Managing Multiple Conversations: the multilevelled communication of Late Antique honorific monuments and epigraphy
by Elizabeth A. Wueste
Abstract: For the modern scholar, the most historically informative piece of a monument is often the inscription. When complete, it can often tell us not just the specific name and identity of the honorand, but also their precise occupation, full cursus honorum, ancestral background, and the exact reason for which they are being honored. Furthermore, a narrowly-dated honorific inscription can potentially date individual lifespans, terms of office, geographical reorganizations, imperial reigns, clothing styles, artistic movements, stratigraphic contexts, and even entire build-ings. Yet in order to extract this information from a single inscrip-tion, the viewer, ancient or modern, must possess substantial preexisting knowledge if she wants to fully contextualize the inscription. Indeed, the barriers to fully understanding and appreciating a late antique honorific inscription are so high that it is unreasonable to expect the typical ancient viewer to meet them. So who was the intended audience of such compli-cated, coded, and concealed honors?