Pagan Inscriptions, Christian Viewers

Abstract

What did people in the early Christian period (4th–7th century ce) think about the ancient, pagan inscriptions filling their cities? Why, for example, is the famous Res Gestae of the “divine” Augustus almost perfectly preserved on the walls of a temple in Ankara in Asia Minor, even though the city became a Christian imperial center? The prima facie explanation—that late Romans ignored the older epigraphic material around them—is proven untrue in this book. By gathering both literary and archaeological evidence, this study indicates that early Christians (and late pagans, Jews) in the eastern Mediterranean interpreted older inscriptions in Greek and other languages through their own worldviews. After establishing the modes of reading ancient inscriptions in the textual sources, the book presents a series of archaeological case studies spanning from Greece to Egypt, which reveal three possible reactions to epigraphic material—preservation, spoliation, and erasure—at pagan sanctuaries, the physical and discursive spaces in which the “culture wars” of early Christian hegemony were fought. Intersecting with research on spolia, damnatio memoriae, and the fates of pagan statues, this book makes a critical intervention in the fields of epigraphy and archaeology by arguing for the transtemporal agency of inscriptions. It adds a new facet to the study of “Christianization” in the Roman world by proposing that ancient inscriptions contributed to broader attitudes about the (pagan) past in late antiquity, attitudes that continued to color how people in the medieval period and beyond evaluated classical patrimony.