The Latin military documents on papyrus and parchment from Dura-Europos, preserved at Yale University, are among the most important textual sources for the study of the Roman army under the Principate, providing an in-depth view into the army's administrative procedures. They contain a wealth of information on how soldiers entrusted with scribal work went about writing, compiling, archiving or updating all sorts of documents about daily, mainly routine, activities at the military base in that city, around the first half of the third century a.d. There are already several previous masterly (partial) editions, e.g. C. B. Welles et al., The Parchments and Papyri (1959); A. Bruckner, R. Marichal et al. in various Chartae Latinae Antiquiores volumes (1954–); or R. O. Fink's Roman Military Records on Papyrus (RMR) (1971), with the latter standing out for ease of access and usability. So why a new edition?
Iovine's aim is to present an updated critical edition of these texts. The book opens with a comprehensive four-chapter introduction: ch. 1 provides a historical overview of the city, its inhabitants and Rome's military presence there. Ch. 2 covers the documentary typologies (letters, lists, rosters etc.) established by previous editors and retained here. Ch. 3 presents updated prosopographical tables for officers and common soldiers. Ch. 4 discusses the palaeography of the scripts (chancery, epistolary, bureaucratic) in the Durene documents, their peculiarities and their range of use. Ch. 5 then presents the texts themselves, each with an introduction, a critical apparatus, an English translation and a line-by-line commentary. Twelve fragments, published by I. in 2019 and containing very little extant text, round off the chapter. Two appendices contain the re-edition of the Feriale Duranum, a sort of festive calendar whose peculiarities prompted I. to examine it separately, and a summary of the Durene Greek military documents. The book concludes with a bibliography of the relevant research literature from 1977 onwards.
Unlike previous editors, I. was able to inspect the documents with a digital microscope, which enabled him to supplement surviving (fragments of) names, titles or annotations by military scribes (e.g. P.Dura 101 col. XXIX 7, 10, 12; 102 col. II 3, 10; col. VI 4), offer improved readings (e.g. P.Dura 95 fr. a col. II 2), recognise additional lines in the texts (e.g. P.Dura 65.2–4) and add new scraps, admittedly often with only a few letters (e.g. P.Dura 54 col. IV 9–12). His dense elaborations come with a wealth of palaeography and literacy-related information on the hands of the various military scribes as well as on the records, their layout and the arrangement and combination of details concerning the soldiers' ranks, duties, places of service, etc., with numerous images of handwriting samples from Dura and elsewhere, which make it easy to follow his argument. The fact that all line-by-line readings of the previous editors are brought together in the critical apparatus for comparison greatly facilitates the close study of these texts.
A random check of the prosopographical three-column table (Name, Where, Details, e.g. assignment to a centuria) for the common soldiers gives an overall positive impression of the reliability of the table. However, some of the entries checked were not verifiable. For example, the soldier Abdaeus Zabb. (51) is indicated as belonging to the centuria (Ч) of the centurion Antoninus prior; the reference given is P.Dura 102 col. VIII (line 20; unlike the indices in Welles et al. or Fink, no line numbers are given here, which is not helpful). However, the nearest extant centuria sign Ч upstream of Abdaeus Zabb, in P.Dura 102, is found only in col. VII 25 (457), where the name of the centurion is not preserved. The centurion Antoninus prior is not to be found at all in P.Dura 102 but in 101 col. XLV 3, for example.
While I.'s improvements and additions do not radically alter the overall perception of these documents, they do provide a host of new and valuable details for further research into the prosopography, literacy and administration of the Roman army at Dura. Unfortunately, the book does not lend itself to swift consultation and easy citation, as the documents, which retain their original, non-chronological P.Dura numbers, are arranged chronologically in several sub-chapters, with the result that the sequence of the texts has a jumbled appearance (e.g. P.Dura 63, 70, 66, 98 on pp. 225–77). Independent, consecutive numbering as in Fink (RMR 1, 2 etc.), indicated at the top of each page plus an accompanying concordance, would have been much more practical. It is also regrettable that, with reference to online search facilities, the book forgoes the indices to be expected in an edition like this. In this respect, Fink's RMR in particular remains indispensable.
Despite these reservations, there can be no doubt that I. does justice to his project. The quantity of material he has expertly compiled and meticulously re-assessed is impressive. Text-wise, this integrated, updated and expanded edition is bound to supplant all previous editions and become the new reference standard for the study of these documents.
