interesting, given an exact parallel at Aphrodisias in the same province (IAph2007 8.405). The editor of the Iasos text assumes that the Theodosius in question is the emperor of a.d. 379–395 but the parallel phenomena at Iasos and Aphrodisias suggest the interesting possibility that it is his grandson, Theodosius II, who is the honorand in both cases. Theodosius II made a brief tour of the nearer Asian provinces in the late spring/early summer of a.d. 443. The precise itinerary is not known but his presence at Aphrodisias, the capital of the province of Caria, on 22 May is documented (NTh 23). Given that this was the first provincial tour by the eastern court in nearly forty years and Theodosius' only known excursion beyond the environs of Constantinople as an adult, one can imagine civic authorities striving to impress. Remaining public honours to Julian the Apostate may have commended themselves as candidates for reworking and rededication. A fragmentary inscription from Side records the dedication of a forum named after Theodosius II's father, Arcadius, (τὸν ϕόρο[ν…]| Άρκαδι[ακὸν] – an interesting loan-word expression) by the governor Vicerius, possibly in a.d. 404.Footnote ²⁷¹

A new fragment of the constitution of Anastasius relating to the administration of the military annona in the Orient diocese by the dux Palaestinae has been uncovered in Jerusalem, adding to the five copies of the same text already known from Arabia.Footnote ²⁷² Originally a vast text of a couple of hundred lines, this late fifth-/early sixth-century document is concerned with protecting soldiers from exploitation at the hands of their officers; the authentication of officers' appointments through the presentation of imperial letters; the division of horses and camels among the soldiers; and army rations. This document is one of those included in the very useful register of acts of the imperial state attested epigraphically in Late Antiquity recently compiled by D. Feissel and already updated in his collected papers on the related themes of law, documents and diplomacy in the later Roman Empire, where his previously scattered studies are enhanced by the very full indices.Footnote ²⁷³

II.iii The Élite and the Governing Class

This section is intended to highlight new epigraphic information, studies, or research aids regarding senior office-holders and other significant members of the Roman senatorial and equestrian class (though for military officers see Section II.iv below), as well as members of the provincial aristrocracy of more than simply local significance. For the period of the High Empire, military diplomas continue to provide new entries in the fasti of provincial governors of the more military provinces and of the prefects of the fleets, or revisions to existing ones. Another category, which was a significant source for new names of governors of Pontus and Bithynia in the last survey and proves so again, is that of the lead weights of the agoranomoi of Nicomedia, meticulously dated by provincial governor and emperor's regnal year (the latter an uncommon practice outside Egypt).

Starting with works of reference, an English translation of J. Rüpke's monumental prosopography of priests in the city of Rome, the Fasti Sacerdotum, has appeared.Footnote ²⁷⁴ This presents the data in two main catalogues: year-by-year snapshots of the membership of the priestly colleges from 300 b.c. to the end of the fifth century a.d., by which time Christian clergy monopolise the entries; and individual biographies, for which the numbering (from 1 to 3,590) remains consistent with the German original. These are complemented by membership lists for the various colleges. The British publisher has (just) managed to squeeze the three volumes of the original within a single pair of covers but at the expense of abbreviating much of the synthetic material found in the German version. Nor is the CD-Rom of the database included so that readers are dependent entirely on the hard-copy indices.Footnote ²⁷⁵ Despite the cessation of central government funding, two new fascicles of the revised Prosopographia Imperii Romani have been completed in the quinquennium, covering the letters S (a bumper volume of 1,054 entries) and T (a slimmer volume of 450 entries).Footnote ²⁷⁶ B. E. Thomasson has issued on CD-Rom and online a consolidated set of revisions, corrections, and updates to the first volume of his Laterculi Praesidum presenting the province-by-province list of governors from Augustus to Diocletian.Footnote ²⁷⁷ A study of the holders of the urban prefecture from Augustus down to a.d. 289 includes an appendix that reproduces the literary and epigraphic testimony for each of the seventy-nine attested office-holders in full, with commentary.Footnote ²⁷⁸ Four further parts, making up three volumes (a prosopography, social study, and indices), have appeared to complete Y. Burnand's extensive examination of the members of the senatorial and equestrian classes of Gallic origin during the imperial period.Footnote ²⁷⁹

On the basis that the orthography of the magistrate's cognomen (Cottas) reflects Greek influence, J. Prag has argued forcefully that the unusual quadrangular milestone from Corleone in central Sicily (ILLRP 1277 = CIL I² 2877) should indeed be attributed to the C. Aurelius L.f. Cotta of the First Punic War (cos. 252, cos. II 248 b.c.; RE 2.2 (1896), cols 2481–82, Aurelius 94) rather than one of his descendants.Footnote ²⁸⁰ Integrating the epigraphic and literary testimony, Prag has also provided a revised list of republican governors of Sicily.Footnote ²⁸¹ The publication of a cylindrical cippus found in the Comune di Codigoro in the Po delta reveals a road-building inscription set up by T. Annius T.f., as consul.Footnote ²⁸² This raises the possibility of identifying this individual (possibly T. Annius Rufus, cos. 128 b.c.; RE 1.2 (1894), col. 2277, Annius 78) with the T. Annius, praetor, of the milestone ILLRP 454a from near Vibo in Lucania. This pair of inscriptions, therefore, may illustrate how T. Annius was involved in road-building in different regions of Italy during the second century b.c., first as praetor, and then as consul. Potentially closely contemporaenous is a milestone from Sardinia that attests the presence there of a M. Cornu[ficius?] pro consule.Footnote ²⁸³ This the editors prefer to date to the late second century (c. 121–116 b.c.) rather than to the Augustan period, where it might otherwise belong. If so, this is a departure from the more accustomed title of pro praetore for promagistrates in Sardinia at this period. By contrast, in Asia, a newly published statue base is dedicated by the people of Nysa to a patronus and benefactor, Cn. Domitius M.f. Calvinus, who is titled ἀντιστράτηγος (i.e. propraetor).Footnote ²⁸⁴ The most likely explanation is that this is Calvinus cos. 53, cos. II 40 b.c. (PIR ² D 139), a loyal supporter of Caesar and Octavian, and that his title indicates that he was operating in Asia as a legatus pro praetore of Caesar c. 48/46 b.c.

G. Menella has produced a reasonably detailed study of a recently discovered bilingual inscription of rather uncertain date from Aulla in Tuscany (AE (2005), 491) that was found reused in the eighth-century paving of the S. Caprasio monastery. This bears a dedication to L. Titinius,praefectus fabrum, set up by a koinon (described as commune in the Latin version) somewhere in Greece or Asia Minor, during the late Republic/Augustan era.Footnote ²⁸⁵ A. Raggi's monograph, which provides an important new critical edition and commentary on the dossier of five documents (dating between 42 and 30 b.c.) in honour of the navarch Seleucus of Rhosus (IGLS III.1 718), was already signalled in the last survey.Footnote ²⁸⁶ Another well-known inscription, which probably relates to events of the civil war and triumviral period, to have received new attention is the so-called Laudatio Turiae.Footnote ²⁸⁷ H. Lindsay devotes a long article to examining issues of inheritance, infertility, and virtues in marriage in the inscribed funerary elogium. He defends the traditional identification of the senator Q. Lucretius Vespillo as the dedicator against the prevailing trend in scholarship of the last couple of decades. Certainly of the early Augustan period is an inscription from Malta (AE (1969/70), 204) that features L. Sempronius Atratinus (cos. 34 b.c.; PIR ² S 347). The text has been reinterpreted to read as a commemoration of him as aug(ur) and, significantly, imp(erator), a title which reflects his African triumph of 21 b.c.Footnote ²⁸⁸ The trilingual (Egyptian hieroglyphic, Greek, and Latin) stele of Augustus' notorious first prefect of Egypt, C. Cornelius Gallus (PIR ² C 1369) from Philae receives a new critical edition, line-by-line translation (into German) and commentary.Footnote ²⁸⁹ A previously unknown proconsul of Baetica, C. Servius Rufus Terentianus (PIR ² S 608a), is named on the base of an equestrian statue dedicated to him as their patronus by the local community of Ilia Ilipa in the region of Seville.Footnote ²⁹⁰ The honorand is probably a descendant of the senatorial monetalis of 41 b.c., L. Servius Rufus and a Terentia. His period of office is likely to have fallen between 13 b.c. (when the separate province of Baetica was created) and a.d. 20. This inscription records the earliest known honour to a governor of Baetica.

A study of the relations between senatorial families and their home towns in the first and second centuries a.d. is based on eight case-studies, for which the evidence is more often than not epigraphic.Footnote ²⁹¹ The links are examined in various respects: landholdings, municipal offices held, euergetism, patronage, and honours granted to senators by their home communities. The case-studies are distributed geographically over central and northern Italy, Spain, Africa, and Asia Minor, and the volume concludes with an annotated list of the most significant relevant epigraphic evidence. S. Demougin has provided an update to her prosopography ofequites of the Julio-Claudian period, adding fifty-eight new persons to the catalogue drawn up in 1983, and emphasizes the importance of the epigraphic record in tracing the history of the terms equo publico and eques Romanus.Footnote ²⁹² Relating to the process of the creation of the new imperial social orders is the Senatus Consultum of a.d. 19, known from the surviving bronze copy from Larinum (AE (1978), 145), that prohibits members of the senatorial or equestrian orders from appearing on stage or in the arena as actors or gladiators. This has been the subject of a new monograph, which offers a line-by-line commentary focused in particular on the historical and legislative context.Footnote ²⁹³

Turning from Italy to the provinces, M. Rathmann has produced a synthesis of the rôle played by early imperial governors in road-building, based on a prosopographical catalogue of over 200 governors and other Roman government officials attested on milestones and other inscriptions commemorating road construction.Footnote ²⁹⁴ This reveals considerable regional variation. Some 90 per cent of the around 180 provincial milestones naming such officials come from the Balkan provinces, Asia Minor, the Syrian region, and North Africa, a proportion that does not reflect that of milestones overall. The honorary inscriptions from the Athenian agora have now been reappraised. Among their number, it is suggested that the honorand of a fragmentary text, AE (1947), 74, should be identified with Cn. Hosidius Geta, conqueror of Mauretania under Claudius (PIR ² H 216) and the context of this dedication suggests that he was also previously proconsul of Achaia.Footnote ²⁹⁵ The study is also helpfully equipped with a table summarizing the content of the sixty honorary inscriptions from the American agora excavations, plus five more from IG II/III². Also pertaining to the reign of Claudius, a further boundary cippus from Cyrenaica commemorating the activity of the emperor's special legate, L. Acilius Strabo (PIR ² A 82), in a.d. 53 has been discovered.Footnote ²⁹⁶ Strabo's mission, to determine whether former royal lands had been illegally occupied, is recalled by Tacitus (Ann. 14.18). What is unique in the new text is that it preserves the Greek equivalent (μεταξυμεσίτης) for the Latin term, disceptator (arbitrator), that Tacitus uses to describe Strabo's rôle. The text of an inscription, lost and previously only known by report, that documents a lacuna in the known career of Ti. Iulius Alexander (PIR ² I 139), the prefect of Egypt and ‘kingmaker’ of Vespasian in a.d. 69, has now been published in full.Footnote ²⁹⁷ This is a dedication in Alexander's honour by the council and people of Tyre as their patronus giving his office as procurator of Nero, presumably for the province of Syria. This inscription must date after the accession of Nero (a.d. 54) and before Alexander joined the staff of Domitius Corbulo (a.d. 63), and this procuratorship was presumably the next stage in his career after procurator of Judaea, where he is attested in a.d. 46. Also relating to the equestrian service under Claudius and Nero are two newly completed statue base dedications from Perge in Pamphylia.Footnote ²⁹⁸ The tops of the two bases, long known as stray finds (IPerge (IK 54) 24 and 222), were reunited, thanks to some nice detective work, with two recently excavated bases, which reveal them both to be dedications by a certain Plocamus, freedman and priest of the divine Claudius, to two of his former superiors as procurators of Galatia and Pamphylia. One was the later praetorian prefect Sex. Afranius Sex.f. Volt. Burrus (PIR ² A 441), whose regional responsibility as procurator was not previously known, and the other his successor c. a.d. 50–51, L. Pupius L.f. Sab. Praesens (PIR ² P 1047), adding to his known career the procuratorship a loricata (a financial post at Rome), which he filled presumably only after the freedman Pallas had been removed as the chief a rationibus in a.d. 55.

Moving on to the Flavian period, incorporating recent epigraphic data, G. Mennella has assembled revised fasti for the praesidial procurators of Alpes Cottiae known between the Flavian period and the 370s.Footnote ²⁹⁹ A military diploma of Domitian attests T. Flavius Norbanus, the later praetorian prefect, known previously only by his cognomen (PIR ² N 162), and almost certainly a relative of the imperial family, in office as praesidial procurator of Raetia on 13 May a.d. 86, confirming a hypothesis of H.-G. Pflaum, Carrières procuratoriennes, Supplément (1982), 17–18.Footnote ³⁰⁰ The name of a new Domitianic governor of Britain has been partially recovered from a diploma of a veteran of the classis Britannica issued on 10 August a.d. 93.Footnote ³⁰¹ The provincial legate may be fairly securely identified as [A. Vici]rius Proculus, not previously known as a governor of Britain but attested as a suffect consul in September–December a.d. 89 (RE Suppl. 14 (1974), col. 853, Vicirius 4). An exiguous fragment from another Domitianic diploma of the early 90s adds a further post to the career of T. Iulius Candidus Marius Celsus (cos. suff. a.d. 86, cos. II ord. a.d. 105; PIR ² I 241), though the province of which he was legate is still uncertain (either of the Germanies or Moesia Superior).Footnote ³⁰²

In a demonstration of what can still be derived from a much discussed text, J. F. Matthews has re-analysed the fragmentary text of the inscribed will generally known as the Testamentum Dasumii (of a.d. 108), looking for clues as to the social outlook of its anonymous author.Footnote ³⁰³ Embedded within the discussion is a complete Latin text, parallel English translation, and line-by-line commentary. Matthews' conclusion is that, contrary to the established scholarly consensus, the testator is unlikely to be of the highest social standing. He certainly included a number of grandees among the eighty or so named legatees but some are more plausibly freedmen. Given some of the insecurities of social status expressed, Matthews prefers to see the testator as a wealthy eques with family ties to members of the senatorial order through shared provincial origins. On balance, it may be that the search for the anonymous testator and his amicus rarissimus, who is to inherit the estate and his name, amongst the known senators of the period should now be called off.

