The documents of the cohors XX Palmyrenorum found in Dura-Europos are, alongside the wooden tablets from Vindolanda and the ostraca from the Roman guard posts in the eastern Egyptian desert (Hélène Cuvigny, Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, 2 vols., New York 2021 etc.), among the most important groups of written records of the Roman army. After their discovery in the early 1930s and the publication of some especially important texts, they were first presented in their entirety in 1959 (C. Bradford Welles, Robert O. Fink, John F. Gilliam, The Excavations at Dura-Europos conducted by Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters Final Report V, Part 1. The Parchments and Papyri, New Haven 1959). Robert O. Fink republished them together with comparable papyri known from other contexts in his Roman Military Records on Papyrus (Philological Monographs of the American Philological Association 26), Cleveland, Ohio 1971.[1] Along with all known Latin papyri (roughly 1,500, to be published in a multi-volume Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus), these have been studied from 2015 to 2022 under the EU-funded project Platinum (= Papyri and LAtin Texts: INsights and Updated Methodologies. Towards a philological, literary, and historical approach to Latin papyri; https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/636983/results/de ). Giulio Iovine was a member of the Platinum team dealing especially with the Dura Papyri.
The introduction of this monograph raises a number of expectations: “This book contains a new edition, with translation in English and an updated commentary, of all the Latin documentary texts … connected to the Roman cohort stationed in the town of Dura-Europos … The main aim … is to provide an updated text and state of the art concerning these papyri, in a book easily accessible and available for consultation” (p. XV). As for prior editions, the editor states (p. XVI): “Those editions, all renowned and masterly examples of Classical scholarship, can nevertheless be improved by a further, more accessible and updated edition. The editions … were done without the digital microscope”. We shall return to these claims.
Let us first outline the contents of the book: An “Introduction” of four pages sketches the significance of the military records from Dura-Europos for various disciplines and offers an overview of the book’s chapters. The first short chapter deals with the history of Dura-Europos and its garrison, based principally (p. 10) on the research of Simon James (The Roman Military Base at Dura-Europos, Syria: An Archaeological Visualisation, Oxford 2019). It is followed by a chapter of equal length, describing the types of Roman army documents preserved at Dura-Europos, i. e. letters, especially epistulae probatoriae, acta diurna, rosters, guard rosters, lists, legal texts, labels and “uncertain documents”.
Next we find a huge chapter “Who’s who in the XX Palmyrenorum” (p. 41-161). After a short introduction on onomastics the names of the individuals are presented in lists, arranged first according to rank and then, in each respective list, alphabetically. For each individual the list records the name, the place in the documents where the soldier is found, and what we know about him—often only his centuria and sometimes his assignment at a specific date. At the end, there are 14 pages of “isolated Aurelii”, i.e. those for whom only the nomen gentile, Aurelius, survives, and 12 pages of “isolated genitives or badly preserved names”.[2] The introductory third of the book concludes with a chapter discussing the characteristics of the Latin script in the corpus. The aim is to characterize the development from the older to the younger Roman cursive on the basis of the documents from Dura.
The corpus itself starts on p. 139 and comprises roughly 100 texts. These texts are presented according to the following scheme (p. 193 f.): 1. header, giving the official designation, dating, brief summary, TM number, measurements; 2. physical description (conservation etc.); 3. original text, “following in Fink’s footsteps, I respect the original layout of the text as much as possible, which also means, not solving the abbreviations”; 4. critical apparatus; 5. English translation; 6. a “line-by-line commentary, when necessary”. As the author underlines, the scheme mostly matches typical editorial practice in papyrology. Iovine’s edition is apparently more “papyrological” and substantial than the presentation of these texts in the forthcoming Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus, characterized by Iovine as a “container of Latin texts” (p. 193).
By contrast to modern papyrological standards, the editions here are not accompanied by photographs. Instead, the reader is referred to a website at the Beinecke Library. In the corpus small photographs document only specific readings of short phrases or singular letters, so that a reader can form no impression of whole texts or the layout of documents. This is regrettable, especially since photos of the whole documents are not accessible via the large papyrological databases. In the edition of 1959 already 53 of these papyri were represented by one or two photographs. Modern publishing would have offered the possibility to show them all and in color. However, this decision may have been due to a restrictive practice on the part of the copyright holder.
The corpus offers a new guiding principle for the arrangement of the texts/entries. Previously, documents were organized by type. Iovine arranges them according to his ideas about the development of the Latin cursive, distributing them across six chapters dealing with the first six decades of the 3rd century AD and one of papyri of uncertain date.
