The edited volume compiles conference papers from the North American Conference of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (NACGLE), held on 5–7 January 2020 at Georgetown University, Washington DC, organised by the editors. Dedicated to the late Ramsey MacMullen (1928–2022), a seminal figure in epigraphic research who coined the term ‘epigraphic habit’ to describe a society's propensity to produce inscriptions for communication, commemoration, or as an expression of identity and authority, the book features 18 chapters divided into four thematic groups by the approach and scale at which they address the epigraphic habit. These groups explore regional trends in epigraphy, inscriptions in specific social contexts (e.g., Rome, Pompeii, Ostia, Athens), and the role of individuals in epigraphic practices, including phenomena such as social mobility, cultural contact, cultural practices such as cursing and libation and their epigraphic footprints. The contributors discuss the commonalities of epigraphic activities in various contexts, starting from Archaic Greece and Classical Athens, through Roman Pompeii and Ostia, all the way to the Near East or Roman Britain and Hispania. Elizabeth Meyer’s concluding chapter, Epigraphic Habits and Epigraphic Communities, offers a comprehensive overview of the book’s contributions and their relevance to the ongoing discussion of the epigraphic habit and its transformation towards varied epigraphic cultures.
Three chapters particularly stand out. The first is John Bodel’s keynote address at the NACGLE conference in 2020, which examines the epigraphic habit and the state of the discipline. The other two chapters, which merit detailed discussion, exemplify well-executed regional epigraphic studies: Chapter 4 by Marta Fernandez-Corral explores the intensity of epigraphic behaviour in Hispania Citerior, while Chapter 5 by Joanna Porucznik focuses on the cities of the Northwestern Black Sea region.
John Bodel’s Chapter 1, Epigraphic Culture and the Epigraphic Mode, provides readers with an excellent introduction to the problematics of the ‘epigraphic habit,’ offering thought-provoking insights into the current state of epigraphy. It should be essential reading for any class on the subject, as it introduces the field and addresses the core problem identified by Macmullen in a concise and well-argued manner.1 Bodel highlights a conceptual divide between two groups of epigraphers: those focusing on the ‘epigraphic habit’ by studying monumental stone inscriptions (p. 1), and those examining literacy levels in the ancient world (p. 8), who tend to work with minor epigraphy, such as inscriptions on daily objects or texts of a less permanent nature, scratched or painted onto surfaces. Bodel explores the audience and communicative intent of inscriptions, asking to whom the texts were addressed and whether their audience was literate enough to understand their value.
In line with Silvio Panciera2, Bodel questions the very nature of epigraphy, asking what makes inscriptions distinctive as a medium. Panciera’s earlier answers did not persuade the academic community, and further elaboration was needed. In his proposed solution (p. 14) to this disciplinary divide, Bodel suggests abandoning the binary classification of epigraphy in favour of more inclusive criteria that account for varying degrees of ‘epigraphic worthiness’ to bring the two worlds together. Bodel critiques the current state of the discipline, arguing that existing taxonomies fail to address and capture the communicative intent of inscriptions, often conflating the carrier or technique with the message itself.3 In search for a more inclusive methodological approach, Bodel introduces the term epigraphic mode, which evaluates inscriptions based on criteria such as location, material support, language, writing technique, layout, and register of expressions (p. 14). His definition, centred on heightened self-awareness in the visual and topographic presentation of the textual message, might come off as too theoretical but can be elucidated by the following quote in Chapter 17 (p. 334): “John Bodel characterizes “epigraphic mode” as “any form of written expression that […] takes advantage visually of its location, material support, language, writing technique, layout, or register of expression to enhance the meaning for its targeted audience.” Whether we agree with the definition of epigraphic mode, Bodel’s argument calls for a more inclusive definition of epigraphy, considering the situational value of each text, as well as the intention and creativity of its maker (p. 15).
The primary weakness of Bodel’s otherwise excellent chapter is its lack of a conclusion, which may leave readers puzzled or disappointed by the absence of a resolution to the current disciplinary divide (p. 34). However, the chapter offers a valuable theoretical framework for addressing the divide inclusively, embracing diverse ‘epigraphic modes’ instead of dismissing texts for not being ‘epigraphic’ enough. In 2025, the focus should shift from deciding what is worthy of research to fostering collaboration and overcoming past divisions to enhance our understanding of the past, exactly as Bodel suggests.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine regional trends in Roman Hispania Citerior (Marta Fernandez-Corral, p. 81) and the Northwestern Black Sea (Joanna Porucznik, p. 95), standing out for their depth and approaches to understanding the factors driving epigraphic activities in their respective regions. Both authors compiled a substantial body of material and critically evaluated the representativeness of their samples across spatial, social, and, in Porucznik’s case, temporal contexts. A common limitation in both studies is the minimal use of statistical methods, which prevents fully leveraging the collected data. Most analyses rely on basic descriptive statistics, such as frequencies of inscriptions over space and time, without proportional comparisons to the overall body of evidence. Another shared issue is the exclusion of imperfect data, which could be addressed through computational techniques like temporal modelling for inscriptions with broad or uncertain dates and machine learning to classify conceptual models across datasets, e.g., typologies. This omission significantly reduces sample sizes, by up to 49.1 % in the case of Chapter 5 (p. 97), impacting the representativeness of the results. While the trends identified may remain similar even with the full dataset, including all available data would yield more robust and comparable findings across similar cases. However, this cannot be confirmed until the datasets are digitised and accessible for replication and the application of advanced statistical methods.