New military diplomas have added a number of names to the fasti of legates of Moesia Superior under Trajan and Hadrian. Two diplomas issued by Trajan in a.d. 111/112 and 112–114 respectively name for the first time T. Prifernius Paetus, attested as a suffect consul in a.d. 96 (PIR ² P 934), after a surprisingly long gap, as legate of this province.Footnote ³⁰⁴ New fragments of a diploma issued in August a.d. 115 furnish the name of the legate as L. Tutilius Lupercus, who had been a suffect consul in a.d. 106 or 108 (PIR ² T 463).Footnote ³⁰⁵ From the reign of Hadrian an additional small fragment completes the name of the governor in a.d. 126 as C. Iulius Gallus, a suffect consul of 124 (PIR ² I 337).Footnote ³⁰⁶ Sometime under Hadrian also belong the one or two viri clarissimi whose name(s) is/are partially preserved on the Bronze of Agón discussed above (under Historical Highlights): Mi[nucius? - - -]anus legatus Augusti (col. III, lines 33–4), who issued an edict, is no doubt an otherwise unattested governor of Hispania Citerior, while [- - - Fu]ndanus Augustanus Alpinus, the legatus … Hadriani Augusti (col. III, lines 44–5), who, having been approached by the magister pagi of the Caesaraugustani, sanctioned and ordered the decision to be ratified, is likely to be either a iuridicus or an equally unknown successor as provincial governor.Footnote ³⁰⁷ Although apparently unknown, the latter is clearly related in some way to Ti. Claudius Augustanus L. Bellicius Sollers (PIR ² B 102), who was a suffect consul c. a.d. 100. If the name of the first is correctly supplemented as Mi[nucius Fund]anus, then the two viri clarissimi legati may actually be the same man and might be identified with C. Minucius Fundanus (PIR ² M 612), suffect consul in a.d. 107 and proconsul of Asia in c. a.d. 122–123. More certain is the identity of one of the two second-century governors of Cappadocia named in recently published texts from Comana-Hierapolis. The first honours L. Flavius Arrianus, the well-known author Arrian, as legatus Augusti of Cappadocia, that is under Hadrian some time between a.d. 130/1 and 137/8 (PIR ² F 219).Footnote ³⁰⁸ Of interest is that the dedication is made by the priest of an association (synodos) of Apollo, presumably some sort of group of initiates. The editor perhaps pushes the interpretation slightly too far in suggesting that the honour may be granted in return for the governor's interest in them as part of a wider imperial policy, sponsored by the emperor Hadrian, of exploiting religion as a means of integrating provincial subjects into an imperial state. Also from Comana-Hierapolis, the same scholar publishes a very fragmentary text dated by the governorship of one Papirius Aelianus consularis, a previously unknown governor of Cappadocia.Footnote ³⁰⁹ The letter forms are consistent with a second-century date, which gives rise to two plausible identifications. He might be the same as the Cn. Papirius Aelianus Aemilius Tuscillus, whose career is partially preserved on a dedication from Illiberis in Spain (CIL II 2078) and known as legatus in Britain in a.d. 146 (PIR ² P 108). In this case a governorship of Cappadocia might be placed in the period a.d. 140–146. Alternatively, he might be identified with his son, Cn. Papirius Aelianus, known to have been a suffect consul in the period a.d. 155/9 (AE (1998), 1627). In this case, a governorship of Cappadocia might be dated in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, around a.d. 165.

More certain is the date of a legate of Syria Palaestina, [- - - Se]neca, attested in office by a military diploma of 15 January a.d. 142 (Pferdehirt, RGZM 29). W. Eck has proposed supplementing the lacuna with ‘Domitio’ to identify him with Domitius Seneca, the legate of Lycia-Pamphylia of a.d. 133–135, recorded on the inscription of Opramoas of Rhodiapolis (AE (2000), 1454, frag. VII A 2).Footnote ³¹⁰ Knowledge of the career of one of his contemporaries, M. Nonius M.f. Fab. Macrinus (cos. a.d. 154; PIR ² N 140), one of the so-called viri militares, whose public service stretched from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, has been enhanced by two finds of different kinds. His career has been relatively well documented already from multiple honours in his home town of Brixia, military diplomas for Pannonia Superior in a.d. 159–160, and a statue base from Ephesus. Now, however, a military diploma of 5 September a.d. 152 for the auxiliaries of Pannonia Inferior provides a date for his period of office as governor of that province too.Footnote ³¹¹ Moreover, archaeological excavations in an area between the fifth and sixth milestone of the Via Flaminia north of Rome have uncovered his tomb monument, including fragments of the dedicatory inscription put up by his son.Footnote ³¹² This reveals, most importantly, that at some point after his proconsulship of Asia, dated c. a.d. 170, he was appointed as legate in Hispania Citerior (i.e. Tarraconensis) and possibly also Baetica (if he followed C. Aufidius Victorinus in this extraordinary joint command), most probably in the period a.d. 171/73, when Spain was afflicted by incursions by Mauri. Also commemorated, in a second phase of carving, is Macrinus' wife, Flavia [- - -], which may be a further name for Arria, recorded as his wife in Brixia, or a second separate individual. Another of the significant office-holders of the Antonine age is C. Tattius Maximus (PIR ² T 40), praetorian prefect from a.d. 156 to 159. Before that he is known to have been prefect of the vigiles from a.d. 156 to 158 and prefect of the Misenum fleet in a.d. 153, to which (thanks to a newly published fleet veteran's diploma) can now be added also the command of the fleet at Ravenna in a.d. 150/51.Footnote ³¹³

The dating clauses of military diplomas reveal several new pairs of suffect consuls of the Hadrianic and Antonine periods. A diploma for an archer serving in Britian provides the names of two otherwise unknown suffect consuls in office on 9 December a.d. 132 (C. Acilius Priscus and A. Cassius Arrianus).Footnote ³¹⁴ L. Minicius Natalis (PIR ² M 620) and L. Claudius Proculus (PIR ² C 979–980), the new consular pair attested for July–August a.d. 139, will have been among the first sets chosen by Antoninus Pius.Footnote ³¹⁵ From the equivalent period in the second year of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus come Ti. Claudius Paullinus and Ti. Claudius Pompeianus, the new consular pair attested in office on 23 August a.d. 162 by a diploma for a soldier in Pannonia Inferior.Footnote ³¹⁶ The pair were possibly relatives, though it is tempting to associate the consul prior with the Ti. Claudii Paulini of late second-century Cibyra (IKibyra I 12, 45–6, 296; PIR ² C 954); while the consul posterior would appear to be more certainly the future son-in-law of Marcus, a native of Antioch, and consul for the second time in a.d. 173 (PIR ² C 973). Lastly an incomplete diploma for a fleet veteran names the suffect consuls in office on 14 February of an uncertain year in the early 180s as Antoninus and Haterianus.Footnote ³¹⁷

A Bithynian market weight dated year fifteen of Marcus Aurelius (in local terms 23 September 174 to 22 September 175) names P. Herennius Niger Atticianus, a previously unknown senator, as legate of Pontus-Bithynia.Footnote ³¹⁸ New finds and revisions have also enhanced our knowledge of the governors of Moesia Inferior in the latter half of the second century. The provincial command of P. Calpurnius Iulianus (PIR ² C 270) has been clarified thanks to the cleaning of one stone from Dacia and the re-reading of another from Novae in Moesia Inferior. The first, an altar dedicated in fulfilment of a vow to Hercules and the genius loci of hot springs at Băile Herculane (CIL III 1655 = ILS 3891), gives his post as simultaneously legionary legate of legio V Macedonica and legatus Augusti pro praetore of Moesia Inferior (despite the transdanubian location of the dedication).Footnote ³¹⁹ He may then be identified as the P. Calpurni[us - - -] named on a building inscription (AE (1983), 878) painted c. a.d. 176–180 (under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus) at the base of legio I Italica at Novae, along with its legionary legate, whose name is now to be read as C. Sammucius (not Mucius) Maior (PIR ² M 693a).Footnote ³²⁰ From later in the 180s belongs a stone attesting the construction of a bath building by the cohors II Brittonum at Sexaginta Prista under a legate [- - -]cus who may tentatively be identified with the L. Septimius Flaccus, suffect consul in a.d. 183 (PIR ² S 450).Footnote ³²¹ Also probably belonging to the late Antonine period is the career of a new late second-centuryeques, whose identity has been revealed by a statue base unearthed during excavation of the remains of the late antique basilica of Privernum in Latium.Footnote ³²² In this dedication the Privernates honour a certain Q. Lucilius Q.f. Pub. Valens, currently procurator of the vicesima hereditatum trans Padum et Aemiliam usque ad Aquileiam (a previously unattested district of responsibility) and former curator of the colonia of Privernum, as their patronus. As well as his earlier military posts (trib. coh. VI equestris civium Romanorum, trib. leg. XXX Ulpiae Victricis, praef. coh. I Flaviae, possibly all served in Germany), the text also gives his municipal posts in his home town, Verona, as duumvir and flamen coloniae Veronensium. This is the first epigraphic attestation for duoviri (rather than quattuorviri) as the senior magistrates of Verona and of the city as a colonia (mentioned as such in Tac., Hist. 3.8.1).

Back in Rome, the identity and early career of a previously unattested senator of the late second or early third century has been revealed by a fragmentary statue base, apparently from the context of the remains of a suburban villa of the High Empire located to the south-west of the city.Footnote ³²³ This lists the career of one [- - - Cor]nelianus Agrippinus from tribune of the legio XII Fulminata in Cappadocia, through tribune of the plebs and quaestor, to praetor, the most senior office held at the time of the dedication. One curiosity is the unparalleled styling quaestor Romanus, to indicate a quaestorship spent in the city, rather than the more regular designation urbanus. The integration of new fragments with a long-known inscription from Beneventum (CIL IX 1582 = ILS 1343) helps to fill out the career of a high-flying equestrian officer of the Severan period, Cn. Marcius Rustius Rufinus, who had once been assumed to have reached the heights of the praetorian prefecture (e.g. PIR ² M 246).Footnote ³²⁴ Of an equestrian family of Beneventum, after a series of tribunates in the legions and at Rome, his big break came in the civil war with Pescennius Niger, which led to his promotion to the procuratorship of Syria Coele. What the new text reveals is that he held a special post of praepositus annonae exercitus impp. L. Septimi Severi Pii Pertinacis et M. Aurelii Antonini Pii Augg. for the Persian campaign of a.d. 200–202, perhaps combining this with the regular command of the fleet at Misenum. The inscription also clearly confirms that later, as praefectus vigilum, he was one of the higher equestrian prefects to enjoy the elevated title of vir eminentissimus (as had previously been surmised from fragmentary texts at Ostia).Footnote ³²⁵ Another Bithynian market weight issued by the agoranomos of Nicomedia, this time from the collection of the Pera museum in Istanbul, names Silius Messala, a previously unattested consular legate of Bithynia of the early part of the reign of Septimius Severus (a.d. 194/197).Footnote ³²⁶ This Messala should be the same man, who, as Cassius Dio reports (73[74].17.3–4), when suffect consul in a.d. 193 convened the Senate to denounce Didius Iulianus and declare for Severus (PIR ² S 725). A lead fistula from Rome, bearing the name of the senator [C]odonius Taurus (CIL XV 7573), may now be dated, by the name of the plumbarius Aurelius Florentinus, to the early third century.Footnote ³²⁷ This distances him from close chronological association with the Codonius Taurus iunior who dedicated a statue base in Rome in a.d. 346 (CIL VI 1768 = ILS 1229), along with the eques Flavius Spes, whom it should be noted seems to be an individual overlooked by the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire.