If one goes through the individual entries, one gets the following impression: The use of the digital microscope leads to new readings of singular letters and to greater certainty in the identification of others already read by previous editors, often at the beginning or end of a line. However, no major progress has been made in terms of whole texts or the content of the individual documents. This impression is confirmed by the critical apparatus which tends to list minutiae (see for example p. 524; 559-560; 563; 606). Also, there are more translations than in the edition of 1959 or in Fink’s Roman Military Records, where texts were translated when at least a small sentence could be understood, i. e. the morning reports, the files of letters and the Feriale Duranum. Iovine tries to translate every word, even addresses, greetings, dates and names left on scraps. Even the lists are “translated”, so that we find after a long list in Latin a long list in English with very few differences because the English form of an ancient name is normally the Latin one (e.g. p. 267-277; 288-346; 397-447 etc.). Of course the abbreviated nomina gentilia are resolved.
At the end of the volume we find 15 very fragmentary texts published by the author in an earlier publication (Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 56, 2019, 95-116), the Feriale Duranum and a list of Greek papyri among the documents of the cohors XX Pamyrenorum. There are no indices and no concordance with earlier editions.
With regard to the edition of the texts, the use of new technology by Iovine has largely served to confirm the reliability of the texts of the earlier editors. He has improved them in detail, but was unable to present major new readings—this is a compliment to the earlier editors and not a criticism of him, except that the work should not be announced as grandiloquently as it was. Similarly, the commentary rarely adds much to the older ones. Unfortunately, the commentaries and the introductory sections contain a number of minor errors.[3]
The central new perspective in the edition is obviously the development of the Latin cursive within the first half of the 3rd century. Giulio Iovine finds confirmation of the ideas of Emanuele Casamassima and Elena Staraz (“Varianti e cambio grafico nella scrittura dei papiri latini: note paleografiche”, Scrittura e civiltà 1, 1977, 9-110) and of Davide Internullo (his unpublished BA Thesis of 2009) in the scripts used in the Dura papyri (p. 185 f., 191). Whatever future discussion and evidence from other places and written artefacts will say about this palaeographic development, it makes a poor ordering principle for the corpus. Scribes who were active in a particular year could have differed in age by several decades and could therefore have learned very different scripts. And in one important sense this ordering principle represents a step backwards: the majority of the documents are fragmentary and cannot be dated with certainty. Arranging the texts by document type would have permitted the reader to confront first the documents that have been preserved most completely. Thus, the reader could gain an understanding of a given document type before confronting very fragmentary texts and having to judge how to categorize and understand them. Iovine’s edition first confronts the reader with the oldest—and therefore usually the worst preserved—examples, making it difficult to check the editor, at least at first. It remains to be seen whether the greater scope of the translations of the texts will really lead to the very fragmentary ones receiving more attention in the future. Finally, it is a somewhat strange decision not to include a concordance and indices, but 150 pages of lists of names.[4]
In conclusion, we have here a new edition of a group of already well edited papyri with a new emphasis on the development of the younger Roman cursive. But the volume misses the chance to offer illustrations of these papyri and is weighted down by 120 pages of lists of names. Most users of the book will probably be students of the Roman army, its literacy and its documents, who will have expected more and deeper discussion of these aspects. At least for them Fink’s Roman Military Records has not been replaced.
Notes
[1] This was probably the edition most widely used in the pre-digital age. In view of the cost and characteristics of the series, volumes VI-IX of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores, compiled by Robert Marichal between 1975 and 1977, were used only by a few specialists in selected libraries.
[2] The author calls this a prosopography, which it is not, at least not in the sense of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire or Hubert Devijver’s Prosopographia militiarum equestrium. All these prosopographies are based on several sources referring to each person, offering a number of items characterizing the career or the character of the individual in question, from whose synopsis the person and its life can at least be partially reconstructed. We have such sources only in the case of a handful of officers doing duty at Dura-Europos.
[3] For example, the tria nomina are not “Republican” (p. 42), but only became established in the early imperial period. “Top-ranking Roman soldier/officer” is used here for a wide variety of officers of the Roman army (p. 34, 39, 40, 200) and not only for high equestrian or senatorial office holders, as it should be. To characterize duplicarii and sesquiplicarii as “lieutenants” (p. 34) or a cornicularius as “adjutant” (p. 285), is problematic, because these were ranks held by charged common soldiers, who were socially far inferior to a centurio or even more to junior equestrian officers like a tribunus or praefectus. Treating the Historia Augusta as a source of knowledge with the same reliability as the Feriale Duranum (p. 670, 673 ad l. 4) ignores the entire scientific discussion about this highly problematic work.
[4] The editor felt an index verborum was not necessary, “given that all the texts are available in online repositories where queries for single words or sequences of letters are possible” (p. XVIII). Does the same not apply to names?