It is now notorious that the production of inscriptions in the Roman Empire was not constant over time, but rose over the first and second centuries A.D. and fell in the third. Ramsay MacMullen pointed this out more than five years ago, with conclusions more cautionary than explanatory: ‘history is not being written in the right way’, he said, for historians have deduced Rome's decline from evidence that–since it appears only epigraphically–has merely disappeared for its own reasons, or have sought general explanations of decline in theories political, economic, or even demographic in nature, none of which can, in turn, explain the disappearance of epigraphy itself. Why this epigraphic habit rose and fell MacMullen left open to question, although he did postulate control by a ‘sense of audience’. The purpose of this paper is to propose that this ‘sense of audience’ was not generalized or generic, but depended on a belief in the value of romanization, of which (as noted but not explained by MacMullen's article) the epigraphic habit is also a rough indicator. Epitaphs constitute the bulk of all provincial inscriptions and in form and number are (generally speaking) the consequence of a provincial imitation of characteristically Roman practices, an imitation that depended on the belief that Roman legal status and style were important, and that may indeed have ultimately depended, at least in North Africa, on the acquisition or prior possession of that status. Such status-based motivations for erecting an epitaph help to explain not only the chronological distribution of epitaphs but also the differences in the type and distribution of epitaphs in the western and eastern halves of the empire. They will be used here moreover to suggest an explanation for the epigraphic habit as a whole.

‘Death is bad for those who die, but good for the undertakers and the grave-diggers’. (Dissoi Logoii 3)And for archaeologists and for epigraphers as well, even though epitaphs, and especially simple or formulaic ones, are probably the most understudied and unloved area of ancient epigraphy. Yet the mere fact of an inscribed epitaph indicates deliberate and intentionally enduring commemoration, and therefore embodies a social attitude; epitaphs thus constitute a matter of historical importance that can be studied for the very reason that so many—in Athens over 10,000—survive. Most Athenian epitaphs which have been found have been dated, and for approximately two-thirds of them a general find-spot has been recorded (very few are actually foundin situwith a body or grave-goods). Temporal and spatial variations within the distribution of Athenian epitaphs (Part I) prompt not only the question of why aspects of this habit should change over time, but why the habit of epitaphs should exist at all; the answer suggested here links the function and distribution of Athenian epitaphs to changing concepts of (and importance attached to) Athenian citizenship. For epitaphs function as more than testimonials to grief: they represent what survivors saw as defining the deceased (Part II), and the significantly greater number of epitaphs in fourth-century Athens derives from Athenians' emphatic definition of themselves as citizens at that time (Part III). Finally, the Athenians's use of tombstones has no parallel in the classical Greek world (Part IV), for the Athenians' developing perceptions of their own city and of their own special relationship, as citizens, to it, were also unparalleled.

Greeks wrote mostly on papyrus, but the Romans wrote solemn religious, public and legal documents on wooden tablets often coated with wax. This book investigates the historical significance of this resonant form of writing; its power to order the human realm and cosmos and to make documents efficacious; its role in court; the uneven spread - an aspect of Romanization - of this Roman form outside Italy, as provincials made different guesses as to what would please their Roman overlords; and its influence on the evolution of Roman law. An historical epoch of Roman legal transactions without writing is revealed as a juristic myth of origins. Roman legal documents on tablets are the ancestors of today's dispositive legal documents - the document as the act itself. In a world where knowledge of the Roman law was scarce - and enforcers scarcer - the Roman law drew its authority from a wider world of belief.

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The Harmodius-and-Aristogeiton 'digression' or 'excursus' in Thucydides Book 6 is one of the most unusual passages in the entire work. Older scholarly incomprehension or denigration of its importance 1 has been gradually replaced by the growing perception that it plays a crucial role in explaining-something 2-in Thucydides' history. The unexpected veer into a sketch of the story at 1.20 and the surprise of its lengthy presentation later (6.53-9), in the midst of a narrative devoted to something else entirely (or so it would seem), single out the excursus as especially worthy of close attention and suggest that Thucydides intended as much. Here previous scholarly analyses of the excursus are briefly surveyed. The episode will then be given another close reading (I), compared to its two frames, Thucydides' narrative of the Athenian response to the mutilation of the herms and the profanation of the Mysteries, and the Sicilian Expedition and its failure (II), and then all three-episode and two frames-examined in relationship to the famous Thucydidean statement on method (1.20-2) with which the episode is-uniquely-closely related (III). 3 Parallels in language at all levels suggest, first, that the excursus marks the moment in its larger framing narrative at which the Athenians truly became tyrannical, how this tyranny is defined, and why it happened at this moment; why-second-the Athenians made the bad decisions about Sicily that they did; and, third, what the relationship between evidence, clarity, contemplation, understanding, and decision should have been, all also of crucial concern in 1.20-2. The emphatic association of the Harmodius-and-Aristogeiton story with Thucydides' statement of historical method and historical ambition in 1.20-2 suggests strongly that his presentation of Harmodius and Aristogeiton is a paradigmatic demonstration of how to establish the facts, but also of how the correct assessment of evidence permits precision (), which in turn leads to clarity ()-the 'useful' contribution Thucydides wanted his work, above all, to make-so that his historical ambition, that through careful scrutiny the past would have correct meaning(s) for readers in the present, would be fulfilled. One strand of scholarship on the purpose of the digression denied that Thucydides intended to draw a connection between 514, when the tyrant Hippias' brother 13 * With my thanks to