This chapter opens with a pagan priest’s remarkable decision to reinscribe an epigram from the Persian Wars in the context of rising Christian dominance. This inscription demonstrates the continued vitality of ancient Hellenic culture even as pagan sanctuaries throughout the eastern Mediterranean gradually closed. Christian literature in this period was rife with calls for the destruction of pagan sanctuaries—but archaeology has shown that this rhetoric was rarely put into action. How do we explain this disconnect between rhetoric and reality? Sanctuaries were full of ancient inscribed texts, but they mainly dealt with civic matters, not with pagan religious beliefs. Stripped of their surrounding pagan ritual frames, these inscribed testaments of “polis religion” projected messages of civic privileges, illustrious rulers, and local benefactors. I argue that these inscriptions continued to be valued and engaged with in late antiquity, inflecting how people thought about, and reused, the remains of the pagan past.
Chapter 4 continues the archaeological case studies by turning to sanctuaries where inscriptions ended up as spolia, that is, reused building material. While the use of spolia has sometimes been viewed as a triumphalist act heralding the victory of Christianity, the way that inscribed blocks were reused in churches and, in one case, a synagogue does not support such an interpretation. Nor did builders completely ignore inscriptions when they appropriated them as building material: at several sites, inscriptions were clearly taken into account during the construction process, even if their pagan content was moderated in some way, such as through scrambling or hiding. This chapter investigates the construction decisions that resulted in the protection or display of inscribed spolia and the ways these texts intersected with local identity formation.
The concluding chapter emphasizes that most viewers throughout the centuries read inscriptions not as epigraphers do, with a focus on historical accuracy, but rather through the lens of their own time, place, and cultural expectations. Furthermore, the continued vitality of ancient inscriptions in late antiquity has been overlooked in part because of a scholarly fixation on spolia to the exclusion of stones preserved in place. These inscriptions, spoliated or not, created the composite, intertextual epigraphic landscapes of late antique cities and sanctuaries. The afterlives of inscriptions paralleled to some degree those of pagan statues, but divergent ontologies of words and images in this period also resulted in different treatment of these two media. Finally, this chapter underlines once more that the inscriptions considered in this book proclaimed overwhelmingly civic messages, and this was still intelligible in late antiquity. Indeed, the decisions made about epigraphic material in that period resulted in the astounding preservation of thousands of inscriptions, which has enabled the development of the highly specialized field of epigraphy today.
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