At first, only senators' epitaphs set out the sequence of public offices they had held (cursus honorum), or a segment of it, while inscriptions erected during senators' lifetimes — building inscriptions, dedications to gods, honorific inscriptions — gave just their most recent office. Then, around the time of Augustus, these inscriptions too began to set out their careers. The earliest non-sepulchral inscription listing multiple offices that Maurizi has found is ILLRP 438: L(ucius) Caecina L(uci) [f(ilius)], q(uaestor), tr(ibunus) p(lebis), p(raetor) pr(o) co(n)s(ule), IIIIvir i(ure) d(icundo), sua pecunia vias stravit.
These are the so-called cursus inscriptions, and for at least a generation we have been asking why — at precisely the moment when popular elections became a formality and posts were filled by imperial appointment, when candidates were often lacking for lower offices — senators began to publicize their public service through inscriptions. W. Eck suggested that senators had been squeezed out of traditional forms of recognition, like triumphs, and were influenced by the biographies of Republican worthies on display in the Forum Augustum; G. Alföldy, that they were influenced by Augustus' developing titulature.
These questions, about the genesis and significance of imperial epigraphy, underlay M.'s tesi di laurea under S. Panciera at La Sapienza in Rome, and he was still asking them as he concluded the present work, his doctoral thesis under O. Salomies at the University of Helsinki (205–10). This is a study not of senatorial careers, but of epigraphic representations of careers. M. seeks to collect and compare all epigraphic testimonies to cursus honorum from the period 27 b.c. to a.d. 117 and to trace their stylistic development. Chs 1–4 (1–42) set out parameters and consider ‘forerunners’ to cursus inscriptions (inscriptions listing an office, a priesthood, an imperatorial acclamation, but not sequential offices). Chs 5–8 (44–132) analyse the cursus formulas ‘structurally’: the elements, their arrangement, eventual omissions. Chs 9–12 (134–79) analyse them ‘stylistically’: the phrasing of individual elements, in Latin and in Greek translations. Ch. 13 (211–324) contains the 395-item catalogue of inscriptions (quoting only the cursus honorum themselves), bibliography, and indices to literary sources, epigraphical sources and names.
As M. modestly confesses, his overall findings ‘do not revolutionize our understanding’ (210): chronological sequence gave way to reverse-chronological, which put the highest post first; titles of posts became ever more elaborate; under the Flavians cursus inscriptions spread from Italy to the provinces (interestingly, Greek translations remained fluid (180–204)). The value of this work is in the analysis rather than the synthesis, and above all in the collection itself. Researchers will want to use the work to restore lacunose inscriptions, to determine dating criteria and to learn whether a given cursus was commonplace or remarkable. They will expect the work to be comprehensive, reliable and relatively easy to use.
Surprisingly, the work falls short of these criteria:
1. It is unnecessarily unwieldy. M. numbers the items in the catalogue, but never refers to the numbers, instead citing a single publication of each inscription, meaning that in order to move from the discussion to the catalogue, one must pivot through the indices of sources and names.
2. Though most of these inscriptions have been anthologized and re-edited many times over, M.'s index of epigraphic sources includes only the single publication he cites in the text. This means that if researchers do not have that particular citation, they will have to use the index of names — but is it, for example, M. Plautius Silvanus, consul in 2 b.c., or his father? — or resort to the Epigraphische Datenbank Clauss-Slaby (www.manfredclauss.de) or another online database and, after finding the inscription, try different citations until they discover the one M. has chosen to use.
3. This arrangement seems to have been the source of problems for M. himself. The single inscription recording M. Plautius Silvanus, the father of the consul, for example, is cited one way at 103 and in the catalogue (217), and another at 33 and 99 n. 49, and in the index of epigraphic sources: one man, one inscription, two separate existences across the text and indices. Similar problems with internal references occur throughout.
4. The starting-point seems arbitrary and unhelpful. As M. demonstrates, the adoption of the full cursus was a gradual process. Within this process, the date 27 b.c. is of no significance whatever. M.'s choice means that comparable ‘forerunner’ inscriptions are both excluded from his catalogue and analytic tables and included in them (5–6, 33–6). Most unfortunately, it means that M.'s own example of the earliest surviving cursus inscription — that of L. Caecina, quoted above — does not appear in his catalogue and is cited only once, in his introduction (7), and then never mentioned again. Perhaps the better approach would have been to include all Republican inscriptions mentioning senators and their public offices, and then to let the birth and development of cursus inscriptions emerge from the discussion (principal texts already cited at 5 n. 27 and 6 n. 31).
Part of the explanation for the problems with the present work may lie in a peculiarity of the Finnish doctoral process, which requires publication of a doctoral thesis before its final public examination (the examination, with J. Bodel as ‘opponent’ and Salomies as ‘custos’, took place on 2 March 2013; the review copy was stamped as received at the Joint Library of the Hellenic and Roman Societies on 11 March 2013). It is to be hoped that in this case M. will be able to publish a revised and corrected edition. He has done so much, for the most part he has done it well, and, once he makes the necessary changes, he will have produced a very useful tool.
