Inscriptions and Literacy

Through a case study of a specific monument (the ‘Archive Wall’ at Aphrodisias), this paper will consider how the context and visual framework of writing can impact its perception and the act of reading. One of the most challenging aspects of approaching “literacy” in the ancient world is the plurality of different meanings that the term can have for ancient and modern readers. Different approaches apply different criteria, contexts and expectations to the act of reading, which can result in divergent concepts or “literacies” ((Harris 1989 vs.

Did women see, commission, and set up inscribed objects and monuments that line Roman roads outside city walls? Did they read, interpret, and appropriate what these material and textual memorials represented? To find answers to these questions, we need to know something about the ability of women of variable age, ethnic origins, social affiliations, and power, to produce and consume words and images in epigraphic form. We also need to identify the various contexts where women interacted with private Latin inscriptions (Keegan 2014).

My title comes from the text of a marble tombstone (AE 1928, 73) which documents the life and achievements of a Roman freedwoman who was born into slavery and who had served the family by which she had been enslaved as a “lectrix,” or reader:

Sulpiciae cineres lectrìcis cerne, viator,

quoì servile datum nomen erat Petale.

Ter dénos numeró quattor plus vìxerat annós

natumque in terris Aglaon ediderat;

omnia naturaé b́ona viderat, arte vigebat,

splendebat forma, creverat ingenió.

In the spring of 200 B.C., when the Athenians declared war on Philip V of Macedon, they voted to destroy statues and inscriptions for Philip and his ancestors (Livy 32.44.4-6). This decision also led to the excising of references to the Macedonian kings and their family in inscriptions. In an important essay, Byrne (2010) reconsidered this material, but he focused on the political circumstances surrounding the events; earlier scholars also concentrated on the historical and political ramifications of this episode (e.g. Habicht 1982: 147-150; Flower 2006: 34-40).

When writing emerged in the Central Mediterranean in the eighth and early seventh century, it was accompanied by an equal explosion in figural images. These two practices were certainly connected in the minds of their consumers, since the same verbs are used to refer to them in Greek and Etruscan (grapho and ziχ-, respectively). This paper explores what happens when writing and figural drawing meet by examining a specific sub-category of ‘literacy’: the production and consumption of texts linked to images and of images that prompt a still unwritten text.

This paper aims to show that in the process of ‘oral dictation’, a form of hypokrisis (‘delivery’) that relies on writing primarily as a memorization tool, the repetitiveness of meter took priority over clause-formation. Metrical archaic inscriptions are proof of this process: rhythmical regularization and written punctuation show that the metrical unity, primarily the hexameter, served as a unit of written communication before it doubled as a composition unit. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey represent the last trace of this development.