The study of Pompeian inscriptions has a long and glorious past. The writings on the walls and carvings in the stone have been investigated thoroughly from many perspectives since the first ones saw the light of day in the early excavations and were published in Volume 4 of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the highly ambitious publication series of epigraphical texts, in 1871. These inscriptions have been used as important sources for Latin linguistics as well as the political, economic and social history of the Campanian town. Epigraphic material has been used to identify inhabitants of the town and owners of particular properties. And as often is the case, Pompeian evidence has been used as a case study for wider Roman society, with wide-reaching generalisations of the ‘Roman life’ of the town.
Despite the long history, the Pompeian epigraphic evidence has not yet yielded all that it can give. For decades research concentrated mainly on the textual evidence of inscriptions, with no or little attention to the context and materiality of the writings. This has, however, changed rapidly in the past decade, and research into contextualising inscriptions has boomed. Spatial analysis of the find locations has been published for instance by P. Lohmann and R. Benefiel, who have written extensively on graffiti in private houses, and E.-M. Viitanen, whose research concentrates especially on the programmata, publicly painted electoral notices, in their archaeological contexts. The theoretical framework of exploration into inscriptions in their material contexts emphasises how our understanding of both epigraphy and ancient space(s) remains limited if the inscribed texts are treated as separate entities, without taking into account the places and spaces the texts appear in.
In the English description of the book under review, the work is set in the ‘interconnections between the context, action, content, and materiality of the texts’, placing the study in dialogue with this recent research. O. has promoted the holistic approach to inscribed texts in their context previously, as co-editor of Writing Matters. Presenting and Perceiving Monumental Inscriptions in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (2017).
The book is an ambitious undertaking aiming at finding out the cultural significance of writing in public space. It studies the inscriptions as artefacts forming part of the social space of the city, shaped by its inhabitants, and is positioned in the intersection of spatial analysis of Pompeii and epigraphic scholarship, focusing on the location and appearance of the inscriptions in urban areas. The starting point is the analysis of the actors involved in writing and reading: what was the communicative function of inscriptions in public space and how was it was achieved, and how did the inscriptions work within their environment?
The substantial book is divided into six chapters, including an extensive catalogue of the inscriptions, colour plates, and maps of the texts and spaces discussed. My suggestion for readers is to start their exploration of the book from the end, with the maps and photographs in ‘Farbabbildungen’ (p. 341 onwards). As the book discusses how the writings were perceived in the built environment, taking a good look around the environment serves as a good starting point. O. argues that not only the writing but also the design and location of the texts are meaningful for communication. Therefore, to understand the spatial aspects of inscribing, readers need to position themselves in the area.
Once familiarised with the surroundings, one can proceed to the material of the study, which consists of Pompeian inscriptions (and some examples from Herculaneum) in stone and metal, painted or carved on the walls (dipinti and graffiti). The texts include funerary and honorary inscriptions, building dedications, lists of people holding official positions etc., focusing on writings in the public sphere. Among the painted dipinti, Pompeii offers a unique collection of programmata, i.e. electoral notices. The edicta munerum, advertising gladiatorial games, make up another large group of writings, typical of Pompeii. These painted inscriptions form a rather formal group of texts. Graffiti, on the other hand, reveal more intimate connections: versatile texts and pictures written by private inhabitants of the town. All these types, along with their materiality, production and design, are presented meticulously in Chapter 2, ‘Beschreibung und quantitative Erfassung der Inschriften’.
O. focuses specifically on the metatextuality of inscriptions in Chapter 3, ‘taedia sustineas – zeitgenössische Reflexionen über Schrift im öffentlichen Raum’, which takes its headline taedia sustineas from the so-called admiror te paries inscription (p. 142). The painted texts, dipinti, contain metatexts, i.e. writing referring to writing, most notably in the signature scripsit (‘so-and-so wrote’) found in numerous programmata. These signatures give weight to the texts by highlighting the authorship by a skilled group of professionals. But not only the painted electoral notices comment on writing; the same can be said of graffiti too. The admiror te paries inscriptions appear in three, almost but not quite, identical versions on Pompeian walls. One example, admiror te paries non cecidisse | qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas (CIL IV 2487), freely interpreted in English as, ‘I admire you, wall, for not falling down, you who sustain so much tediousness from writers’, reveals how even the anonymously scribbled inscriptions take part in the dialogue of writing culture in the Roman world. Chapter 3 also contains a list of literary passages (and their translations) concerning ancient epigraphic traditions (3.1 ‘Literarische Quellen’), which seems somewhat redundant in this day and age of digital online databases, with easy access to practically all ancient literature. This could have been pared down to a more compact and dynamic literary analysis.
In Chapter 4, ‘Kontexte’, individual inscriptions are used to investigate what kind of communicative functions and intentions can be identified and whether the inscriptions reveal movement patterns of the inhabitants and visitors of the cityscape. The focus is on the appearance, location, materials and design of the texts. By putting form and content at the centre of the investigation, O. analyses how the form and inscription type relate to one another. The investigation into the intersections of typography and space is the book's strongest contribution to the field of epigraphy and Pompeian studies.
O. manages to explain convincingly how the spatial features have a direct or indirect effect on the communicative aspects of the texts and how the texts, reciprocally, shaped the space and movement in it. For instance, in certain areas of Pompeii, the placement of the inscriptions was designed to stop the movement of passers-by who read the texts, as they were properly visible only from one angle. The title of the book, Die Stadt als beschriebener Raum, and O.'s concluding arguments (pp. 246–7) suggest that the inhabitants of Pompeii from various social groups were able to appropriate (‘Raumaneignung’) the urban space through writings on the walls and thus participate in public life by means not fully appreciated in earlier scholarship.
O.'s book aligns with the current trend of epigraphic studies adding the importance of the appearance and design of the writings in understanding how they were used for communication, as concluded in Chapter 5, ‘Ergebnisse und Zusammenfassung’. As the weightiest contribution to the ongoing discussion on contextualising inscriptions, O. offers the view that it is not just the spatial arrangements, but also the form and appearance of the texts that are vital for a full understanding of the meaning of these writings. The fonts or colour schemes of Pompeian inscriptions are not random but carefully chosen to enhance both durability and visibility of the texts, and the colours of the plaster and the paintwork shaped the visual appearance of the city to a large extent. Form and content are intricately linked with one another, and there cannot be one without the other, a good reminder for future epigraphic studies.
