Performance, Presence, and Memory: Inscriptions and Public Spaces
This panel will explore the role, presence and interpretation of inscriptions in public spaces.
The papers will cover the topics of setting up honorific monuments, the re-use of public
inscriptions, and the inscribing of sacred laws, while addressing the overarching theme of the
context of inscriptions and their function beyond being public, written documents.
The key questions at the heart of this panel include: In what ways did inscriptions affect the
public spaces in which they were put up? Did the performative aspects of setting up and
reading inscriptions change over time? Did it really matter whether or not the written text of
an inscription could be read? And, what happens to the meaning of an official document
when it is re-used?
Honorific Self Display: A Musical Note from Roman Cyprus
Ersin Hussein, University of Warwick, and Dr Massimo Raffa, Dipartimento di
Filologia, Università della Calabria (Italia)
Ever since antiquity, the Sanctuary of Aphrodite at Palaipaphos has been Cyprus' most
celebrated religious space. The high number of Hellenistic and Roman inscriptions - mostly
statue bases and plaques - discovered at the sanctuary reveals that it was an important context
for the celebration of the island's rulers, high profile visitors, and its local elite. While the
inscriptions of these honorific monuments survive without their accompanying statues or the
structures that they may have been fixed to, their texts point to the visually impressive
character of the sanctuary. This paper will address the relationship between the visual,
artistic, and literary aspects of a particular monument by presenting an inscription discovered
at this sanctuary, in which the poet Nestor of Laranda is honoured by his patroness Sergia
Aurelia Rhegina.
The relationship between poet and patroness, as it appears from two inscriptions in the
sanctuary (IGR III 958 and 959), is to be placed beyond doubt in the framework of female
euergetism in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, II-III cent. AD. Re-analysis of the
musical pun occurring in IGR III 958 sheds some new light on the nature of this relationship
and may account for some puzzling features of the inscription, such as the self-celebrating
tone in which Sergia speaks of herself and the title of hypatē (hardly a substitute for the
expected hypatikē) with which she credits herself. This paper will consider what the
relationship could have been between the text of the monument and its accompanying statue.
Did it really matter if the viewer could read the text of this inscription? What impact did the
accompanying statue or structure have on the environment in which the monument was set
up?