One outcome of a review of the readings of the milestones of the road between Caesarea and Melitene in Cappadocia is revised fasti for the governors of Cappadocia in the politically turbulent period a.d. 217–22.Footnote ³²⁸ New supplements for the erased emperors' names in a set of milestones places the term of Catius Clemens/Clementinus (RE Suppl. 14 (1974), col. 88, Catius 6b), previously thought to belong to a.d. 237–238 (under Maximinus), instead two decades earlier, in a.d. 217–218 (under Macrinus). The full name of another governor under Macrinus, the legate of Moesia Inferior, known from coins as P. Fuf(- - -) Pontianus (PIR ² F 496), may now be identified with a new legate of Pontus-Bithynia under Severus Alexander. A market weight dated to year 4 (i.e. 23 September 224/22 September 225) names P. Pontius Pontianus Puficius (sic) Maximus as governor.Footnote ³²⁹

Looking beyond the confines of the imperial élite to those of provincial significance, an inscribed bust from a rural villa site in the Macedonian region of Mygdonia reveals a hitherto unattested title for a delegate to the provincial council.Footnote ³³⁰ Palaeography of the inscription and the style of the bust point to a date c. a.d. 225–250. The bust is dedicated by a slave estate manager to his master [Ae?]lius Nicopolianus, who is described as a σύνεδρος (member of the provincial koinon) and uniquely πρῶτος Ἑλλήνων τῆς ἐπαρχείου (first of the Greeks of the province [of Macedonia]). This honorary title, which has parallels in the Roman provinces of Asia Minor, was conferred by a vote of the koinon on one of its delegates. The famous dossier of texts on the statue base of another prominent provincial of the first half of the third century has been the subject of two recent studies. This is the so-called ‘marbre de Thorigny’ (CIL XIII 3162), the base of a statue raised by the Council of the Three Gauls on 16 December of the eventful year a.d. 238 to the treasurer of the iron-workings (iudex arcae ferrariarum), T. Sennius Sollemnis (PIR ² S 383), at his home town of Viducasses in Lugdunensis (Vieux in Calvados, Normandy) and first recorded at the château of Torigni-sur-Vire. Aside from the lengthy narrative of Sollemnis' municipal, provincial, and imperial career on the front face, the stone is notable for the inclusion of supporting evidence in the form of copies, on the left and right side faces respectively, of letters of his patronus and amicus Ti. Claudius Paulinus, legate of Lugdunensis and subsequently of Britannia Inferior, and of his patronus Aedinius Iulianus, Paulinus' successor and later a praetorian prefect. First, in the 2006 volume in appreciation of H.-G. Pflaum, S. Benoist offered a detailed appraisal of the late professor's famous 1948 monograph on the monument, also summarizing subsequent scholarship.Footnote ³³¹ This has then been followed by a fresh monographic treatment by P. Vipard, including text, French translation, and commentary, in which he argues that, despite the lack of any explicit statement, Sennius Sollemnis should most probably be considered a local notable who had successfully entered the equestrian order.Footnote ³³²

Roughly contemporary with the honours to Sollemnis is a series of statue bases to the emperor Maximinus and his son put up at Philippopolis. Two put up by the city authorities name known governors of the period a.d. 236–238 (Simonius Iulianus and T. Clodius Saturninus), but a further two put up by the Thracarch (chief priest of the koinon of Thrace), M. Aur. Stason, name a previously unattested legate of Thrace, C. (or T.) Vibius Gallus.Footnote ³³³ The most likely date for his governorship is the period c. a.d. 235/6. If the praenomen is indeed Gaius, then it is also tempting to identify this man with C. Vibius Afinius Trebonianus Gallus (PIR ¹ V 403), the legate of Moesia Inferior in a.d. 251, who was elevated to the purple in the power vacuum following the death of Decius at Abrittus. The name of the governor of Germania Superior in a.d. 240, a senatorial legatus Augusti, is partially revealed by a diploma issued to a soldier of the legio XXII Primigenia.Footnote ³³⁴ Only [- - - F]alco survives, but the cognomen is particularly distinctive of the Pompeii Falcones, a senatorial family prominent since the early second century (PIR ² Pars VI, p. 265, stemma 29). In roughly this period also may be placed the [- - -] Rufus, vir egregius and procurator of Lycia and Pamphylia, honoured with a statue as their benefactor ‘in all things’ by the council and people of Phaselis.Footnote ³³⁵ He may be the same as the Rufus honoured with an inscribed epigram at Attaleia (Merkelbach and Stauber, Steinepigramme IV 131). On the subject of third-century procurators, the personnel and management of revenue gathering in Roman Africa during the transformations of the middle and later decades of the century have been illuminated by a detailed examination of the epigraphic evidence.Footnote ³³⁶

Three more Nicomedian weights reveal new legates of Pontus-Bithynia in the 250s. One, now in the Römisch-Germanisch Museum in Cologne, records a L. Egnatius Victor Lollianus consularis as legatus Augusti pro praetore in year 1 of Decius, which in Bithynian terms means between 8 June and 22 September a.d. 249.Footnote ³³⁷ R. Haensch argues that he must be distinguished from the homonym, famous as an orator, who was proconsul of Asia under Gordian and Philip for a triennium (c. a.d. 242–245) and prefect of the city at Rome in a.d. 254 (PIR ² E 36). Most plausibly this governor of Pontus-Bithynia is the son of the orator. Two more weights from the Pera museum collection reveal a further couple of governors. The first, dated by year 2 of the emperor Decius (i.e. 23 September 249–22 September 250), names one C. Sabucius Secundus Paulus Modestus as consularis and legate; the second names a certain Aurelius Hieron as legate in year 4 of Valerian and Gallienus (i.e. 23 September 255–22 September 256).Footnote ³³⁸ Probably almost contemporary with the latter is a man named on one of the texts thrown up by excavation in the Great Temple at Petra in Arabia. This is a large sandstone plaque bearing the fullest version yet known of the names and titles of the senatorial legate of Arabia already attested in office under Valerian and Gallienus (c. a.d. 253–259; PIR ² A 150). He is now attested as M. Aelius Aurelius Theon Serenus and described as co(n)s(ul) d(esignatus), sacerdos and sodalis Hadrianalis.Footnote ³³⁹ The fasti of the governors of Pannonia Superior in the sole reign of Gallienus have received some refinement. The reading of the names and titles of this emperor in the erasure on a well-known inscription from Aquincum (CIL III 3418 = ILS 3654) means that the period of office of the senatorial governor M. Aurelius Valentinianus (PIR ² A 1623) can now be placed with some certainty c. a.d. 260–262, rather than vaguely before 283.Footnote ³⁴⁰ This legatus Augusti of Pannonia Superior should probably now be distinguished from the senatorial homonym that governed Hispania Citerior under Carus, who is most likely his son (cf. PLRE 1, Valentinianus 6). Probably roughly contemporary is the dedication at Nola in Campania by the Cretans to a certain L. Publil[ius -] f. Felix Iustus, a former proconsul of Crete and Cyrene and now (suffect) consul, as their patronus and examinator iustissimus.Footnote ³⁴¹ Other details of his career provided by the fragmentary marble plaque are that he had been governor of Sicily and curator of Siena. Iustus was presumably a native or at least resident of Nola and related to an earlier third-century Publilius Iustus clarissimus puer commemorated as a patronus in Numidia (CIL VIII 4233; PIR ² P 1052).

The obscure period between Gallienus and Diocletian, which saw the general replacement of senatorial legati by governors of equestrian status, has received some further illumination. A previously unknown equestrian governor of Lusitania is revealed by the publication of an inscription on the base of a votive from Mérida.Footnote ³⁴² This records that a certain Iulius Maximinus, vir perfectissimus, procurator of a single Augustus and agens vice praesidis, made an ex voto dedication to Deus Mars Augustus, at a date that is probably to be put in the period a.d. 262–282. Already known from report, the full text of a (lost) Latin statue base in honour of the emperor Claudius II (a.d. 268–270) has been published.Footnote ³⁴³ The dedication is made by the otherwise unattested Salvius Theodorus vir egregius praeses provinciae Phoenices. A reminder that it would be misleading to imagine a huge social divide between this class of new governors and the established senatorial order comes in the form of a dedicatory plaque from a rural sanctuary of Saturn in the territory of Nicives in Numidia.Footnote ³⁴⁴ The inscription explicitly identifies the proprietors of the landed estate as an Aurelius Marcellinusvir perfectissimusanddux ducum victoriarum, his daughter Marcella clarissima puella, and his mother Egyptilla clarissima femina. The governor of Palestine in a.d. 303, Aelius Flavianus (PLRE 1, Flavianus 1), who is remembered as a persecutor of Christians by Eusebius of Caesarea (Mart. Pal. pr. 1), is now attested epigraphically at the fort of Udruh (ancient Adroa or Odroa) near Petra, in which city he was already recorded (AE (1999), 1702). The new Latin building-inscription records his joint responsibility with the dux for the restoration of the headquarters of the legio VI Ferrata. Rather surprisingly, perhaps, he is revealed to have been a vir clarissimus (i.e. senatorial) praeses provinciae.Footnote ³⁴⁵ A new Latin dedication from Cos, originally made to the Caesars Crispus, Licinius and Constantinus, attests a previously unknown equestrian praeses Insularum, Valerius Silvinus, vir perfectissimus, whose tenure of office can therefore be placed in the period a.d. 317–324, when he will have occupied a position on the uneasy front line with Constantine.Footnote ³⁴⁶ A. Parma offers revised readings and a detailed commentary on a tabula patronatus recently unearthed from what was presumably the site of a rural villa in the territory of Larinum (AE (2004), 443). This records a decree of neighbouring Luceria, dated 23 or 24 May a.d. 327, offering patronage to an otherwise unknown [- - -] Actus clarissimus ac consularis vir.Footnote ³⁴⁷

Two recent syntheses with a later Roman focus draw heavily on epigraphic evidence for some of their sections. A study of the perception of public monuments in late antique Rome examines the attitudes and activities of the imperial authorities and also members of the senatorial aristocracy, raising the question of the extent to which the centre of Rome had effectively become a heritage theme park.Footnote ³⁴⁸ The epigraphic evidence for the moving and re-erection of statues and for the restoration and re-dedication of buildings (activity that is concentrated in the later fourth and earlier fifth century) is central to this study. With a focus on the empire of Constantinople, D. Slootjes has produced an analysis of the rhetoric of communication between provincial subjects and the governors placed over them.Footnote ³⁴⁹ Her chronological arc is the period from Diocletian to Justinian and her geographical focus is on the provinces that were to form the praetorian prefecture of Oriens in the later fourth century. The erection of honorific inscriptions and statues forms an important part of this and one entire chapter is devoted to case-studies of five statues and associated dedicatory inscriptions from Ephesos and Aphrodisias, with texts and English translations. The virtues hoped for in a governor that are repeatedly evoked are justice, accessibility, fearlessness, moderation, wisdom, and incorruptibility. A new specific example of praise for a governor comes from Elis in the Peloponnese. A statue base, found in situ with remains of a marble statue, honours a proconsul of Achaea, Flavius Severus, as benefactor of the Hellenes and specifically benefactor of the Eleans.Footnote ³⁵⁰ The palaeography suggests a late fourth-century date; the governor is otherwise unknown, unless he may be identified with the proconsul Severus Aëtius, known from an Athenian inscription (IG II² 5205 = II/III² 13292), datable to a.d. 395/401.Footnote ³⁵¹ If so, Severus' benefactions might have been in the form of aid to the region in the wake of the depredations of Alaric's Goths. A notable feature is that the statue was erected by a principalis of the city council on the basis of a vote of the people, testimony to the continued vitality of the organs of the polis at this date.

Returning to the Latin West, the specific terms of praise used of another Aëtius, the famous magister militum of the reign of Valentinian III (PLRE 2, Aetius 7), have attracted the attention of R. Delmaire.Footnote ³⁵² A now acephalous dedication (CIL VI 41389) by the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III, from the base for a bronze (or gilded) statue erected in the Atrium Libertatis at Rome for the general, celebrates the general's military exploits, such as the suppression of the Burgundians and Goths. However, towards the end, Aëtius is also described as delatorum … inimicissimus, vindex libertatis, and pudoris ultor, rôles that do not appear to be particularly military in character. As a result, it is argued that this is testimony for hitherto unsuspected activity on Aëtius' behalf of sponsorship of legislation in the period a.d. 437/45, to which the inscription may be dated. Also in Rome, excavations of a Hadrianic hall just off the Piazza Venezia in preparation for the new Linea C of the city's metro have revealed an inscription that commemorates the building's restoration by Fabius Felix Passifilus Paulinus (PLRE 2, Paulinus 13), a praefectus urbi of the mid-fifth century, studiis suis (‘through his zealousness’), a phrase unparalleled in the epigraphic record.Footnote ³⁵³ This is not the only new evidence of public works by urban prefects of the period. Excavations in the piazza in front of the Pantheon in 1997 threw up sixty or so fragments of an architrave inscribed with two lines of text. Painstaking reconstruction has pieced together an inscription commemorating the repair and equipping of an edifice described as the [stabul]um (or [catabul]um) vehiculorum by Rufius Valerius Messala praefectus urbi (PLRE 2, Messala 4).Footnote ³⁵⁴ Messala was already known to have been urban prefect at some time in the fifth century from an inscription recording his re-erection in public of a statue of Victory (CIL VI 1775 = 41422) in the Vicus Patricius, which ran north between the Mons Cispius and the Viminal to the Porta Viminalis. The newly discovered dedication of the building activity in the environs of the Pantheon to a Valentinianus Augustus helps to narrow down Messala's period of office to the reign of Valentinian III (a.d. 425–455). The unusual nature of the dedication to Valentinian as sole Augustus may, in fact, help to pinpoint an even narrower chronological window: a.d. 450-1, when Valentinian refrained from acknowledging his newly elevated eastern colleague, Marcian. The new inscription is also incidentally interesting evidence for the maintenance of the infrastructure of state transport at this date. A previously unsuspected link between this prefect and a member of the eastern aristocracy, who reached the pinnacle of his career a decade or so later, has also been revealed thanks to the inscription on an enigmatic object that has surfaced on the antiquities market. Punched onto the outside of this bronze tube of unknown provenance are what would appear to be the full names of the eastern consul of a.d. 463, previously known only as Flavius Vivianus (PLRE 2, Vivianus 2).Footnote ³⁵⁵ In full he is named as Fl. Antoninus Messala Vivianus vir inlustris, praefectus praetorio et patricius et consul ordinarius. The evidence of laws preserved in the Justinianic Code indicates that he was praetorian prefect of Oriens in a.d. 459–460 and so based at Constantinople. The bronze artefact is plausibly identified as the base of a candelabrum, like those illustrated in the insignia of the praetorian prefect in the Notitia Dignitatum. This inscription is also the first evidence that Vivianus enjoyed the personal honour of patricius. The epigraphic record of Vivianus' counterparts in the next generation in the West, the public officials and members of high society at Rome during Odoacer's reign in Italy, is the subject of a survey and assessment by S. Orlandi.Footnote ³⁵⁶

G. Deligiannakis has drawn attention to neglected evidence for a governor of the province of the Islands in the sixth century.Footnote ³⁵⁷ A stray block found reused on the site of the temple of Aphrodite in the town of Rhodes is inscribed with a short text commemorating the restoration of some unspecified edifice by a certain Procopius περίβλεπτος ὑπατικός (i.e. vir spectabilis, consularis). Although the known governors of the Islands from the tetrarchic period through to the early sixth century are simple praesides (and pierres errantes are not unknown in the Aegean), since Rhodes was the metropolis of the province, the simplest explanation is that Procopius was indeed a governor of the Islands but with an enhanced status. His rank may be a personal honour or the result of a revision in the status of the position following the major overhaul of the provincial administration by Justinian in a.d. 536. The palaeography of the text is certainly consistent with a mid- to late sixth-century date.

