According to Canali De Rossi, the three volumes of Le iscrizioni degli antichi autori e latini contextualize the aggregate of his knowledge of inscriptions accrued within the broader frame of his teaching over many years of Greek and Latin literature. As acknowledged in his prefatory remarks to the notional reader (al lettore), this very particular publication is the outcome of a profoundly personal labour of collation, abstraction, and presentation. Harvesting information from the Suda (composed ca. 1000 CE) and the familiar databases of epigraphic corpora, Canali De Rossi aims to generate a catalogue of references in the epigraphic record of named writers from Graeco-Roman antiquity. Although aware of the idiosyncratic nature of historical information derived from a Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, Canali De Rossi indicates that any qualms about the nature of evidence extracted from the lexicon should be tempered against the value of its data and the associated degree of interest (“le molte notizie interessanti e poco valorizzate che vi si trovato”, p. i). He is also cognizant of the associated demands imposed by the broad search criterion of “Greek/Latin author” when confronted with what is acknowledged as “the excessive abundance of relevant material” (“l’eccessiva abbondanza del materiale pertinente”, p. i) in the surviving repertoire of Greek and Latin inscriptions. In relation to the breadth of this criterion, it is important to note that Canali De Rossi classifies authorial references under two categories: writers whose works or testimonies about literary activity have been transmitted in the extant literary record; and authors attested exclusively in inscriptions. With these caveats and analytical parameters in place, Canali De Rossi stipulates that the resulting collection of inscriptions and associated historical commentary, while not in any way comprehensive, will constitute a meaningful contribution to the reconstruction of biographical detail about ancient writers from Homer (ca. 8th cent. BCE) to Pope Gregory I (540-604 CE).
The work is divided into three volumes. Volume 1 provides information about the authors to whom Canali De Rossi’s selected inscriptions refer. A brief (single-page) introduction registers the long gestation of the volume, the epigraphic and literary foci underpinning Canali De Rossi’s catalogue, and the desired alignment between the plentiful references to Greek and Latin authors preserved in the surviving published and digital collections and additamenta of ancient inscriptions and, as noted above, the Byzantine collection of lexicographical entries, biographical notices, and literary paraphrases known as the Suda. What becomes clear—and is acknowledged explicitly by Canali De Rossi—is the overarching purpose of Le iscrizioni: to establish a series titled Scriptorum Antiquorum Tituli which, following current epigraphic conventions and drawing on existing corpora and related publications of known and newly discovered inscriptions from the ancient world, will record extant or transcribed epigraphic references to Greek and Latin authors and their literary output and provide commentary about biographical, literary, and philological matters arising from study of these inscriptions. Canali De Rossi notes here that he had previously published in Latin a specimen of the intended series.[1]
Here is a selected item (translated from the Italian) given in full to illustrate the approach employed in Volume One:
C. MEMMIUS, orator and poet reached the highest level of political life in 58 BCE. with the election to the magistrate. Immediately after the praetorship he was governor of Bithynia and brought the young poet Helvius Cinna and Valerius Catullus with him to the province: the latter was disappointed by Memmius’ illiberal behaviour towards the comitatus, a severity that probably benefited the provincial. It must be considered, in the absence of other identifications, that he is the patron … RUFUS honoured in Rome by the cities of this province with a grandiose monument, of whose bilingual dedication inscription only the patronymic remains (L.f.: corresponding to that of Memmius) and the cognomen (Rufus: in the case of Memmius it is not known): of the dedications placed by the individual cities, six remain (454 a-f).
At this point in the item, Canali De Rossi supplies translations (in Italian) of six transcribed (Greek) inscriptions referring to C. Memmius Rufus (catalogued as 454a-f), fragments of which were once located (according to the 15th-century humanist and book printer Aldo Manutius and the 16th-century Neapolitan antiquary Pirro Ligorio who recorded these fragmentary texts) in the floor of the Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Lucina but which are now lost. Prefaced by the select apparatus, which comprises a bibliography of the major corpora (CIL VI 1508; IG XIV 1077; IGR I 139; IGUR I 71; Moretti, Miscellanea Manni, pp. 1585-92) and select scholarship (incl. two of Canali De Rossi’s own published studies),[2] the pertinent epigraphic texts of these six fragments are listed according to alphabetic designation (a-f) in the corresponding item (454) in Volume Two (p. 591).
