Based on a survey of the evidence for perishable and liminal Roman material writing habits that might appropriately be described as ‘fringe epigraphy’, this paper invites a conceptual re‐evaluation of writing and the role of letters, words, and texts – including their perception – in the Roman world. It thus challenges recent attempts of an all too narrow disciplinary, institutional view of what might constitute Latin epigraphy. Much rather, it is argued, it seems appropriate to think of the Roman world as a fundamentally lettered one – a world that is not only described and perceived, but, in actual fact, even imagined and explained in such terms, allowing for fluid transitions from monumental to informal, from serious and communication‐driven to playful, pointless, and sensational, and ultimately from real to imagined.
The way in which the Roman army, as a major factor contributing to relative mobility of individuals within the Roman Empire, may be thought of as a driver behind the diffusion and general dynamic of Roman poetry and song, has not sufficiently been explored. Similarly, regionalized approaches to poetry and song as a cultural practice, subject to local, ethnic, social, and cultural variation and change, have not yet been pursued in a research context in which Roman poetry has largely remained a domain of study in upper-class entertainment and intertextuality. Not only is the common approach at odds with a methodology that has long, and successfully, been adopted otherwise in historical and linguistic research: it also excludes the vast majority of surviving poems from the Roman world, the Carmina Latina Epigraphica, from consideration – a body of texts that provides us with information about a cultural practice that, subject to substantial regional variation, literary poets stylized and drove to its artistic extremes.
This chapter investigates Latin inscriptions that contain linguistic features which appear to stem from popular, as opposed to elite, usage and are rarely, if ever, found in Roman literary authors, unless these were explicitly seeking to mimic uneducated, semi-literate, or moronic people’s speech. Topics treated include: diastratic, diaphasic, and diatopic varieties of Latin, the now contested concept of “Vulgar Latin,” and the phonology, morphology, and syntax and semantics of such Latin inscriptions. The chapter traces the broader use of the Latin language than that found in the literary corpus and thus widens our understanding of what may be considered “standard” Latin.
This article reconsiders the evidence for Furius Bibaculus’ historical epic Annales Belli Gallici, an epic arguably covering Caesar’s warfare in Gaul. In addition to a reconsideration of the textual evidence and the testimonia, this article discusses in detail questions of authorship, date, and sources. The article concludes with some observations on language and content of the Annales Belli Gallici.
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