Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/136

 INSCRIPTIONS [ROMAN. The documents of Lycurgus s administration are recognized by their small, neat characters, very carefully inscribed. The Macedonian period betrays a falling off in neatness and firmness of execution, the letters being usually small and scratchy, excepting in inscrip tions relating to great personages, when the characters are often very large and handsome. At this time came in the use of apices as an ornament of letters. These tendencies increased during the period of Roman dominion in Greece, and gradually, especially in Asia Minor, the iota adscriptuni was dropped. The Greek characters of the Augustan age indicate a period of restoration ; they are uniformly clear, handsome, and adorned with apices. Under the empire the characters fast degenerated, combining increased orna ment with less delicacy of execution. In the 2d or 3d century, if not earlier, the circular and square sigma (Q, Q) occur, together with the circular epsilon. There are a good many pretty in scriptions under the Antonincs ; but later the writing grows more coarse and clumsy until Byzantine times, when the forms appear barbarous indeed beside an inscription of the Augustan or even Antonine age. Collec- The finest collections of inscribed Greek marbles are of course at tious of Athens. There are also good collections, public and private, at marbles. Smyrna and Constantinople. The British Museum contains the best collection out of Athens (now being edited) ; the Louvre contains a good many (edited by Frbhner, Les inscriptions Grccqucs du musee du Louvre, 1865) ; the Oxford collection is very valuable, and fairly large ; and there are some valuable inscriptions also at Cambridge. The following essays give good outlines of the whole subject, : Boeckh, C. I. O., preface to vol. i. ; Westermann in Pauly s Real-Encycl., s. v. Inscriptiones ; Egger, &quot;Des collect ions d inscriptions Grecqucs &quot; in Journal des Savants, 1871 ; O.T.New ton, Essays on Art anil Archxology. 1S80, p. 95, 209 Besides the works already quoted, the following should be mentioned : Hoeckh s Kleine Schriften ; Weschcr- Koucart. Inscriptions recuei/lies a Delphes, 1863 ; Michaelis, Der Parthenon ; Wad- dington, Fitstrs des Provinces Asiatiques, part i., 1872. and Memoire sur In chron- ologie de la vie du rhe teur Aristide; Kirchhoff, Studien zur Gfscfiichle der f/rieclnschen Alphabets, 1867 ; Keil, Specimen Onomato/ogi Grxci, 1840, and Analecta Epiyraphica et Onomalologic.a, 1842 ; C. Curtius, Studien und Urkunden zur Gcschichte von Samoi. Liibeck, 1877 ; Meier. De proxenia, 1843, and Die Pri- vatschiedsrichter und die, offentlichen DiHteten Athens. Halle. 1846 ; lidtant, An fuerint a pud Grxcos judices certi lilihus inter ciritates componendis, dias. inaug , Berl., 18(&amp;gt;2 ; Foucart, Des Associations Rcliyieuses chez les Grecs, Paris. 1873 ; Liiders, Die Dionysischen Kunstler, Berl., 1873. (E. L. H.) V. ROMAN. I. Roman Inscriptions (by which general name are de signated, in classical archaeology, all non-literary remains of the Latin language, with the exception of coins, letters and journals) fall into two distinct classes, viz. (1) those which were written upon other objects of various kinds, to denote their peculiar purpose, and in this way have been preserved along with them ; and (2) those which them selves are the objects, written, to be durable, as a rule, on metal or stone. The first class is that of inscriptions in the stricter sense of the word (styled by the Romans tituli, by the Germans Aufschriften) ; the second is that of instru ments or charters, public and private (styled by the Romans first leges, afterwards instrurnenta or tabulx, and by the Germans ffr&unden). No ancient Latin authors have professedly collected and explained or handed down to us Roman inscriptions. Some of the orators and historians, such as Cicero, Livy, Pliny the elder, and Suetonius among the Latins, and Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Josephus among the Greeks, occasionally mention inscriptions of high historical interest. A few grammarians, as for example, Varro, Verrius Flaccus, and Valerius Probus of Berytus, quote ancient words or formulse, from them, or explain the abbreviations used in them. Juridical instruments, laws, constitutions of emperors, senatus consulta, and the like appear here and there in