Epigraphy and the ancient historian

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20074954
AutoresJohn Bodel (autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Páginas27-82
Fecha de publicación2012-11-12
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaEpigraphic Evidence (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9780203086445-8
WikidataQ64115514
OpenAlexW2901590486
ISBN9780203086445
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11

Few ancient historians nowadays would agree with Sir John Edwin Sandys that the relationship between epigraphy and history is one of undue encroachment of the former upon the latter. Most would concede that the history of classical antiquity could not be written without epigraphy, and many would assert that the proper business of the epigraphist is not only to edit inscribed texts but to set inscriptions into their cultural contexts and thus to demonstrate their contribution to history. And yet epigraphists have often been viewed as narrow technicians whose conceptual myopia prevents them from seeing beyond the edges of their stones. The father of modern historiography, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, did not see things this way. Already in 1815, in his proposal before the Berlin Academy to create a Corpus Inscriptionum of all the languages of Roman antiquity, Niebuhr recognized that inscriptions were to the study of antiquity what documents were to modern history: essential primary sources (Niebuhr 1815). But a disparaging perception of epigraphists and their work has a long pedigree. Theodor Mommsen recalled being laughed at more than once, while touring Italy as a young man in search of material to be included in his edition of the inscriptions of the kingdom of Naples, as a “man addicted to stones” (lapidarius homo) and, because so many of the inscriptions were epitaphs, a “morbidundertaker” ( feralis designator) (Mommsen 1852: xvi; see Frontispiece). By the end of his career Mommsen had published more ancient inscriptions than anyone before or since, and yet most today would not regard him primarily as an epigraphist but as a Roman historian. In fact, most of those specializing in the study of Greek and Latin inscriptions since Mommsen’s day have interpreted their role as differing in particulars but not essentials from that of ancient historians exploiting other types of evidence

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Epigraphy · Classical Antiquity Studies · History