II.iv Military Inscriptions

M. P. Speidel's revised text of the emperor Hadrian's addresses to the African army has already been discussed above (under Emperors). A significant new assemblage of epigraphic data relating to the Roman military is that undertaken by M. Traverso, who has produced a catalogue of over 400 men who divided their public careers between Italian municipalities and service in the army at various grades from ordinary soldier to equestrian officer.Footnote ³⁵⁸ The prosopography, which covers the first three centuries of the imperial period, is divided according to the Augustan regions of Italy. Accordingly it is possible to perceive distinct regional variations. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Latium and Campania provide the greatest number of individuals. Equites undertaking one or more of the tres militiae predominate in most regions. It is only in Aemilia and Liguria that the picture is reversed and career soldiers account for the majority. Several of the contributors to the volume celebrating the work of H.-G. Pflaum offer reassessments of the information about the Roman army to be gleaned from inscriptions recording the careers of equestrian officials or Pflaum's interpretation of them.Footnote ³⁵⁹ The twenty-nine papers of the fourth Lyons congress on the Roman army focus on the army and religion in the early Empire.Footnote ³⁶⁰ The interpretation of epigraphic evidence is key for the many regional studies among them, documenting, for instance, the range of Graeco-Roman and oriental divinities honoured by soldiers, the impact on local cults, and the question of Christianity in the army. Further light has been shed on the lives of the auxiliary soldiers based in the north of the British province towards the end of the first century a.d. by the publication of writing-tablets excavated at the fort of Vindolanda between 2001 and 2003.Footnote ³⁶¹ Amongst the documents are further examples of types already known from the Vindolanda tablets: a strength report, several letters, lists of various kinds, and bits of Vergil. These last and the other fragments of Vergil's Georgics and Aeneid known from the tablets have been the subject of a detailed study by M. C. Scappaticcio.Footnote ³⁶² Of the unpublished contributions in the collected works of S. Panciera, ten or so deal with the epigraphic record of soldiers and military units, mostly in Rome and Italy. Topics covered include the Ligerici (nautae), equites singulares Augusti, the exclusion of citizens from and inclusion of slaves in the Italian fleets, the centurionate and promotion, and the castra peregrina.Footnote ³⁶³ The second chapter of a monograph on the legio VII Gemina, based at León in north-western Spain, focuses on the men of the legion, culminating in a handy tabulation of the (overwhelmingly epigraphic) data.Footnote ³⁶⁴

Moving from the collective to the individual, the famous cenotaph (CIL XIII 8648) for M. Caelius T.f of Bologna, the centurion of legio XVIII who fell in the bellum Varianum, has been the subject of a remarkable team effort to mark the two-thousandth anniversary of the disaster in the Teutoberg Forest.Footnote ³⁶⁵ Besides its obvious historical significance, this stone, discovered in 1620 at Xanten and now housed in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, is a very fine example of a rectangular funerary monument. Caelius is depicted in military uniform, with decorations (phalerae, armillae, and corona civica) and centurion's rod (vitis), while the flanks of the stone bear images of his slaves, Privatus and Thiaminus. This precisely datable stone also happens to be the earliest securely dated tombstone from Roman Germany. This nearly 200-page book presents an extreme example of what can be achieved by way of detailed commentary. In thirty short chapters twenty-four separate scholars study every conceivable aspect (iconographic, historical, demographic, and linguistic) of this monument and its five-line inscription. Another aesthetically impressive piece from just over a century later is the funerary altar of T. Flavius T.f. Lucilius, an imperial horseguard (eques singularis) from Salona in Dalmatia (= AE (2006), 1013). This has also been the subject of a lengthy commentary.Footnote ³⁶⁶ The significance in this case is that the text provides the fullest known account of a career for one of these soldiers. Lucilius, whose origo is given as the camp (castris), started as a vexillarius of the equites singulares and finished up as a centurion of the cohors VIII voluntariorum, being honourably discharged, receiving the rewards for his service from the emperor Hadrian.

A legionary helmet from the environs of Sexaginta Prista in Moesia Inferior reveals details of its ownership history by the inscriptions punched on its neck-guard: A. (centuriae) Valeri Crispi l(egionis) V M(acedonicae) | P. Vibius; and B. (centuriae) Valeri Crispi | P. Sabini | Marri.Footnote ³⁶⁷ On the basis of its design, the helmet (the first of the Wiesnau type so far found in Bulgaria) can be dated to the first century a.d. It is interesting that the two owners both served, presumably in succession, in the century of Valerius Crispus and that the helmet shows signs of repair and a further botched attempt to punch the second inscription. From a.d. 6 onwards, legio V Macedonica had its headquarters at Oescus, except for service in the East between a.d. 62 and 71 and several periods in Dacia under Domitian (a.d. 85–88) and Trajan (a.d. 101–102, 105–106), after which it was transferred to Troesmis in Rumania, so the wearing of this helmet by P. Vibius and P. Sabin(i)us Marrus is probably to be dated in the period a.d. 71–107. Both men are plausibly identified as Italian in origin: Vibius because of his lack of cognomen (for which reason he is also considered the earlier), Sabin(i)us because of the rare Italian cognomen, Marrus. Contemporary with these men is the building of the road between Caesarea and Melitene in Cappadocia. Here, a review of the readings of the milestones has revealed governors known to have been in office under Titus and Nerva, overturning the previous orthodoxy that the road was not built until c. a.d. 198 under Septimius Severus.Footnote ³⁶⁸ À propos of the subset of stones collected in the early nineteenth century by Cardinal Antonio Despuig y Dameto for his mansion on Mallorca, A. Soler and M. J. Pena establish a partially illustrated catalogue, with full texts, of the fifty or so epitaphs of marines of the Misenum fleet recovered from various cemeteries in the environs of Rome.Footnote ³⁶⁹ In the proceedings of a conference on administrative structures and practices, the epigraphic evidence for the staffing of guardposts (stationes) by military and fiscal personnel during the Principate is surveyed and quoted in extenso by J. Nelis-Clément.Footnote ³⁷⁰

Of course the bulk of new information on military matters (recruitment, command, deployment) derives from the bronze diplomas. The latest instalment of the corpus by P. A. Holder, discussed above (under Corpora), permits the study of trends over time by bringing the diplomas together in a single chronological sequence. Extracting the novel and significant information from these very formulaic texts gathered en masse can seem a somewhat daunting task; but alongside the publication of new examples, there have been a number of more reflective studies. The current editor of RMD has compiled an overview of auxiliary unit deployment in the reign of Trajan.Footnote ³⁷¹ The chapter on recruits and veterans in the Blackwell Companion to the Roman Army offers a general synthesis, but the volume sorely lacks a systematic description of diplomas.Footnote ³⁷² Interim syntheses and indices of the new finds for Moesia, Cappadocia, Syria, and Judaea are of some aid in approaching this material, but they are all too quickly superseded by new finds.Footnote ³⁷³ D. Dana has offered useful analyses of, and corrections to, the diplomas attesting soldiers of Dacian origin.Footnote ³⁷⁴ W. Eck has offered a detailed list of corrections and up-dates to B. Pferdehirt's important recent catalogue of the diplomas in the Römisch-Germanisch Zentralmuseum at Mainz (AE (2004), 87).Footnote ³⁷⁵ Similarly, the first part of a study of soldiers in the Roman forces of Thracian origin, devoted to the auxilia, is essentially a synthesis of the data taken from the diplomas.Footnote ³⁷⁶

The fifteen papers of a conference held in Bern in 2004 now, taken together, provide the best broad synthesis of the various strands of research into military diplomas, updating, and to some extent superseding, Heer und Integrationspolitik (1986).Footnote ³⁷⁷ R. Frei-Stolba revisits her analysis of the change in operation of the system of witnessing between a first phase (a.d. 65–71), when the witnesses travelled to Rome from the region of the beneficiary, and subsequently, when witnessing was confined to an increasingly small pool of persons resident, at least semi-permanently, in Rome.Footnote ³⁷⁸ W. Eck focuses on changes in the wording of the grants, observing various impacts of Antoninus Pius' enthusiasm for traditional military discipline:Footnote ³⁷⁹ the exclusion from a.d. 140 of children and descendants born during service from grant of citizenship, and the inclusion of children of decuriones and centurions born before their fathers entered service only in those cases which the praeses provinciae approved; similarly, restriction between a.d. 152 and 158 of the grant only to those children of marines born from unions approved by the praefectus classis; re-establishment in a.d. 153 of the engraving of the internal text to its previously high standard; and, from a.d. 151 (until 192), explicit precision regarding the status of the commander (legatus, procurator, praefectus). Eck has published two other general essays during the five-year period surveyed here on the import of military diplomas: one considering the function and significance of the lost originals (which the surviving individualized diplomas excerpt) as inscriptions of the city of Rome, and the other reflecting more broadly on aspects of law and changing imperial policy.Footnote ³⁸⁰ Returning to the Bern conference proceedings, P. Weiss explores the phenomena of occasional differences in the dates of the internal and external texts, of blanks, and additions in a second hand, to be explained by the partial prefabrication of diplomas.Footnote ³⁸¹ H. Lieb draws attention to the fact that, while an indication of length of service is a standard part of the formula for auxiliaries, marines, and equites singulares, it is lacking, not only in special grants, but also for soldiers of the praetorian and urban cohorts.Footnote ³⁸²

Given that the vast majority of new diplomas have no secure provenance, a chronological review seems the best way to survey significant new information. Starting with the Flavian period, W. Eck and A. Pangerl have published a diploma issued by Vespasian to the trierarchs and rowers in the fleet in Moesia some time between April and June of a.d. 73.Footnote ³⁸³ This is the earliest known grant by Vespasian to a provincial fleet and probably marks twenty-six years service since the formation of the Danube fleet in a.d. 46. The same pair have published a diploma from a grant to the army in Moesia, dated 7 February 78, that provides the name of a previously unknown prefect of the cohors VIII Gallorum, Ti. Claudius Ti.f. Quir. [- - -].Footnote ³⁸⁴ A diploma issued by Domitian on 13 May 86 is interesting in a number of respects.Footnote ³⁸⁵ As well as naming the future praetorian prefect, Flavius Norbanus, as governor of Raetia, it reveals a new prefect of the ala Thracum veterana, Ti. Claudius Agricola. It also adds his unit, along with the cohors II Gallorum, to the known garrison of Raetia (both units being found later, in the wake of the Dacian wars, in Pannonia Superior and Moesia Inferior respectively). Most significantly it specifies a previously unknown location for posting the full constitution in Rome (in Capitolio in tribunali Iovis Parati parte posteriore). As it happens, this grant to the troops in Raetia is only one of a series now known to have been made on 13 May of this year. In addition to a previously known grant to the troops of the province of Judaea on this day, W. Eck has published a new (unprovenanced) military diploma that attests a further constitution of the very same day in favour of a different group of auxiliary troops in Judaea.Footnote ³⁸⁶ Among the units mentioned is one, the ala Vocontiorum, that was not previously known to have served in Judaea. It is attested by papyrological evidence in Egypt under Nero and also by several diplomas of the period a.d. 98/105. It was most likely transferred to Judaea during the campaigns of a.d. 66–70 and remained there for some time, perhaps returning not long after the issuing of this diploma, since it is missing from diplomas issued to the army in Judaea in a.d. 87 and 90. The recipient himself is from one of the previously attested units, the cohors I milliaria sagittariorum, under the command of an otherwise unknown equestrian prefect, L. Pedusius Herennianus, and is named in a Latinized version of a Nabataean name as Honaenus son of Zabdi, from Philadelphia (Amman). When Honaenus had been recruited (a.d. 61) the Decapolis, including Philadelphia, was part of the province of Syria, which makes it likely that this cohort formed part of the army of Syria before being transferred to Judaea in the period a.d. 66–70. If this cohort had been milliary since its creation, then this is also one of the earliest attestations for the formation. The editor provides a table of all eighteen known diplomas for the army in Judaea, spanning a century from a.d. 86 to 186, nearly a third (five) of which belong to the two years 86 and 87. Notably, the set of seven witnesses on the new diploma is completely different from that of the two diplomas of the other constitution of the same day. They were clearly separate enterprises, but the rationale is not obvious. It would not have been impossible to include all ten units covered by the two constitutions in one grant and the division has not been done by grouping alae and cohorts together — the first has two alae and four cohorts, the second, one ala and three cohorts. The grants to the Judaean troops from 13 May 86 also share a peculiarity with a further constitution, of between 6 and 11 June 87, now attested by two diplomas:Footnote ³⁸⁷ that is they are issued specifically to those men who have served precisely quina et vicena stipendia and not twenty-five or more (quina et vicena stipendia aut plura), as is the case in the group of diplomas issued to the army in Syria between a.d. 88 and 91. From a couple of years later comes a newly attested grant of a.d. 93 (possibly 10 August) to the army in Britain, which reveals a previously unknown prefect of the British fleet, [- - -]ius Pius.Footnote ³⁸⁸