the various collections of Roman jurisprudence. Inscriptions (in the wider sense, as we shall henceforth call them without regard to the distinction which has been drawn) have been found in nearly every centre of ancient Roman life, but, like many other remains of antiquity, only seldom in their original sites. The great mass of them has to be sought for in the large European museums of ancient art, and in the smaller local collections of ancient remains which occur nearly everywhere in the European provinces of the former Roman empire, as well as in the north of Africa, and also here and there in Asia Minor. Only those copies of inscriptions are to be received with full confidence which are furnished by experienced and well-equipped scholars, or which have been made with the help of mechanical methods (casts, photographs, moist and dry rubbings), not always applicable with equal success, but depending on the position and the state of preserva tion of the monuments. 1 From the first revival of classical learning in the Carolingian age, attention was paid anew, by pilgrims to Rome and other places worth visiting, to epigraphic monuments also. In the time of the Renaissance, from the end of the 14th century downwards, some of the leading Italian scholars, like Poggio and Signorili, and the antiquarian traveller Cyriacus of Ancona, collected inscriptions, Greek and Latin. 2 In the 15th century large collections of the inscriptions of all countries, or of limited districts, were made by Giovanni Marcanova, Fra Felice Feliciano, Fra Michele Ferrarino, Fra Giocondo the archi tect of Verona, Marino Sanudo the Venetian polyhistor, and others. At the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th, the first printed collections can be recorded (Spreti s for Ravenna, 1489; Peutinger s for Augsburg, 1508 ; Huttich s for Mainz, 1520 ; Francesco degli Alber- tini s for Rome, printed in 1521 by Jacopo Mazochi), while during the same century, a long list of epigraphic travellers, like Pighius, Rambertus, and Accursius, or antiquarian collectors, like Sigonius, Panvinius, Antonius Augustinus with his collaborators Ursinus and Metellus, and many others, were busy in augmenting the stock of epigraphic monuments. The series of printed epigraphic Corpora begins with that of Apianus (Ingolstadt, 1534), the only one arranged in geographical order, and is con tinued in those of Smetius (1558, but edited only after the author s death by Justus Lipsius, 1588), Gruter (with Joseph Scaliger s Indices, 1603, and re-edited by Grsevius, 1707), Gudius (about 1660, edited by Hessel, 1731), Reinesius (1682), Fabretti (1699), Gori (1726), Doni (1731), Muratori (1739), Maffei (1749), Donati (1765-75). These collections, manuscript and printed, will never altogether lose their value, as great numbers of inscriptions known to the ancient collectors have since been lost or destroyed. But, inasmuch as even towards the beginning of the 15th century, as well as afterwards, especially from the 16th down to a very recent period, all sorts of inaccu racies, interpolations, and even downright falsifications, found their way into the Corpora, these can be employed only with the greatest caution. Modern critical research in the field of epigraphy began with the detection of those forgeries (especially of the very extensive and skilful ones of Pirro Ligorio, the architect to the house of Este) by Maffei, Olivieri, and Marini. The last-named scholar opens a new era of truly critical and scientific handling of Roman inscriptions (especially in his standard work on the Atti dei Fratdli Arvali, Rome, 1795); his disciple and successor, Count Bartolomeo Borghesi (who died at San Marino in 1860), may be rightly called the founder of the modern science of Roman epigraphy. 3 Orelli s handy collection of Roman inscriptions (2 vols., Zurich, 1828) is a first attempt to make accessible to a larger scientific public the results of the researches of Marini and his successors ; but it was not completed (and thoroughly corrected) until nearly thirty years later, by Henzen (Orelli, vol. iii., with the indispensable Indices, Zurich, 1856), who, 1 See E. Hiibner, Ueber mcchanische Copieen von Inschriften, Berlin, 1881. 2 Compare De Kossi, Bullettino dell Institute archeologico, 1871, p. 1 sq. 3 Of his works, published by the French Government, nine volumes 4to (Paris, 1862-80) have already appeared.