Inscribed Honor: The Information Technology of Inscriptions on the Altar at Adamclisi (20 min)

Presenters

Clara G. Pinchbeck, Case Western Reserve University

Abstract

In 109 C.E., three Roman military monuments were constructed overlooking the Civitas Tropaensium, a Roman military fort in Adamclisi, Romania. The most famous of these monuments, the Tropaeum Traiani, formed a counterpart to Trajan’s column in Rome. A lesser known monument, the so-called Funerary Altar, is evidenced by a 16-m square foundation and fragments of a marble façade originally inscribed with the names of 3,800 Roman military casualties. These soldiers’ names appear in the tria nomina naming convention, accompanied by their origines, or places of origin. Scholars have noted the altar’s political geography as both war memorial and map of the empire. Previous scholarship, however, has not examined the inscriptions’ structure and relationship to contemporaneous Roman information technologies. This paper compares the inscriptions of the altar at Adamclisi to Roman military rosters and commemorative lists dedicated by soldiers. The striking differences between the altar’s text and official military registers suggest that retiring soldiers aided in the altar’s design as a monument that highlighted both their Roman identity and diverse origins. The altar’s text most closely resembles the structure and language of laterculi militum—standardized lists of soldiers appearing later in the second century C.E. and found in both Rome and the provinces. Soldiers erected laterculi as collective dedications to the emperor upon the occasion of their honorable discharges. These laterculi, I argue, suggest the soldiers’ increased military bureaucratic knowledge and the appeal of the form of individual commemoration and recognition. Understanding the altar as a textual monument that bridged official military rosters and the later laterculi reveals how soldiers operationalized the roster as a form of information technology to shape the commemoration of Roman victory and war deaths in Dacia and to define themselves as honorable, Roman citizen-soldiers, who were also proud of their origins from across the empire.

  AIA-8D