Inscriptions are our tweets from the ancient Romans. From the alphabets scrawled by school children on wax tablets to the curse tablets of scorned lovers and the biographical epitaphs on funerary monuments lining the roads leading into Roman cities they provide an intimate view of daily life in the ancient world, while public inscriptions document the political, religious, and social workings of the Roman state. This course will survey a representative sampling of the Latin inscriptional record from the earliest period through the Empire, including examples of laws, decrees, and religious dedications, Augustus' Res Gestae, and the methods employed in inscribing objects. |