Moving into the post-Flavian period, a diploma issued by Nerva to the army of Dalmatia in May/June a.d. 97 is only the second known grant for the army in Dalmatia.Footnote ³⁸⁹ The Norican beneficiary, Dasio son of Calvus, served in the cohors I Alpinorum, whose prefect M. Vestinus Quadratus is otherwise unknown. The attachment of this unit to Dalmatia must have been short-lived, since it is attested in Pannonia in a.d. 80–85 and again in a.d. 102, after which it was transferred to Britain. A diploma issued under Trajan to the army in Moesia Inferior on 14 August a.d. 99 belonged to a Thracian cavalryman in the ala I Flavia Gaetulorum, whose prefect's name is now revealed in full as Q. Planius Sardus C.f. Pup. Truttedius Pius (cf. RMD V 337).Footnote ³⁹⁰ A further example of a grant by Trajan to the army in Moesia Superior on 8 May a.d. 100 names a new prefect of cohors I Flavia Bessorum, C. Prifernius Licinianus; given the title of his unit, the recipient also has a suitably Thracian name, Aulusenis.Footnote ³⁹¹ From 16 May of the following year comes another diploma attesting a grant to the army in Moesia Superior.Footnote ³⁹² This reveals a new prefect of ala II Pannoniorum, C. Iulius Paullus. A tangible sign of cultural assimilation is that, while the recipient has the very Thracian name, Ciagitsa son of Sita, his three sons have the banal Latin names Valens, Valerius, and Sabinus. The next year, a.d. 102, saw a special grant by Trajan restricted to the higher ranks (decuriones and optiones) of just one ala, possibly the ala praetoria, stationed in Moesia Superior, to whom he gave Roman citizenship before the due period of service because they had performed pie et fideliter on the expeditio Dacica.Footnote ³⁹³ The commander, whose name is partially preserved, is probably to be identified as Ti. Claudius Ilus (Devijver, PME I, C. p. 254), otherwise known from an unduly impugned inscription (CIL X 270* = 432*). A more standard diploma is that issued in September/December a.d. 107 to the army of Lower Moesia. The latest copy was received by a Thracian cavalryman in the ala Gallorum Flaviana; only part of the name of his previously unattested commander survives: M. Arruntius [- - -]s.Footnote ³⁹⁴ The next notable new find dates to some point in the next five to seven years (a.d. 112–114).Footnote ³⁹⁵ This is a grant by Trajan, again to the army in Moesia Superior, including the marines of the Danube fleet (classici), under a previously unattested prefect, [- - -]lius Importunus. A grant of January/March a.d. 116 to the troops in the neighbouring province of Lower Moesia provides the first attestation in the garrison of that province of the cohors II Flavia Numidarum, which is later attested in Dacia.Footnote ³⁹⁶ A further copy provides most of the name of the prefect of the cohors II Flavia Bessorum, D. Iunius D.f. [- - -], possibly to be identified with the [Iu]nius Iuvenalis, the dedicator of an altar to Ceres near Aquinum (CIL X 5382 = ILS 2926) and as a relative of the poet of the same name (Devijver, PME I and Suppl. II, D 146).Footnote ³⁹⁷

Amongst the new diplomas from the reign of Hadrian comes the first known example of a grant for the army in Thrace.Footnote ³⁹⁸ From a.d. 121 comes an example of a ‘retarded’ constitution; that is one in which the imperial titles betray a demonstrably earlier date for issue than for posting up.Footnote ³⁹⁹ This was a special grant made by Hadrian some time before 9 December a.d. 120 but not posted till 5 May of the following year. This constitution gave Roman citizenship not only to the cavalrymen of the ala Ulpia contariorum milliaria before they had completed their normal term of service, but also gave it to their parents, brothers, and sisters (cum parentibus et fratribus et sororibus). From the end of the same decade comes a diploma from a grant of Hadrian to the troops and fleet in Moesia Inferior of 20 August a.d. 127 that provides the name of a new prefect A. Gellius Celer.Footnote ⁴⁰⁰ The form of the name of the recipient, C. Valerius [-] f. Marcellus, a Pannonian, suggests that he was a citizen before recruitment (although there is the possibility that he was a Latin). A fragmentary diploma, issued in July, August, or September of a.d. 128, to an auxiliary of the cohors I Ulpia Brittonum torquata, stationed in Dacia Porolissensis, reveals the unit's commander as one Antonius Caru[s], previously unknown.Footnote ⁴⁰¹ Looking further east, a complete example of the grant made by Hadrian on 22 March a.d. 129 to the army in Syria permits the completion or revision of five other examples.Footnote ⁴⁰² This new copy was issued to a veteran of the cohors I Ulpia Dacorum, M. Ulpius Damusi f. Canuleius, whose nomenclature suggests that he had already received the citizenship during his service (presumably from Trajan before a.d. 117). The prefect of the cohort, Ti. Claudius Ti.f. Quir. Maximinus of Naples, is also new. Amongst new military diplomas for the army of Britain is one of a.d. 130, the first diploma to attest Sex. Iulius Severus (PIR ² I 576), while legate of Britain.Footnote ⁴⁰³ Another diploma of Hadrian, issued in a.d. 132 to one Longinus, probably from Montana in Moesia Inferior, a soldier of the cohors I Hamiorum sagittariorum in Britain, has proved informative in a variety of ways.Footnote ⁴⁰⁴ It reveals the name of a new prefect of the unit: M. Mussius Concessus. Moreover, at this date the emperor is described as proconsul, meaning that he was still in the provinces and had not yet returned to Italy, where he is attested by 8 April a.d. 133. That Hadrian had not yet returned means that there is now a strong possibility that he did visit Judaea in late a.d. 132 or early 133 and witnessed at first hand the terrible situation there in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Bar Kochba revolt. Hadrian's personal presence is suggested by the epigraphic references to the campaign as expeditio Iudaica, not just bellum Iudaicum, and reinforces the proposal that the triumphal monument later erected at Tel Shalem, far to the north of the main theatre of operations, marked the place where the emperor met with his commanders and decided upon the various emergency measures taken to cope with the crisis (such as the transfer of marines from Italy to Judaea, and the summoning of Iulius Severus from Britain). A fragmentary diploma, issued in the period between 1 July and 30 September a.d. 133, once Hadrian was back in Rome, to a soldier of a cohors I Augusta [Nerviana or Ituraeorum] in one of the Dacian provinces, names its commander as a C. Catel[(l)ius - - -], whose origin is given as [- - -]ucisin(us).Footnote ⁴⁰⁵

A diploma generated by a constitution of Antoninus Pius for the Ravenna fleet, dated 22 August a.d. 139, provides the name of an otherwise unknown prefect, Fabius Sabinus.Footnote ⁴⁰⁶ A very fragmentary diploma to the army in Moesia Superior from around a.d. 140 reveals that the recipient's commander was called [- - -]atus and was a native of Lepcis Magna, which is certainly appropriate for someone with a name of the Donatus/Honoratus type.Footnote ⁴⁰⁷ Two diplomas under Pius attest previously unknown grants to the troops in Moesia Inferior. The earlier, from a.d. 140, was issued to a soldier of the ala I Gallorum Atectorigiana, under the prefect [Hel/Ful]vius Futianus, not otherwise attested; the later one relates to a constitution of c. a.d. 147.Footnote ⁴⁰⁸ A further example of a known grant to the same province, this time of 7 April 145, reveals the end of the name of the prefect of the cohors I Bracarorum civium Romanorum as [- - -]ntidienus.Footnote ⁴⁰⁹ Another retarded issue is a grant of Pius made some time before 9 December a.d. 150 but not posted until 20 January of the following year. This constitution for the army in Moesia Superior reveals a new prefect of the cohors I Lusitanorum, Sex. Geganius Gegula (or Cecula) of Praeneste.Footnote ⁴¹⁰ A further example of a known grant to the army in Lower Moesia, issued on 27 September a.d. 154, names the prefect of the ala I Gallorum Atectorigiana this time as Flavius [- - -].Footnote ⁴¹¹ It has been suggested that the findspot of a diploma issued to a sailor of the classis Flavia Moesiaca on 8 February a.d. 157, the Black Sea port of Olbia, provides the earliest evidence for a Roman military presence there.Footnote ⁴¹² This conclusion is based on the assumption that the diploma belonged to a veteran who settled in the canabae outside the fort in which he had served. The diploma also happens to attest a previously unknown prefect of the fleet by the nicely appropriate name of [- - -] Potamus (‘Mr River’). A further example has now been added to the eight already known of the grant of Antoninus Pius to the army of Moesia Superior, dated 23 April a.d. 157. The number of surviving copies reflects the massive recruitment in a.d. 132 in response to the Judaean emergency. This particular copy helps to resolve a question surrounding the cohors I Montanorum, which was sent east by Trajan and which is still attested in Syria Palaestina in a.d. 160. This diploma demonstrates that a part of the unit was returned, thus creating two homonymous units in different provinces.Footnote ⁴¹³ A further example reveals the name of a new prefect of the cohors II Gallorum Macedonica, L. Laberius [- - -].Footnote ⁴¹⁴ Two new diplomas attesting constitutions of Antoninus Pius to the army in Syria Palaestina from the spring of the next year, a.d. 158, help to pinpoint the governorship of the legate C. Iulius Severus (PIR ² I 574), reveal the name of the then prefect of the ala VII Phrygum, Roscius Capitolinus, and allow the drawing up of revised fasti for the province under Pius.Footnote ⁴¹⁵ Further testament to the severity of the losses suffered by the Romans during the Bar Kochba revolt is a group of five diplomas all emanating from the same grant to the soldiers of the classis Misenensis, issued on 7 February a.d. 160 to recipients of Thracian origin. This cluster suggests that there had been a forced levy in Thrace in a.d. 133–134 to replace the then marines of the Misenum fleet who had been transferred to the legions fighting in Judaea.Footnote ⁴¹⁶ A new grant by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus for the troops of Pannonia Inferior, dated 23 August a.d. 162, reveals an otherwise unknown prefect of the cohors II Augusta Thracum, Furius Hilarianus.Footnote ⁴¹⁷ The recipient, of the tribe of the Eravisci near Aquincum in Pannonia, has an interesting Celtic cognomen, Iulius Casio, forming a genitive Casiunis. Although information provided by a monumental inscription rather than a military diploma, mention should be made here of the previously unknown prefect of the cohors II Brittonum, [C]elsianus Antio[chianus?], responsible for the construction of a bath at Sexaginta Prista in Lower Moesia in the later 180s.Footnote ⁴¹⁸

Some of the most striking new insights into the bureaucratic and working practices of the Roman army have come not from the conventional diplomas associated with the honourable discharge (honesta missio) of auxiliaries but from the growing body of bronze certificates recording discharge on grounds of ill-health (missio causaria) for troops of various types. The best preserved example, issued for a member of the corps of vigiles, was published in the previous quinquennium by B. Pferdehirt (RGZM 75 = AE (2003), 2040) and has attracted considerable further comment. This certificate takes the form of a letter written by the emperors Philip senior and junior, datable to a.d. 248, to Aelius Aemilianus prefect of the vigiles, asking him to release one M. Aurelius M.f. Mucianus of Moesia Inferior from his oath propter adversam corporis valetudinem. The text then goes on to describe Mucianus' service record since enrolment in a.d. 239 under the praefectus Celsus, including precise details of four periods spent away from Rome, as well as the date (1 March 243) on which he was entered into the register of those in receipt of the frumentum publicum (the corn dole at Rome). S. Demougin and X. Loriot have correlated Mucianus' secondments (Ostia, the East, Sardinia, Pisa and Luni) with political and military events.Footnote ⁴¹⁹ F. von Saldern suggests that, rather than reflecting a tour de force of record-keeping by the imperial authorities, this information derives from self-declaration, and was supplied by Mucianus himself in his petition to the emperor (or perhaps on his behalf, if his petition was supported by the suffragium of one of his superiors).Footnote ⁴²⁰ From an earlier period, a further, newly published, example of a discharge for a causarius of the legio II Adiutrix, granted by Vespasian on 7 March a.d. 70, gives the fullest known version of the place of posting for this constitution, showing that the names of the causarii were listed before those of the emeriti: recognitum ex tabula aenea quae fixa est Romae in Capitolio ante emeritorum (sc. tabulas or nomina) ante aram gentis Iuliae intrinsecus podium lateris dexterioris contra signum Liberi patris, tabula II. Footnote ⁴²¹ Also newly published is the partially preserved second tablet from a diploma of missio causaria for a legionary from a.d. 240.Footnote ⁴²² As with Mucianus' certificate from a few years later, this provides a fascinating glimpse of the recipient's service record. It declares that M. Aurelius Aulusanus was recruited (dilectarius fuit) from the city of Plotinopolis in Thrace and enrolled in the legio XXII Primigenia Pia Fidelis by Divus Antoninus Magnus (Caracalla) on 28 February a.d. 215, when the legion would have been passing through on its way to Syria for a projected eastern campaign. His names (M. Aurelius) suggest that he may then have been a recent beneficiary of the Constitutio Antoniniana. By a.d. 240 he had been rewarded as a miles duplarius and was presumably stationed back at the legion's normal base at Moguntiacum (Mainz) in Upper Germany when released by the legate. In the 230s Aulusanus will presumably have been involved in the German campaign of Severus Alexander and may have witnessed at close quarters the coup at Moguntiacum in a.d. 235, when the troops successfully replaced the emperor with the equestrian officer Maximinus, a fellow Thracian. The witnesses recorded on the exterior of the diploma are all veterans with Thracian names, perhaps a group of Aulusanus' compatriots released at the same time and eager to return home.

Returning to monumental texts, an inscribed marble base of the late second or early third century, recently retrieved from the archaeological excavations at Apulum in Dacia, records the building of a tetrastylon (i.e. an aedicule with four columns) and the setting up of a silver image of an eagle by a former centurio trecenarius, now primus pilus, of the legio XIII Gemina.Footnote ⁴²³ It is noteworthy that the dedicator, L. Aninius L.f. Pap. Firminus, from Tridentum in the Italian Alps advertises his membership of the equestrian order (equo publico). New evidence for activity at the fort of Sostra, or Siosta, in Moesia Inferior (modern Lomets in Bulgaria) is provided by the discovery of a statue base to the emperor Gallienus, along with fragments of the bronze statue itself.Footnote ⁴²⁴ This reused base was dedicated by a governor, C. Iulius Victor, previously attested by a milestone from the territory of Tomi (AE (1993), 1376), erected some time under Valerian and Gallienus (a.d. 253/60), simply as praeses. The new text reveals this generic term to have been masking a traditional senatorial legatus Augusti; it was presumably carved in association with renovation work at this location in the hinterland of the western end of the province.