The entry continues:
Subsequently convicted of fraud in the consular elections for 53 BCE, Memmius withdrew into exile in Athens, where he wanted to build a villa on the house of Epicurus, a fact perhaps related to his adherence to Epicureanism (and the dedicatee of the poem of Lucretius). He was praised as a man of letters by Cicero, who affirms among other things that he was fonder of Greek letters than of Latin ones. Furthermore, Memmius had notoriety not only as a patron of poets but was himself learned, and distinguished himself as an orator in numerous circumstances, although according to Cicero, who appreciated his wit and suaviloquentia, he shied away from the trouble of elaborating and pronouncing adequately his speeches.
As illustrated above, the second part of the work (Volume Two) presents the texts of the selected inscriptions, linked by progressive numbers and letters to the pages of the text and to the commentary provided in Volume One. Letters are used to distinguish multiple inscriptions referring to the same author. Rather than provide the essential bibliography for each epigraphic item, Canali De Rossi refers to the main (or most recent) editions only. The underlying intention of this approach is noted in the introduction to Volume One (p. i): “in maniera che il lettore interessato possa compiere utilmente in proprio ulteriori approfondimenti” (“so that the interested reader can complete usefully on their own further investigations”).
Volume Three comprises a bibliography and a series of helpful indices that gather all the relevant evidence into clear and easy-to-use categories: authors’ names, other proper names (including names of divinities and heroes, and of personal and post-classical names), place-names, notable things, works mentioned, Greek words and numerals, Latin words, and quoted passages. A final index of epigraphic sources completes the volume. These indices allow users to readily access the material assembled in the preceding volumes.
What is evident both in every item addressed over the 324 quarto pages of textual commentary (Volume Two) and the 750 pages of transcribed Greek and Latin inscriptions with associated bibliographical apparatus (Volume Two) is the antiquarian spirit informing the structural frame, selection of epigraphic items, and provision of historical, biographical, literary, and textual detail. Use of the antiquarian label should not, however, suggest that Canali De Rossi’s annotated catalogue reflects an excessively narrow focus on epigraphic trivia. It is important to recognize (as does the author) that the volumes comprising Le iscrizioni degli antichi autori greci e latini capture the historical and cultural processes of epigraphic commemoration and transmission.
There is, naturally, a danger in adopting such a deeply personal approach to such an ambitious enterprise. This is, after all, a project modelled on one of the enduring encyclopaedic dictionaries of the medieval Eastern Roman Empire, a lexicon comprising a vast and heterogeneous body of evidence presenting a series of challenges and possible interpretative approaches. It is also abundantly clear that Canali De Rossi’s goal—namely, to engage with and bring order to hundreds of epigraphic references to authors of ancient literature (epic verse, tragedy, comedy, elegiac poetry, satire, grammar, history, jurisprudence, oratory, philosophy, and so on) spanning the chronological extent of Graeco-Roman antiquity—affords opportunities for users of Le iscrizioni to uncover discursive patterns that in turn might shed fresh light on antiquity’s preoccupations with history, with the literary refinements of past generations, and the preservation of tradition and cultural memory through the written (in particular, the inscribed) word. Although the focus of commentary and textual catalogue should not be misconstrued as a critical edition of closely associated inscriptions but rather as what amounts to an epigraphic pastiche of biographical attributions, Canali De Rossi’s three-volume reference work will prove invaluable to those interested in epigraphic practices and discursive protocols, in reconstructing an understudied aspect of Graeco-Roman intellectual culture, and to the manifold representations of literature across time in the inscribed spaces of antiquity.
Notes
[1] Canali De Rossi, F., Scriptorum Antiquorum Tituli, Roma: Scienze e Lettere, 2019.
[2] Canali De Rossi, F., Le ambascerie dal mondo greco a Roma in età repubblicana (Studi pubblicato dall’Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica, 63), Rome: Istituto Italiano per la storia antica, 1997; idem, Il ruolo dei patroni nelle relazioni politiche fra il mondo greco e Roma in età repubblicana ed augustea, Munich, Leipzig: K.G. Saur Verlag GmbH, 2001.