Pre-emptive Protection: Reading defacement in the funerary inscriptions of Ancient Rome

This seminar will explore how tombs and religious spaces were expected to be treated in the Imperial Roman period. Scholarship has discussed broad concepts such as ‘damnatio memoriae’ at length concerning the political defacement of the monuments of emperors and the elite of Rome, but how might Romans of other social standings have thought of their tombs being defaced? And what might such defacement entail? Legally, the tomb was considered to be locus religiosus, a site of religious sanctity which could not be bought, sold or disturbed. However, despite this legal and religious protection, amongst funerary inscriptions patterns of commemoration emerge in which the desire for preservation of the monument is emphasised at length. Inscriptions specify who can use the tomb, the size of the monument, instructions to those reading the inscription, or all these elements combined, providing some insight into the nature of the defacement the deceased may have feared. This paper begins to interrogate these concepts of defacement to gain a sense of how these spaces were expected to be treated in Ancient Rome, where discrepancies occurred, and how ancient graffiti fits into this interplay.

Image credit: Liturgical Hermeneutic of Scripture.jpg