Art and Inscriptions in the Ancient World

The ancient visual environment was packed with instances where words and images appeared side by side: statues with dedicatory inscriptions, labels on paintings or mosaics, or complex juxtapositions of images and engraved texts on funerary monuments. In the past these elements have often been divorced from one another and studied in isolation. In this volume art historians and epigraphers have come together to look at the complex ways in which images and words interacted with one another, illustrating, explaining or reinterpreting each other or, conversely, making competing demands upon the viewer. Their essays range widely in their focus from archaic Greek pottery through Hellenistic honorific statues and Pompeian wall-paintings to Late Roman mosaics. The insights that emerge contribute to our wider picture of the relationships between art and text in the ancient world, as well as illuminating the complexity and variety in ancient material culture.

Introduction Zahra Newby; Part I. Inscribing Images, Illustrating Texts: Juxtapositions of Text and Image: 1. The problems with honouring Samos: an Athenian document relief and its interpretation Alastair Blanshard; 2. Idem ego sum discumbens, ut me videtis: inscription and image on Roman ash chests Glenys Davies; 3. A painted garland: weaving words and images in the House of the Epigrams at Pompeii Bettina Bergmann; 4. The motto in the grotto: inscribing illustration and illustrating inscription at Sperlonga Michael Squire; Part II. Images and their Labels: 5. Writing on archaic Greek pottery Robin Osborne and Alexandra Pappas; 6. Reading the allegory of the Archesilaos relief Zahra Newby; 7. Inscribed mosaics in the Late Roman Empire: perspectives from East and West Ruth Leader-Newby; Part III. Inscriptions and their Statues: 8. Hellenistic honorific statues and their inscriptions John Ma; 9. Reusing statues, rewriting inscriptions and bestowing honours in Roman Athens Julia L. Shear; 10. 'Honour takes wing': unstable images and anxious orators in the Greek tradition Verity Platt.

Art historians and epigraphers come together to explore the juxtapositions of image and text in a wide variety of ancient works of art. They look at the wider question of how words and images interacted in the ancient world and the competing demands they made on ancient viewers.

Zahra Newby is Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. She has published articles on ecphrasis, art and identity, and mythological imagery and has recently published Greek Athletics in the Roman World (2005).
Ruth Leader-Newby studied at Cambridge, the Courtauld Institute of Art and Harvard and held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at King's College London. She is the author of Silver and Society in Late Antiquity (2004).