The practice of reading, recording, and thinking about inscriptions is common to both the modern and ancient worlds. From the archaic period onwards, ancient literary authors working within a range of genres discussed and quoted a range of inscriptions (dedications, archives, legislation, funerary inscriptions) as ornamental devices, as alternative voices to that of the narrator, to display scholarship, to make points about history, politics, individual morality and piety, and even to express moral views about the nature of epigraphy. This volume is inspired and informed by the belief that mod ... More

The practice of reading, recording, and thinking about inscriptions is common to both the modern and ancient worlds. From the archaic period onwards, ancient literary authors working within a range of genres discussed and quoted a range of inscriptions (dedications, archives, legislation, funerary inscriptions) as ornamental devices, as alternative voices to that of the narrator, to display scholarship, to make points about history, politics, individual morality and piety, and even to express moral views about the nature of epigraphy. This volume is inspired and informed by the belief that modern scholarship can attain a deeper understanding of inscriptions by exploring both the deployment of ancient documents by literary authors and the intertexts and interplay between inscriptions and other literary genres. The volume aims to unleash, for the first time, the great potential in thinking about epigraphy through the eyes of its ancient readers. The primary interest of this volume is in the deployment, paraphrase, citation, verbatim reproduction, imitation, and invention of inscriptions in literary texts. It sets out with several aims: to explore the ways in which the ancient literary record adds to our understanding of how inscriptions were read, interpreted, and perceived in antiquity; to identify the fits and non-fits between ancient and modern approaches to epigraphy; to assess the themes of complementarity and competition between lapidary and literary performance; and to analyse the relationship between habits of epigraphical production and their reception in literature.