Need help with catalogue/database about Roman Achaean epigraphy

by gdeklerk

Hello everyone,

I'm writing a thesis on the imperial cult in Roman Achaea, but I can't seem to find any comprehensive overviews of epigraphic evidence of the region. The online datebase of Heidelberg gives some insights, but I still find it too random to use correctly (especially since most information can only be found in journals which require a subscription). With epigraphical evidence, I mean inscriptions, statues, etc. with Roman/Greek text.

Thanks in advance!

XenophonTheAthenian

Do you mean the Roman province of Achaea or the Greek region of Achaea, which are two different things? For Latin inscriptions in the Roman province of Achaea you want the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) III, Inscriptiones Asiae, provinciarum Europae Graecarum, Illyrici Latinae.

The compendium of Greek inscriptions is to be found in the Inscriptiones Graecae, or IG, of which the third edition is now in the works. The Greek region of Achaea (not the Roman province) is in volume VI, Inscriptiones Achaeae et Elidis. The Roman province would be represented I guess by I-IX or so, although in both cases most of those inscriptions are going to be pre-Roman, so it's easy (if extremely time consuming) to weed out what's not relevant. There's just one problem. Volume VI has never been completed.

And herein lies the problem with what you're asking for and trying to do. Epigraphy is a bit of a mysterious field, with conventions known and understood only by the initiated. It's also extremely time-consuming, requiring often a lifetime of work only to produce a single reference volume. There are more epigraphers than there are papyrologists, but not by much, and it's just as specialized and exhausting a discipline.

That means not enough people, and not enough time. When the IG was being put together not enough people were able to get to Achaea and Elis, which means that when subsequent editions of the IG came out the original volumes had not yet been completed, creating a backlog and a never-ending spiral. Likewise, volume XIII on Crete have not yet been published (although most of them were basically published as a separate Inscriptiones Creticae, the ICr), nor has X (Inscriptiones Epiri, Macedoniae, Thraciae, Scythiae), or part of XI. Bits of XII were not published until 2010. And don't let the existence of a CIL volume fool you into complacency. The CIL was originally published in 1873, and volume III has two supplements, bringing it up to 1902. That means that not all inscriptions found in the region have been published there, only those known up to that point. The others will be in various separate publications that you sort of have to know about because you're a professional epigrapher and not what's called an "armchair epigrapher." Now on top of this, the online resources to locate inscriptions and read them are frankly garbage. The Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg is an unusually good one, as is the Epigraphic Database Roma. The Epigraphische Datenbank Clauss-Slaby is very thorough, but harder to use and not as easy to understand for someone unaccustomed to inscriptions. These are only for Latin. For Greek inscriptions it's basically just the AIO (Attic Inscriptions Online) and the Packard Humanities Project's database of Searchable Greek Inscriptions, which is basically the IG with a few other editions tossed in there when the IG fails. Luckily for you there is an edition of sorts for Greek Achaea, handily searchable through the Packhum portal. In the 90s Rizakis published a two volume study of Achaean inscriptions (with a third introductory volume), Achaie II. La cité de Patras and Achaie III. Les inscriptions des cités achéennes.

The thing with searching for inscriptions is you have to have some idea what you're looking for. You need to know what formulaic phrases to search for, you need to know what type of monument to look for, and so on. The "imperial cult in Roman Achaea" is going to get you a whole lot of bupkiss, as is looking through "comprehensive overviews of epigraphic evidence of the region." Using epigraphy is hard, it takes a lot of work to learn how to do it! All is not lost, though it's likely you'll need to narrow down what precisely you're trying to find in the epigraphic record. Looking for every inscription in Greece talking about the imperial cult is going to give probably like two thirds of all Roman Period monumental inscriptions, which is a useless dataset. The easiest way to start on this sort of project if you don't really know what you're doing is to mine the bibliography of a work on the subject and find important inscriptions there, then if you want to be thorough and try to find any more do searches of particular phrases and words that show up in those. You may or may not be aware of Kantiréa's 2007 study called "The Imperial Cult in Achaea," which is mostly an epigraphic study. Actually I should've started with that but I couldn't figure out what I was looking for at first, because it's a little hard to get hold of. Not actually all that expensive, considering the kind of book it is. Anyway I'd start there, mine it for interesting inscriptions, do a couple searches to see if you can dredge up anything interesting related to it, and see where you go from there.