Cambridge Epigraphic Saturday lineup
This coming Saturday, February 16th, 2008, Joyce Reynolds is organising an epigraphic seminar at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, starting at 1030 sharp.
Werner Eck: New perspectives on Hadrian and the Bar Kochba revolt
Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado: a brief report on inscriptions from the reign of Elagabalus
Henrik Mouritsen: Quantifying Roman manumission using epigraphic evidence
Thomas Corsten: Work in progress: some inscriptions from Kibyra and Olbasa
Dorothy Thompson: Not Alexander: an inscription from Hello
Michael Crawford: Language, geography, and economy in early Italy
All welcome. Contact Joyce Reynolds via Newnham College for more information.
The Saturday was a very successful day (as Joyce Reynolds’ events always are). A handful of people have agreed to post summaries of most of the papers, so we should be seeing them appearing over the next couple of days.
Comment by Gabriel Bodard — 17 February, 2008 @ 23:31
[…] Henrik Mouritsen has sent me a summary of his paper given at the Cambridge Epigraphy Day in February, which I post below: Henrik Mouritsen (King’s College London) discussed the possibility of quantifying Roman manumission using epigraphic evidence. While acknowledging that most inscriptions are of little help in establishing hard statistics in this area, he drew attention to two types of document which may provide more reliable information. The first are the epitaphs of the familial columbaria from the early empire, esp. those of the Statilii and the Volusii, where the ratio of slave to freed suggests a very high manumission rate in elite households. The second type is the municipal alba and particularly CIL X 1403 from Herculaneum. This inscription, long believed to contain the names of the Augustales, is unique in its scale. Even a cautious reconstruction of the fragments entails a total of around a thousand names, the large majority being those of local freedmen, which–given the overall size of Herculaneum’s population–would suggest that a substantial proportion of the free adult males were former slaves. […]
Pingback by Current Epigraphy » Mouritsen: Quantifying Roman manumission using epigraphic evidence — 28 March, 2008 @ 17:51