Also relating to activity in the lower Danube region is the epitaph of Aurelius Gaius, Christian soldier of the tetrarchic period. This has been the subject of two detailed reinterpretations, one examining the world view encapsulated in the list of postings, the other revising his career and its chronology.Footnote ⁴²⁵ S. Lebreton analyses how the geographic terminology employed in Gaius' epitaph represents the perspective of a native of Asia Minor.Footnote ⁴²⁶ M. Colombo argues that Gaius' career can be broken down into three main phases coincident with known imperial movements and campaigns and that the sequence of his positions should be: (i) tiro, discens equitum, eques and lanciarius of the legio I Italica (based at Viminacium), then promoted to optio in the same legion, during which period he campaigned with Diocletian on the Danube (a.d. 285), in the East against the Persians (a.d. 286–7), in Germany (a.d. 288), returning to the Danube (a.d. 289/90), back to the East against the Saracens (a.d. 290), before campaigning in Egypt under Galerius (a.d. 294), and again on the Danube against the Goths (a.d. 295/6); (ii) promotion to princeps optio and transferred to VIII Augusta in the comitatus of Maximian, travelling from northern Italy, through Gaul and Spain to Mauretania (a.d. 296–8); (iii) finally transferred to the I Iovia Scythica and based on the lower Danube for campaigns against the Sarmatians, Carpi and Goths (a.d. 298/9–304). A corollary of this reinterpretation — which pushes Gaius' career several years later than its supposed terminus ante quem of the dismissal of Christian soldiers under the Tetrarchy — is the suggestion that there may not have been one moment of purging but that there was either a crescendo of anti-Christian measures that finally forced Gaius out (assuming he did not retire normally) or that the purge was less than universally effective.

Two previously unknown senior military officers of the tetrachic period appear alongside the provincial governor on the inscription commemorating the rebuilding of the kastra of the legio VI Ferrata Fidelis Constans at Udruh near Petra under Diocletian and the Tetrarchs around a.d. 302/3.Footnote ⁴²⁷ This work was carried out at the command of Aurelius Heraclidas vir perfectissimus and dux, under the immediate supervision of Aurelius Mucianus, prefect of the legion. This dedication helps to fill in a blank in the history of the legion, which was known to have moved at some stage from its former base at Caparcotna.

Another significant find relating to the army of the early fourth century comes in the form of the discovery in Bulgaria of a second bronze bearing another, almost complete, copy of the imperial letter to the Illyrian soldiers known from the tablet found at Szőny in Hungary, ancient Brigetio in Pannonia (AE (1937), 232 = FIRA I² 93).Footnote ⁴²⁸ As attested by the date surviving on the Brigetio tablet, the letter was issued by the emperor Licinius from Serdica (Sofia) on 10 June a.d. 311, only a month or so after the death of his senior colleague Galerius. It confers various privileges on both serving soldiers and veterans and, given the context, may reflect Licinius' desire to secure the loyalty of the troops under his command along the middle and lower Danube. Although the basic text is fundamentally identical to the Brigetio tablet, which is addressed to one Dalmatius (PLRE 1, Dalmatius 2), this new version is addressed to a certain Tertius, who is otherwise unknown. Since neither copy preserves any full original heading, the offices held by the respective recipients are uncertain but, given the nature of the content, they may be reckoned to be military duces more probably than provincial praesides. As regards the opening of the text, where the Brigetio tablet is deliberately misleading, thanks to a retrospectively inscribed heading that names Constantine and Licinius but omits the emperor Maximinus, the new copy is laconically described as an E(xemplum) S(acrarum) L(itterarum). Where the two texts differ in details of wording, the new copy appears to be generally more accurate. Within the text itself there is an instruction that it should be published to the milites … Inlyriciani on bronze tablets at the standards in each and every camp (per singula quaeque castra apud signa in tabula aerea), and the Brigetio copy certainly comes from the headquarters of the legio I Adiutrix. Although the provenance of this new copy is unknown, it is held in the Numismatic Museum at Ruse (on the Danube) and is thought to be from Durostorum (Silistra), the headquarters of the legio XI Claudia Pia Fidelis. If not from one of the camps on the lower Danube, another possibility, given its greater accuracy, is that it was carefully incised for display near the emperor's residence in Serdica.

Another new fourth-centurydux, this time of Arabia, is named in an inscription from Sleim in the Hauran on the Bostra–Damascus road. This commemorates the construction undertaken by an Alexander, centurio ordinarius of legio III Cyrenaica, of a fort or refuge (ϕρούριον) for the protection of travellers. This construction had been carried out on the orders of Flavius Victor, vir perfectissimus and dux, and is dated to the year 240 in the era of the province of Arabia (i.e. a.d. 345/6).Footnote ⁴²⁹ In the same general vein, the discovery of a marble fragment that can be joined to the existing text of the Beersheba tax edict has allowed L. Di Segni to put forward a new dating and interpretation of this document.Footnote ⁴³⁰ What survives, she argues, is the appendix to an edict, dated to the sixth century, addressed to the dux Palaestinae, who it seems had his headquarters at Beersheba. This schedule details the various small amounts of tax to be collected and paid to a vicarius (the commander of a unit of limitanei) and servants, who are to staff the xenodochia or burgi used by travellers, most notably by this date, of course, pilgrims visiting the Holy Land.

VI.i Language

First of all, worthy of note is a new four-volume history of Latin syntax, the result of a major international collaborative project.Footnote ⁵⁸² The coverage of the volumes is as follows: 1. syntax of the sentence; 2. adverbial phrases, adverbs, mood, tense; 3. quantification, numerals, possession, anaphora; and 4. complex sentences, grammaticalisation, and typology. Despite the cover of each volume being decorated with epigraphic motifs, as is very clear from the indices, the corpus of texts that informs the various contributions is almost entirely conventional and literary. Nevertheless, together these volumes will form an indispensable point of reference for those considering syntactical matters in Latin documentary texts. In complete contrast, a perhaps rather curious attempt has been made to produce an aid for Latin teaching that draws its material not from the standard canon of Classical authors but from inscriptions and graffiti.Footnote ⁵⁸³ Epigraphic material forms the primary evidentiary basis for the chapters devoted to pre-Classical developments and the ‘sub-élite’ context in the recent Blackwell History of the Latin Language.Footnote ⁵⁸⁴ Another synthesis that draws heavily on epigraphic material is J. N. Adams' study of the regional diversification of the Latin language.Footnote ⁵⁸⁵ He argues that diversification existed from an early period in lexicon, phonology, (and to a lesser extent) morphology and syntax. Epigraphic evidence inevitably provides much of the data for discussion of early Latin and the Italic context but there is also one entire chapter (ch. 10) devoted to surveying the inscriptions of the imperial period. In explanation of the contrasting phenomena of diversity and uniformity, Adams does not favour the contagion or wave theory of diffusion. With regard to uniformity, he prefers to emphasize the phenomena of hierarchical diffusion or ‘parachuting’ of specific features, and with regard to diversification, separate regional koineisations and shrinkage (rather than archaism). An example of the latter that can be seen in the epigraphy relates to the orthography of inscriptions of Gaul. Here the late antique stone-carvers (of the fourth to seventh centuries) are rather haphazard in the writing of vowels but correct in their writing of ‘v’, which suggests that the b/v interchangeability seen elsewhere was slow to take place in Gaul. An example of using the epigraphic record to establish the characteristics of a local, and in this case, late variant of Latin, is represented by a study of the dialect of Belgica Prima on the basis on the palaeochristian epitaphs of Trier.Footnote ⁵⁸⁶

The background to the early development of Latin, which is fundamentally derived from the epigraphic traces of the other Italic and non-Italic languages, has been the subject of a number of significant contributions. Coinciding with the appearance of the latest update to E. Vetter's Handbuch der italischen Dialekten (1953), A. L. Prosdocimi has issued an updated version of his thoughts on the development of Latin and the Italic languages within the Indo-European family.Footnote ⁵⁸⁷ The inscriptions and iconography of the enigmatic north Picene stelae of Novilara have been the subject of a detailed linguistic and cultural study,Footnote ⁵⁸⁸ while the major part of a book on the Vestini in the late republican period is made up of a corpus of forty-four texts with commentary.Footnote ⁵⁸⁹ More approachable for the non-specialist is a brief introduction to the entire family of Sabellic languages of ancient Italy (that is the group known as Oscan) by R. Wallace.Footnote ⁵⁹⁰ This illustrates various grammatical and lexical aspects of each variety by reference to the epigraphic testimony. The treatment of the phoneme ns (as in Latin consul) in the Oscan language inscriptions has been the subject of a specific study by P. Poccetti.Footnote ⁵⁹¹ All future discussions of the Italic languages will, of course, have to take account of the dataset provided by the very recently completed Imagines Italicae.Footnote ⁵⁹² Amongst the observations made by the editors is that the Latin future imperative, which is a distinctive feature of the XII Tables, is paralleled in inscriptions in other Italic languages c. 500 b.c.

A much more comprehensive manual of the Etruscan language and its inscriptions has also been published by Wallace.Footnote ⁵⁹³ The longest chapter, which forms the pedagogical core of the work, comprises a catalogue of eighty-eight inscriptions, each equipped with grammatical commentary and translation, and identified with reference to H. Rix's Etruskische Texte (ET) of 1991 and/or, for texts that have appeared since, to the author's own Etruscan Texts Project Online (ETP).Footnote ⁵⁹⁴ The catalogue is organized thematically into epitaphs, Etrusco-Latin bilinguals, inscriptions recording the building of tombs, on property ownership, prohibitions, votive dedications, and commemorative texts. This is followed by a chapter devoted entirely to the famous tabula Cortonensis, published for the first time only in 2000 and discussed in the last survey. There is still much controversy about the text amongst Etruscologists, and accordingly Wallace adopts a conservative approach, offering a translation but also providing readers with a synthesis of those aspects on which general consensus does exist. Another work that has been updated to take into account the evidence of the Cortona inscription is the first volume of the Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae (ThLE I²), the lexical index, which was first published in 1978.Footnote ⁵⁹⁵ The new edition, consolidating the three subsequent supplements (of 1984, 1991 and 1998) and a reverse index (1985), runs to almost 600 pages and now provides a concordance of all the words found in Etruscan language inscriptions published up to the end of 2006. The coverage also expands on its predecessor by taking in coin legends. Another helpful feature is the list of texts excluded because they are too fragmentary or of doubtful authenticity.

Moving on to Latin of the Classical period, in a study of the use of the demonstrative pronoun hic haec hoc in Latin epigraphy, O. Salomies has noted that, while it is common in funerary contexts (especially in the phrase hoc monumentum), it is quite rare in other contexts, such a building inscriptions.Footnote ⁵⁹⁶ Here its use in relation to the object or action being commemorated seems only to be required when the inscription is not actually carved on the building itself but, for instance, on a tablet to be attached to it or on a mosaic pavement. The phraseology of the Latin building inscriptions of North Africa has been exhaustively examined.Footnote ⁵⁹⁷ The study is based on a corpus of 1,002 texts from the provinces of Africa Proconsularis, Numidia, Mauretania Caesarensis, and Mauretania Tingitana and ranging in date from the first century b.c. down to the capture of Carthage by the Vandals in a.d. 439. The full texts of the inscriptions are helpfully included as an appendix. The inscriptions chosen for inclusion are quite narrowly those associated with public building and repair activity, and the corpus also deliberately excludes metrical and Christian texts. To some extent these omissions do limit the utility of the statistical data. As it is, quantification reveals an unsurprising peak in civic munificence in the second century but an interesting lack of immediate collapse in the third. The fourth and fifth centuries together total about the same as the second or third. The data reveal that temples and arches are most commonly commemorated and that private benefaction (41 per cent) outstrips other forms of funding (e.g., municipal, 33 per cent; military, 8 per cent; and imperial, 7 per cent). Phraseology is also the subject of M. Dondin-Payre's study of the inscriptions of the Gallic provinces in order to discover the terms in which nobility and/or economic prosperity was expressed and the relationship between the two.Footnote ⁵⁹⁸

Turning to the meaning of specific words and to the context of the entourage of a provincial governor, a revised supplement for the job description of the dedicatee of a votive altar to Jupiter Optimus Maximus from Cologne (IKoln ² 785) has been proposed.Footnote ⁵⁹⁹ Previously the position of the author, Genialinius Gemmatus, had been understood as [an]atarius co(n)s(ularis). However, as is clear from the photograph, it is difficult to accommodate more than one letter into the lacuna in the damaged portion at the beginning of the relevant line so F. Daubner has suggested that it be read [r]atarius, which is to be understood as a variant on the attested term ratiarius, that is Gemmatus was the governor's personal boat captain. His function should then be understood as equivalent to a modern-day chauffeur. The altar might then be understood as an expression of relief from the captain at having managed the safe return of his employer from a trip up or down the Rhine. From Italy and from a later period, S. Panciera reassesses the evidence of three statue bases from Terracina (CIL X 6313, AE (1912), 99 and (1986), 125) which all bear the same text, with minor differences of layout: Avianius Vindicianus v(ir) c(larissimus), cons(ularis) Camp(aniae), statuas ad comptum civitatis Tarracinensium constituendas curavit.Footnote ⁶⁰⁰ These certainly attest some serious effort by Vindicianus (PLRE 1, Vindicianus 4; brother of the famous orator Symmachus), during his governorship of the region (c. a.d. 378), to move a number of statues (subjects unspecified) to a new location. In all three cases the editors have habitually corrected comptum to compitum (i.e. ‘crossroads’) and the general interpretation has been that a cycle of imperial statues is referred to. However, drawing on parallels of the same period from elsewhere, rather than emending all three, it seems better to understand ad comptum as an equivalent to the better attested phrases ad ornamentum, ad ornatum, or ad faciem publicam and to imagine the anonymous statues to be those of pagan divinities that are being saved from neglect in closed-down temples and given a new life as civic adornment. A clarification to the epigraphically attested Greek lexicon comes by way of serendipity. R. Ferri noticed in the image of a sample page (fol. 21 recto) of the incompletely published Greek-Latin glossary manuscript of the German humanist Konrad Celtes (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Suppl. gr. 43)Footnote ⁶⁰¹ a gloss for the term ῥωμαιστήϛ, which is known from antiquity only from a few epigraphic instances (two from Delos and once from Philae in Egypt) and one Cretan coin legend.Footnote ⁶⁰² A. Wilhelm had suggested ‘actor of Latin comedies’ and Louis Robert simply ‘mime actor’, and the appearance of the word in the glossary's section on shows seems to confirm this. However, the word is offered as an alternative for ἰσχυροπαίκτης (strongman) and thus likely derives from ῥώμη (strength). So it would seem that we are now deprived of evidence for the performance of typically Roman forms of artistic display in the Greek East in place of a more conventional crowd-pleasing activity.

