Friday 13 June: Museums and inscriptions

Today I hit some museums again. The National Museum of Rome has five branches, and the two I am most interested in for my research are the Palazzo Massimo, which houses one of the world’s greatest collections of classical sculpture, and the Terme di Diocleziano, built into the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, with an incredible epigraphic collection. I’ve been to both of these before, but wanted to return to check some things that had come up in my research.

I spent the time mostly viewing the epigraphic stuff. Thousands of inscriptions on marble, travertine, and other material, make up the bulk of this incredible collection. Many ancient literary texts exist in manuscript form, on vellum or papyrus or some other fragile material. Very few manuscripts from antiquity exist. Texts are usually copies of copies of copies of copies, and there is a huge field of study devoted to comparing manuscripts, dating them, and establishing a stemma, a sort of family tree, of which manuscripts are copies of which sources. With inscriptions, this is not the case. Of course, an inscription can be a copy of an earlier one. Usually, though, these are the original texts from the ancient world. Many of these are short and simple, like the writing on a grave marker or the dedication of a gift to a temple. A lot of Roman inscriptions, though, are important historical documents, and include official lists of magistrates, proclamations of the emperors, decrees of the Senate, and similar texts. Usually, with some research (and help from a knowledgeable librarian) you can find the text of an inscription published in print someplace. It’s amazing, though, to see the actual texts that were put up in public my Julius Caesar, or Augustus, or Trajan. And when you have the text in front of you, and it’s carved in marble, and there are records of the actual item dating back to the time it was created, you know you’ve got the real thing in front of you.