Similar to other volumes addressing the epigraphic habit4, most papers in this collection lack the application of quantitative methods to analyse the epigraphic habit within specific regions or inscription types, despite the book's theme calling for such approaches. With a few exceptions (e.g., Chapters 4 and 5), the authors predominantly take a traditional approach, focusing on close readings of select exemplary cases—often exceptional ones—rather than exploring broader trends (e.g., Chapters 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 17). The methodologies and the extent of comprehensive analytical approaches vary significantly across the papers, as is often the case with collections of conference contributions authored by diverse individuals and teams. This variability reflects the state of the discipline in 2020, prior to the AI revolution and the rapid development of analytical methods designed specifically for inscriptions.5 Should a similar volume be assembled in 2025, the research questions would likely reflect the transformative impact of emerging technologies. These advancements could address longstanding methodological challenges, integrate existing Linked Open Data, expand the scope of research possibilities, and foster a culture of collaboration, as well as adherence to FAIR and Open Science principles.6
The volume was carefully put together and edited. All chapters undeniably hold significant research value for their specific case studies, but their full potential remains unrealised, especially considering the ambitious scope of analysing a topic as complex as the epigraphic habit. I believe that once the discipline consolidates and embraces collaboration in earnest, as Bodel suggested in Chapter 1, this volume will mark an important step toward successfully tackling the nature of the epigraphic habit, as Ramsey MacMullen originally set out to do in 1982.
Notes:
1 Ramsay MacMullen, The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire, in: The American Journal of Philology 103/3 (1982), pp. 233–246, https://doi.org/10.2307/294470.
2 Silvio Panciera, Epigraphy and Informatics, in: John K. Davies / John J. Wilkes (eds.), Epigraphy and the Historical Sciences, Oxford 2012, pp. 271–273.
3 Bodel’s text predates the FAIR Epigraphy project, launched to address these issues by disentangling and streamlining epigraphic classifications to adhere to a single conceptual model. For details, see https://www.inscriptiones.org. Disclosure: Heřmánková is a member of the FAIR Epigraphy team.
4 Katharina Bolle / Carlos Machado / Christian Witschel (eds.), The Epigraphic Cultures of Late Antiquity, Stuttgart 2017; Krzysztof Nawotka (eds.), Epigraphic Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity, London 2020, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003025306.
5 Petra Heřmánková / Vojtěch Kaše / Adéla Sobotkova, Inscriptions as Data. Digital Epigraphy in Macro-Historical Perspective, in: Journal of Digital History 1/1 (2021), pp. 99–141, https://doi.org/10.1515/jdh-2021-1004; Vojtěch Kaše / Petra Heřmánková, / Adéla Sobotková, Classifying Latin Inscriptions of the Roman Empire. A Machine-Learning Approach, in: CHR 2021: Computational Humanities Research Conference, Amsterdam 2021, pp. 123–135, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2989/short_paper12.pdf; Alessandro Locaputo / Beatrice Portelli / Emanuela Colombi / Giuseppe Serra, Filling the Lacunae in Ancient Latin Inscriptions, in: 19th IRCDL (The Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science), Bari 2023, https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3365/short5.pdf; Evelien de Graaf / Silvia Stopponi / Jasper K. Bos / Saskia Peels-Matthey / Malvina Nissim, AGILe. The First Lemmatizer for Ancient Greek Inscriptions, in: Nicoletta Calzolari / Frédéric Béchet / Philippe Blache / Khalid Choukri / Christopher Cieri / Thierry Declerck / Sara Goggi, et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille 2022, pp. 5334–5344, https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.571; Yannis Assael / Thea Sommerschield / Brendan Shillingford / Mahyar Bordbar / John Pavlopoulos / Marita Chatzipanagiotou / Ion Androutsopoulos / Jonathan Prag / Nando de Freitas, Restoring and Attributing Ancient Texts Using Deep Neural Networks, in: Nature 603/7900 (2022), pp. 280–283, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04448-z; Patrick J. Burns, LatinCy. Synthetic Trained Pipelines for Latin NLP, in: arXiv (2023), https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.04365.
6 John Bodel / Jonathan R. W. Prag / Charlotte Roueché, Open Scholarship. Epigraphic Corpora in the Digital Age, in: Pierre Fröhlich / Milagros Navarro Caballero (eds.), L’épigraphie Au XXIe Siècle. Actes Du XVIe Congrès International d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine, Bordeaux, 29 Août-02 Septembre 2022, pp. 91–117.