Analysis of the epigraphic record with regard to the related questions of bilingualism and language within the Roman world has been a continuing theme. The proceedings of a 2004 conference on the subject of Greek-Latin bilingualism and epigraphy treat Greek-Latin bilingualism in the East separately from the equivalent phenomenon in the West, although two papers on bilingualism in the Res Gestae sit rather uncomfortably in the latter half.Footnote ⁶⁰³ The papers range widely both geographically and chronologically, as well as treating bilingualism in both public and private contexts. Only one paper looks beyond the interface of Latin and Greek (to examine trilingualism at Palmyra).Footnote ⁶⁰⁴ The same author has looked more specifically at the interface between Greek and Aramaic throughout the Roman East, concerning himself with Aramaic words and phrases (principally relating to religious life) that are found transcribed in Greek inscriptions and papyri.Footnote ⁶⁰⁵ A fascinating micro-study of bilingualism is represented by the dossier of bilingual (Greek-Latin) graffiti of Hermas and his companions in the Theban mountains in Egypt.Footnote ⁶⁰⁶ The writers do not always behave as their names would suggest. So, while ‘Hermas’ occurs six times in Greek compared with twice in Latin, the graffito of ‘Latina, from Rome’ is written in Greek. Various aspects of cultural and linguistic exchange have been scrutinized in a volume of collected papers that treats the Roman near eastern provinces over the longue durée from the Hellenistic period to the coming of Islam.Footnote ⁶⁰⁷ Many of the papers touch upon language contact as evidenced by the epigraphic evidence relating to various linguistic and ethnic groups, most notably those on the practice of transcription (the writing of texts in the script of another language),Footnote ⁶⁰⁸ the rôle and impact of Latin in Asia Minor and the East,Footnote ⁶⁰⁹ the epigraphic habit of the Jewish diaspora in Syria and Asia Minor,Footnote ⁶¹⁰ Syriac inscriptions in Edessa,Footnote ⁶¹¹ and the fate of the Greek epigraphic tradition in the face of Islam.Footnote ⁶¹² O. Salomies has explored the linguistic factors leading to the reduplication of consonants in Latin names (e.g. Licinius =>  Λικίννιος) in the Greek epigraphic record.Footnote ⁶¹³ Access to the interface between Latin and neo-Punic inscriptions in North Africa is now much more straightforward for non-specialists thanks to the Handbook of Neo-Punic Inscriptions, which complements the earlier volume, Late Punic Epigraphy.Footnote ⁶¹⁴

Inscribed epitaphs and graffiti feature among the twelve case-studies used to illustrate a manual of everyday documents of ‘vulgar Latin’.Footnote ⁶¹⁵ The editions, offering a number of new readings, and each accompanied by line drawings and detailed commentary, are of high quality but the definition of vulgar Latin is surprisingly lacking in nuance. It is used to cover a variety of different forms that deviate from the high literary style of classical Latin in a number of different registers and genres. A surer guide to current thinking on the nature of vulgar Latin and the contribution of the epigraphic evidence to our understanding of it are the published proceedings of the triennial conferences on vulgar and late Latin.Footnote ⁶¹⁶ In the proceedings of the 2003 conference, H. Solin discusses the orthography of personal names found in inscriptions as a guide to the understanding in everyday Latin of the morphology of names taken over from Greek.Footnote ⁶¹⁷ In the 2006 conference, as a foretaste of his work on the forthcoming supplement to CIL IV, he revisited the mural graffiti of Pompeii — famously exploited for V. Väänänen's Le latin vulgaire des inscriptions pompéiennes (1953) — offering several new readings and interpretations. Perhaps most interesting is his proposal for the enigmatic ‘Nica creteissiane’ of CIL IV 2178a, for which he suggests ‘Nica C(h)re(s)te issime’ (‘Long may you live, Chrestus, your very self!’), where the last element is understood as a popular spelling of a superlative of ipse, ipsimus, previously only known as a respectful form of address in Petronius.Footnote ⁶¹⁸ H. Halla-aho has produced a useful analysis of the syntax and structure of ‘non-literary’ Latin letters of the first and second centuries a.d. that is informed by studying the content of private letters surviving in the papyri, ostraca, and wooden tablets.Footnote ⁶¹⁹

VI.ii Literature

Considering first the epigraphy of the Roman world relating to Greek literature, it is worth noting that two scholars have been re-examining the diverse array of inscriptions on the corpus of twenty-two miniature stone bas-reliefs of the epic cycle, unearthed in the environs of Rome, known as the Tabulae Iliacae.Footnote ⁶²⁰ While there has been a tendency to dismiss them as trivia produced for an undiscerning Roman market, the tide seems now to be turning in favour of seeing them as more sophisticated cultural artefacts. In the Greek East itself, E. Santin has produced an illustrated collection of the inscribed examples of Greek epigrams signed by named poets (amounting to thirty-four) and dating between the second century b.c. and the fourth century a.d.Footnote ⁶²¹ The disputed authorship of a funerary epigram to a young woman, Polyxena, that survives in the Greek Anthology (Anth. Pal. 7.167) may now have been definitively resolved in favour of the otherwise unknown Hecataeus of Thasos and also dated to the Augustan period, if the honorand is correctly identified with a homonym from a Thasian statue base dedication.Footnote ⁶²² The on-going excavation and survey of the site of Oinoanda in Lycia continues to provide incremental additions to the inscribed philosophical work by Diogenes. Annual reports in the journal Epigraphica Anatolica (2007–2010) have increased the number of published fragments by over fifty, from 137 to 190.Footnote ⁶²³

Filling a long identified desideratum in relation to Old Greece, C. Zizza, a member of the team that worked on the Italian edition of Pausanias, has provided a study of the inscriptions in the Periegesis.Footnote ⁶²⁴ This aims to identify, translate, and comment on the epigraphic material that is reported in the work to illustrate how Pausanias employed inscriptions. The author emphasizes that, given that the Periegesis was written to complement existing standard works on Greek history, Pausanias used the inscribed texts he encountered sometimes to confirm the received tradition, and at other times to challenge and correct it. From a modern perspective, Pausanias also had the advantage of being able to comment on inscriptions in the light of a historical narrative that is often now lost or lacunose. References by Pausanias to just over 200 texts are identified, an indication that he exploited this category of material far more thoroughly than did other Greek historians (nearly ten times more frequently than, for example, Herodotus). Two categories dominate: dedications for statues to mortals (c. 100 texts) and stelai (nearly 30 texts). Moreover exploitation of inscriptions is not uniform throughout; over half (122 texts) relate to Elis, primarily Olympia. The terms Pausanias uses to denote inscriptions are ἐπίγραμμα or ἐλεγεῖον for metrical texts, which feature prominently, and γράμματα for prose texts. Pausanias' agenda still dictates the outlines of the study. For example, rather than considering all the inscriptions mentioned, the commentary is reserved only for the smaller group of fifty-four texts that Pausanias chose to report in full and it is arranged in the order that the texts appear in the work, rather than thematically. Most regrettably, perhaps, in those cases where an inscription reported by Pausanias can be related to a surviving artefact, no images of the originals are provided.

Moving to Roman Egypt, it is perhaps appropriate that the visit of the philhellene emperor Hadrian, and his wife Sabina, to the Colossus of Memnon at Thebes in upper Egypt in late November a.d. 130 should have been commemorated, among other inscriptions on the monument, by fifty-four lines of Greek verse by Iulia Balbilla (PIR ² I 650), a Roman aristocrat of Syrian background (CIG III 4725–4727, 4729–4731). Although the content and the metre (elegiac couplets) of the four poems are not characteristic of Sappho, the work has been considered Sapphic in style and dialect (Aeolic). The poems are fairly conventional in their archaic forms and recherché mythological references but P. Rosenmayer explores the possible significance of Balbilla's decision to associate herself with Sappho as a literary model in a text honouring the imperial couple, when most other texts on the Colossus opt for far more obvious and conventional allusions to Homer.Footnote ⁶²⁵ Inspired by the completion of Merkelbach and Stauber's corpus of Steinepigramme (discussed in the last survey), G. Agosti has subjected the full range of inscribed late antique Greek epigrams, those with Christian as well as mythological imagery, to a serious stylistic examination.Footnote ⁶²⁶ Analysing the balance of tradition and innovation in form, he concludes that the epigraphic record confirms the general diffusion of the so-called ‘modern style’, typified by Nonnus and his followers. Its popularity is to be explained by the way in which its simple rhythmic structure, with a pattern of stress accents signalling the main caesura and line ends, allowed the combining of high literary style with a directness of oral communication even to less educated audiences.

Inscribed Latin verses continue to be a fruitful field. In addition to the new finds at Segobriga and the regional collections studied by Sblendorio Cugusi signalled under Corpora above, the carmina epigraphica of the republican period have been the subject of a volume of collected studies.Footnote ⁶²⁷ Billed by the editor as a handbook to the inscribed Latin poetry of the period, the coverage of the contents is not as comprehensive as that description would suggest. The papers are a mixture of thematic studies, preliminaries to regional corpora, and studies of specific inscriptions. The most enlightening section is perhaps the second, entitled ‘Epigraphische Dossiers’. First is a topographical study of the republican verse inscriptions of the city of Rome that attempts to place each in its historical and cultural context, considering the contemporary urban development and cultural milieu of drafters and honorands, as well as providing a systematic listing and mapping of their findspots.Footnote ⁶²⁸ H. Solin discusses the republican verse texts from Latium adiectum and Campania and, for the central Italian region of Sabinum, M. Buonocore provides a detailed commentary on a dozen or so metrical texts, most of them funerary with few lexical or syntactical innovations and echoing standard formulae, such as variations on the theme quod par parenti fuerat facere filius, mors immatura fecit ut faceret pater filio.Footnote ⁶²⁹ A paper on Spain is in fact a case-study of the republican verse texts from Carthago Nova (Cartagena) and its territory, in which the focus is on the layout (ordinatio), especially the visual differentiation of the poem itself from any heading or postscript.Footnote ⁶³⁰ Lastly, by way of comparative context the section closes with a discussion of inscribed verses in the other languages of ancient Italy.Footnote ⁶³¹ Those interested in the conventions of verse in praise of female virtues may find handy the selection of twelve inscribed Latin verses on this theme assembled by C. Fernández Martínez.Footnote ⁶³² An interesting exercise is that conducted by M. G. Schmidt in reconstructing the impact the inscribed monumental verse inscriptions of one Roman town in North Africa would have had as an ensemble on a contemporary taking a stroll through the city.Footnote ⁶³³ Lastly D. Feissel sketches a history of the phenomenon of Latin epigraphy in the Greek East in the late Roman period.Footnote ⁶³⁴ There is a distinct shift observable between the fourth and fifth centuries. Whereas the tetrarchic period sees an efflorescence of the inscribing in Latin of public documents that are by their nature works of prose, by the fifth century this has given way to the inscribing of Latin verse epigrams, perhaps part of a strategy by an élite of government functionaries to distinguish themselves by their advanced command of Latin just at the time when it was becoming increasingly marginal in the eastern context.

VI.iii Onomastics

Given that so much in Roman social history, not just the prosopographical study of élite groups but much wider demographic analysis, hinges on the study of personal names, it is no surprise that it remains a key area for research activity within Roman epigraphy. H. Solin's periodic ‘Varia onomastica’ in ZPE and annual ‘Analecta epigraphica’ in Arctos remain essential to keeping abreast of significant new discoveries or new interpretations of individual names. The former series had reached its sixteenth instalment by 2009,Footnote ⁶³⁵ while the latter accumulated an extra thirty-three individual entries over the quinquennium.Footnote ⁶³⁶ Access to these highly atomised observations has been facilitated by the provision in the Analecta for 2006 of an index of the names (including a reverse index) covered in the previous contributions from 1998 to 2006 inclusive.Footnote ⁶³⁷ Of particular note in the subsequent instalments is the commentary, with many corrections and amplifications, on the names attested in recently published inscriptions from Venusia (Suppl. It. n. s. 20).Footnote ⁶³⁸

The three canonical elements of the Roman name have each been the focus of recent work. The proceedings of a Lyon conference of 2004, dedicated to the subject of the peculiar onomastic feature that Latin shared with its central Italian neighbours, the praenomen, contain a number of papers that touch on the question of language contact in this regard as evidenced in the epigraphic record.Footnote ⁶³⁹ The first of two volumes by N. G. Brancato, publishing the output of twenty years of work amassing the Latin and Greek epigraphic documentation for the transmission of gentilicia, appeared in 2009.Footnote ⁶⁴⁰ The first volume covers the evidence from the provinces, the second that from Rome and Italy, with summary statistical tables, observations (e.g. on unexpected variations), and conclusions. It also usefully includes a CD-Rom containing the raw data of the repertorium. O. Salomies has examined patterns of choice in the giving of cognomina in various contexts. Considering only Italian inscriptions, the cognomina of children in families that did not previously use a cognomen are investigated, then, with regard to the Latin West generally, the cognomina of the children of freedmen related to the nomenclature of the patron and cognomina derived from praenomina are considered. Footnote ⁶⁴¹ Finally, taking the tria nomina together, H. Mouritsen has revisited the question of the format of the names of Junian Latins on the album of Herculaneum, where they seem on some of the surviving plaques to be deprived of filiation.Footnote ⁶⁴² He argues that this is not the result of deliberate differentiation but of the requirements of space.

