The International Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (www.aiegl.org) has convened at more or less regular five-year intervals since 1938, when it assembled for the first time in Amsterdam. No papers were published to mark the occasion, but subsequent proceedings have usually been issued in ponderous volumes, some interval of time after the conference. The organisers of the 13th Congress, held in Oxford 2007, have departed from tradition by publishing only the ‘titles and summaries of 162 papers given at 39 thematic panels’ in a slim ‘booklet’ of 116 pages (p. xi), which they were able to produce in time for the meeting itself. Here, in a volume published under the auspices of the British Academy, just in time for the 14th Epigraphical Congress in Berlin (www.congressus2012.de), are the plenary papers of that 13th Congress.
Few professional historians these days will have more than the haziest understanding of what epigraphers do: experto crede – I have polled my colleagues. Some older ones remember and admire the work of Arnaldo Momigliano or Moses Finley, I think because both were comparativists who worked at a readily accessible level of generalisation. Epigraphers, on the other hand, are particularists, and to outsiders may seem mandarin savants – relics of the age of aristocratic dilettanti. Certainly none of my colleagues had heard of that prodigy of erudition, Louis Robert. Momigliano himself regarded Robert as a great historian, but uncategorisable; Carlo Ginzburg, had he noticed Robert, would have recognised him immediately as a ‘microhistorian’.
The organisers of this conference aim to confront the particularism of epigraphical research with the generalising tendencies of the contemporary ‘historical sciences’ – or maybe vice versa. The volume was issued with the express intention of ‘presenting epigraphy as a specialism to a wider readership, both academic and other’. The undertaking seemed warranted because (a) epigraphy is the major source of new information about Graeco-Roman antiquity; and (b) inscriptions illuminate every aspect of Graeco-Roman antiquity. As a consequence, epigraphical study requires cognizance of a variety of the subdisciplines of history, and in turn illuminates these fields by the novelty of its ever-renewed examples (p. xi). I came away from the book uncertain about the projected readership of the volume. I doubt the book will attract modern historians or the general public. Certainly ancient historians and classicists – including epigraphers – can read it with pleasure and profit; some may feel inspired to expand their research to include, say, epigraphy and demography. Taken individually, the papers are uniformly excellent: authoritative, concise and often engagingly written. Many authors bring recent discoveries to bear on their topics: the bibliographies alone will be found to be worth the trouble of a trip to the library.
As a reviewer, I feel a responsibility to address the ways in which this project hangs together as a coherent volume – a difficult assignment given the stated objectives of the editors. The first and last essays provide little programmatic guidance. D. Feissel (Chapter 1) opens with some rhetorically elegant and substantively illuminating remarks about the constructive ways in which classical culture is inscribed on the fabric of the city of Constantinople, before turning to a general discussion of epigraphy and onomastics. A. Chaniotis (Chapter 14) concludes with a discussion of a topic that has occupied him much lately, that is, the representation of emotions in inscriptions; he ends the essay with an exhortation for epigraphers to make their material more accessible to non-specialists. By this time, however, I had been persuaded that the essays were united mainly by the diversity of their subjects and methods. I do not mean to sound arch: the heterogeneity successfully captures the richness of epigraphical evidence and its susceptibility to a variety of approaches.
The editors have arranged most of the papers in pairs, so that for each topic there is one paper on the Greek side, another on the Roman. For me the tensions between the approaches to ‘Epigraphy and Economics’ of A. Bresson and G. Salmoneri (Chapters 10 and 11) made for the most stimulating reading. Elsewhere R. Parker is coupled with J. Scheid in discussing ‘Epigraphy and Religion’ (Chapters 2 and 3). C. Schuler and W. Scheidel deal with ‘Epigraphy and the Ancient Population’ (Chapters 5 and 6). J. Ma and A. Cooley team in the section on ‘Epigraphy and Government’ (Chapters 7 and 8). A few essays stand alone. G. Petzl contributes an isolated essay on ‘Epigraphy and Language’ (Chapter 4). J. Bodel writes an account of the relationship of Latin epigraphy and information technology (his paper is introduced with a brief comment by S. Panciera) (Chapters 12–13). I particularly enjoyed I. Roda's essay on the contemporary display of inscriptions in museums (Chapter 9).
If any thread unites the papers it is an appropriate preoccupation with the peculiar nature and limitations of the evidence that inscriptions provide. The problem is most pointedly posed in Scheidel's essay on demography: ‘Our present focus in epigraphy notwithstanding, it must be stressed that it is papyrology that has made the most substantial contribution to our understanding of early populations’ (p. 102); ‘the cultural conventions of funerary commemorations, as well as ignorance, introduce biases that differ from those found in documents’ (p. 103). Many others (e.g. Bresson, p. 224) are concerned to define the relationship between inscriptions on the one hand and ancient documents and archives on the other: the consensus here is that ancient inscriptions are to be understood as occasional monumental emanations from more complete and systematic collections of records – a point with large implications for the reliability and social function of inscriptions, and their exploitation by historians and social scientists. Since I have expressed my opinions on the subject recently (Ancient History: Monuments and Documents [2006]) I feel obliged to register an objection.
The origins of contemporary notions of the ‘archive’ and the ‘document’ can be traced to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they develop as part of the apparatus that sustains the nationalist investigations of professional historians. Researchers tend to project their tools and methods onto their material – as if the modern ideas of the archive and the document were historical universals. Discussion of ‘ancient archives’ and ‘ancient documents’ should proceed in tandem with an informed self-interrogation about their equivalence to the modern conceptions. Only Salmoneri (p. 252) gives them more than a casual glance. Bresson's assertion (p. 224, citing Sickinger, Pébarthes and Faraguna) that Greek archives ‘played a central role in the life of ancient communities’ can only work to conceal the vast gaps in our knowledge about ancient ‘archives’, and to occlude discussion of the similarities and differences between these ancient collections and modern archives. The related term ‘document’, which pops up on practically every page of the book, is a conceptual black hole: undiscussed, uncriticised, not even defined. Yes, of course there are collections of texts in the Graeco-Roman world, as there are everywhere that writing is used. I am, for example, now staring at a pile of uncollected but graded student papers from last term (I am by university policy obliged to hold them for one quarter before discarding them). Is this an ‘archive’? Are the graded papers ‘documents’? The answer depends on what precisely is meant by ‘archives’ and ‘documents’.
The editors and press are to be congratulated on the physical quality of the book. It is a thing of beauty: heavy paper stock, sewn binding, an attractive and legible typeface. I do not expect to see many more like it.
