Engraved Lives

Abstract

Inscriptions—permanently incised texts on stone or bronze—are a characteristic feature of Greek and Roman Antiquity. It applies to all periods of ancient epigraphy that by far the most common genres of inscriptions are those directly related to individual persons: funerary inscriptions provide the most substantial single corpus, followed by religious dedications and honorific inscriptions. In their simplest forms, these kinds of texts are almost entirely reduced to a name, the crucial element used to identify a person. To be called biographical, an inscription should contain more substantial information on the various stages of a person’s life that serves to characterize them in greater detail and proposes a moral judgement of their lives. Unlike literary texts, inscriptions as artefacts were generally conceived to communicate condensed information on a restricted space. For this purpose, a special language with a fixed repertoire of standardized formulae was developed, and especially Latin epigraphy also makes heavy use of abbreviations. Only very long texts—that on the grounds of their exceptional importance were inscribed irrespective of their length and the effort required—can come close to biographies but account for only an infinitely small percentage of the extant epigraphic material.