Turning to regional studies and to the Latin West first, there have been a number of weighty contributions by A. Kakoschke. The database behind his complementary studies of foreigners attested in the two Germanies (Ortsfremde in den römischen Provinzen Germania inferior und Germania superior (2002)) and of natives of those provinces attested elsewhere (“Germanen” in der Fremde (2004)), which were discussed in the last survey, has continued to bear fruit at the rate of one volume per year over the quinquennium of this survey. Three volumes providing revised and updated catalogues of the personal names attested in the two Germanies (one for gentilicia, two for the cognomina),Footnote ⁶⁴³ have been followed by a volume for the province of Raetia and a further one for Gallia Belgica, these latter two appearing in Georg Olms' Alpha-Omega lexical series.Footnote ⁶⁴⁴ Given their comprehensiveness and detail, these volumes largely supersede the indices for the volumes of CIL for the regions they cover. However, they should not be dismissed as mere indices or lexica since they are very far from simply being a reworking of the data on the distribution of names registered in B. Lőrincz's Onomasticon Provinciarum Europae Latinarum. Their structure reflects the compiler's primary interest in migration and mobility patterns, being akin to the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names in their quasi-prosopographical approach. Each of Kakoschke's volumes catalogues the ancient evidence for every person, local or visitor, who can be placed in the relevant province in the imperial period (i.e. from Augustus to Diocletian), including military diplomas and potters' stamps but generally not other categories of instrumentum domesticum. An extremely helpful feature is that for each name element its distribution in the Roman world generally is given, which allows the reader to judge the local distribution pattern against the general trend at a glance. Finally each lemma is provided with specific commentary as appropriate and a bibliography. On the other hand, the compiler has refrained from synoptic analyses (e.g. frequency tables) of the contents of each regional volume. M. Dondin-Payre, revisiting a theme that she has explored before, has examined regionalism in the onomastic practice of Romans of indigenous background in North Africa, focusing on a number of case-studies taken from African epitaphs and with an appendix of African gentilicia formed from patronyms (e.g. Abbaius, Abdilius, Iddibalius, Massupius, etc.).Footnote ⁶⁴⁵

Also relevant to the subject of language contact, the year 2007 saw the appearance of three publications collecting and presenting epigraphic testimony (primarily Latin) for names of Celtic etymology. In a work with an explicitly philological purpose X. Delmarre, author of the Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise: une approche linguistique du vieux-celtique continental (2nd edn, 2003), presents a selection of inscriptions illustrating ancient Celtic personal names (divinities as well as mortals), ranging from altar and temple dedications, ex-voto deposits, and epitaphs, to graffiti and makers' marks on pottery.Footnote ⁶⁴⁶ Each entry includes the text of the inscription concerned, with its geographical provenance and bibliography of key modern scholarship on it. The interest of the compiler is the significant contribution that the name forms can make to our understanding of the grammar and lexicon of the ancient Celtic languages. Accordingly a second part of the book is given over to a thematic index of the elements of ancient Gaulish attested by inscriptions, one that serves as an improvement and complement to his earlier dictionary.

Three additions to the series of Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies monographs from the team of M. Raybould and P. Sims-Williams cover similar ground in a more comprehensive manner but with more limited aims.Footnote ⁶⁴⁷ The works are complementary reference volumes and a subsequent supplement devoted to Celtic proper names. The first presents a corpus of 800+ Latin inscriptions containing Celtic personal names, drawn from Rome's European provinces via Lőrincz's Onomasticon Provinciarum Europae Latinarum. Although together these volumes do represent useful research tools for those interested in studying the Celtic element within the Roman Empire, without tackling the epigraphic testimony (much of it in Greek, of course) for Celtic names in Galatia, they cannot be said to provide a comprehensive coverage. Also of interest to those interested in the onomastic practice of specific groups within the Roman population, this quinquennium saw the appearance of the second part of a lexicon of Jewish names of late antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁴⁸ As the subtitle makes clear, this pertains to the entire period from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquests, i.e. an antiquity that is late from the Jewish perspective and incorporates the entirety of the Roman period. The sources are not, of course, exclusively epigraphic but inscriptions feature heavily alongside papyri among the documentary sources exploited. This particular volume covers the western diaspora and is subdivided by origin/etymology (Biblical, Greek, Latin) and gender, rather than geographical location. Moving to an occupational category the names of theplumbarii of Rome have come under scrutiny. C. Bruun has collected the names of the makers of lead pipes, adding over 200 to the 300 that already feature in CIL XV, as the basis for a social history based on this onomastic repertoire.Footnote ⁶⁴⁹

Turning to the Greek East, three important volumes associated with the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names project have appeared since the last survey: two are collections of studies rather than generally presentations of new data, the third the latest addition to the LGPN itself. The first collection of studies publishes ten papers from a conference held at the British Academy in 2003, covering topics ranging from the Archaic period to Late Antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁵⁰ Aside from the article by M. H. Williams on the stele from Aphrodisias (mentioned above under Religions), of note here for students of Roman history is a contribution by M. Sartre on the limitations of assuming cultural identity on the basis of name forms.Footnote ⁶⁵¹ Surveying onomastic practice in Syria in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, he warns against deriving the classification of individuals as either culturally Greek or Syrian (Aramaic/Syriac) from modern scholarly understanding of the etymology of names. He argues that people in the multilingual society of Graeco-Roman Syria probably did not consciously subdivide their onomastic repertoire into ‘Greek’ and ‘indigenous’ as separate categories in the same way that words were not always translated from one language to another. Many names of Graeco-Macedonian origin and etymology will have been completely naturalized and been as familiar to Aramaic speakers with a smattering of Greek as names of Semitic origin were to Greeks with some command of Aramaic.

The second collection of studies — a volume of essays presented to Elaine Matthews, the former director of the project, shortly before her death — is far more substantial.Footnote ⁶⁵² As with the divisions of the Lexicon, the fifty-five papers making up Onomatologos are organized geographically. Amongst recurrent themes are the phenomenon of by-names, the link between onomastics and place, and new life or new meaning given to names as a result of cultural interaction. About a dozen of the contributions touch on epigraphic material of the Roman period. One of these that does actually publish new data is that by J.-L. Ferrary, in which he lists names from the unpublished inscriptions commemorating the choral delegations from Chios to the sanctuary of Apollo at Claros, dating from the second century a.d.Footnote ⁶⁵³ The prosopography of the chorus-leaders, many of them clearly Roman citizens, is no doubt a good guide to the make-up of the élite of the island. Examining personal names of Greek or Hellenized indigenous etymology in what became Latin Dalmatia, J. J. Wilkes argues that these names were an integral part of the onomastic canon of the region and are not here indicative of specific social or geographic origins (e.g. to be associated particularly with slaves, freedmen, and their children).Footnote ⁶⁵⁴ He provides a catalogue of the Greek names attested in Dalmatia and reproduces the epigraphic testimonia for them. The influence of the Roman calendar is supposedly detected in the diffusion of the Greek name Kalandion.Footnote ⁶⁵⁵ The cult of the Christian martyr Sebastianus brings a late international diffusion to this repackaged version of the Graeco-Thracian theophoric Sebazianos, according to D. Dana,Footnote ⁶⁵⁶ and popular etymology probably fuses a traditional Lydian element with Greek to produce the exceptional popularity of Adrastos at Aphrodisias in Caria.Footnote ⁶⁵⁷ Influence of Roman cognomina is probable in the phenomenon of Greeks with supernomina (by-names) in Hellenistic Sicily, addressed by G. Manganaro,Footnote ⁶⁵⁸ but unlikely in the similar phenomenon in Lydia, where it also extends back into the Hellenistic period.Footnote ⁶⁵⁹ Most obviously Latin in form are the supernomina in –ιανός used by Greek-speakers in Asia Minor, examined here by T. Corsten.Footnote ⁶⁶⁰ This suffix was used by locals not only with Latin gentilicia but regularly with names of Greek or indigenous etymology. Any connection with aristocratic Roman practice of the late Republic, in which –ianus was used to commemorate the gens of birth in cases of adoption (e.g. Scipio Aemilianus), is most improbable. More probable is an adaptation of the habit of the imperial period, whereby cognomina might be formed from the mother's gentilicium so that the traditionally neglected maternal heritage might be commemorated (e.g. the emperors Vespasian and Domitian). In the Asian material the phenomenon is mimicked but the purpose is often different, frequently serving a patronymic purpose by forming the –ιανός name on the stem of the father's single name, or combining it with that of another relative. As argued by C. Cheesman in reviewing the volume, this repurposed Latin name-element clearly functioned independently from and in parallel to its Latin-Roman progenitor as a stable part of local onomastic practice. This phenomenon is certainly not an example of Romanization in the sense of acculturation to metropolitan norms.

Corsten is also responsible for the latest instalment of the Lexicon itself. Footnote ⁶⁶¹ Despite being a substantial publication in its own right, this is in fact only the first of a three-part volume that will eventually cover the entirety of Anatolia, a plan that goes beyond the original ambitions of the project in a welcome manner. This first part (LGPN VA), entitled Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia, covers the cities of the southern coast of the Black Sea from Trapezus westwards, the entirety of Bithynia, Mysia, the Troad, Aiolis, and the inland region Lydia, but treats Ionia itself only as far as the mouth of the Maeander river. The epigraphic richness of the central area of the Roman province of Asia is also reflected in the geographic distribution of the data; (northern) Ionia and Lydia together account for very nearly 60 per cent of the whole. At the most popular end, theophoric names in –ios dominate, as in other volumes, with various forms of Apollonius, Dionysius and Demetrius the three most frequent names overall. These are followed by two theophorics in –doros: Artemidorus and Metrodorus. While these statistics are not surprising in themselves, the fact that over 40 per cent of all the examples of two theophoric names from across the entirety of LGPN so far (Apollonius and Asclepiades) are collected in this volume underlines an apparently heightened significance of religious cult in the onomastic practice of Asia Minor. A significant factor contributing to the popularity of the most widely attested –ios, -doros, and –ades theophorics respectively must be the location within, or immediately proximate to, the region covered by vol. VA of the famous cults of Apollo at Claros, Apollo at Didyma, Artemis at Ephesos, and Asclepius at Pergamon. Notable also is the greater popularity in the population covered by this volume of LGPN of names in Herm–, a phenomenon that is also clear from a study, in a volume on regionalism in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor, of the onomastic practice of Lydia under Roman rule. This spike in popularity may be accounted for by the fact that a good number of these theophorics were actually understood by the persons who gave them to their children as referring to the river Hermos, which runs through Lydia, rather than the panhellenic god Hermes.Footnote ⁶⁶²

A study of the prosopography of Aegean Thrace is inevitably very much based on the epigraphic evidence.Footnote ⁶⁶³ The interest for the students of Roman history lies particularly in the coverage of three cities of Roman foundation (Topeiros, Traianopolis, and Plotinopolis) and, indeed, over a third of the 1,258 persons catalogued for the whole area are datable to the Roman period. Another regional onomastic study published in the same series confines itself specifically to the Roman names in the Cyclades, or more precisely, in this first part, of the islands north and west of Delos.Footnote ⁶⁶⁴ Roman here is taken to mean individuals bearing Roman gentilicia and/or single names of Latin origin, rather than all those of indubitably Roman date. Another study of mobility and identity through the onomastic catalogue is one by A. B. Tataki, author of the earlier Macedonians Abroad (1998). The focus remains Macedonia but this time attention is turned on the Roman presence in Macedonia on the basis of personal names.Footnote ⁶⁶⁵ Another regional case-study, this time of leading Cretans in the imperial period, forms the basis of an attempt to correlate personal names with social status.Footnote ⁶⁶⁶

In the second edition of La route de Myos Hormos, H. Cuvigny reports a correction to the previously published interpretation of the Crocodilo ostrakon (O.Krok. inv. 227), which had been taken to name a prostitute ‘Quintana’.Footnote ⁶⁶⁷ However, comparison with ostraka from elsewhere (O.Did. inv. 147 and 411) has made it clear that the explanation is far less picturesque and that the quintana concerned here is a tax to be paid.

As for additions to the toponymy of the Roman world, as noted above (under Cities), newly discovered dedications to Caelestis from the hinterland of Carthage revealed a hitherto unknown and unsuspected pagus and civitas of the Siviritani.Footnote ⁶⁶⁸ The bronze of Agón, also discussed above (under Highlights) has added to our knowledge of the hydronomy (rivus Hiberiensis Capitonianus) of the Ebro valley, as well as revealing the names of a couple of second-century villas. In the Balkans, two recently discovered tombstones for immigrant Dalmatians in the gold-mining district of Alburnus Maior in Dacia, reveal the name of a new hamlet, castellum Starva, and have prompted a cataloguing of the documentary evidence for settlements in the vicinity. This reveals a cluster of settlements known as castella or vici, several of which are qualified by an ethnic relating to a tribe from elsewhere in the Balkans (e.g. castellum Baridustarum, vicus Pirustarum). It is plausible that these settlements were, at least initially, composed of immigrant miners and that their designations reflect this and their lack of autonomy as places falling under the jurisdiction of the administration of the mines. A study of the place-names of Celtic etymology in Europe and Asia Minor draws heavily on the Latin and Greek epigraphy of the Roman period.Footnote ⁶⁶⁹ Finally, the names of two communities have been added to the gazeteer of ancient Anatolia, though they remain as yet unlocated: A. Chaniotis has identified Thynnara as a new Carian place-name on the basis of an epithet of Zeus attested in a recently discovered votive base at Aphrodisias;Footnote ⁶⁷⁰ and an unfortunately unprovenanced dedication to the emperor Valerian preserves the name of the humble κώμη Πανγορανιωτῶν.Footnote ⁶⁷¹