Mediterranean Timescapes: Chronological Age and Cultural Practice in the Roman Empire 2022054212, 2022054213, 9781138288751, 9781032478869, 9781315267708

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Mediterranean Timescapes

This book, built around the study of the representation of age and identity in 23,000 Latin funerary epitaphs from the Western Mediterranean in the Roman era, sets out how the use of age in inscriptions, and in turn, time, varied across this region. Discrepancies between the use of time to represent identity in death allow readers to begin to understand the differences between the cultures of Roman Italy and contemporary societies in North Africa, Spain and southern Gaul. The analysis focuses on the timescapes of cemeteries, a key urban phenomenon, in relation to other markers of time, including the Roman invention of the birthday, the revering of the dead at the Parentalia and the topoi of life’s stages. In doing so, the book contributes to our understanding of gender, the city, the family, the role of the military, freed slaves and cultural changes during this period. The concept of the timescape is seen to have varied geographically across the Mediterranean, bringing into question claims of cultural unity for the Western Mediterranean as a region. Mediterranean Timescapes is of interest to students and scholars of Roman history and archaeology, particularly that of the Western Mediterranean, and ancient social history. Ray Laurence is Professor of Ancient History at Macquarie University (Australia). Prior to this, he was Professor of Roman History and Archaeology at the University of Kent (UK), which came after time at the Universities of Birmingham and Reading. His numerous books focus on ageing, Roman urbanism and Roman roads. He is the editor of the Routledge series Studies in Roman Space and Urbanism. Francesco Trifilò completed his PhD in Ancient History and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK) before becoming a postdoctoral research fellow first at the University of Birmingham and then at the University of Kent. Subsequently, he pivoted into a career in financial services.

Mediterranean Timescapes Chronological Age and Cultural Practice in the Roman Empire

Ray Laurence and Francesco Trifilò

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Ray Laurence and Francesco Trifilò The right of Ray Laurence and Francesco Trifilò to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Laurence, Ray, 1963– author. | Trifilò, Francesco, author. Title: Mediterranean timescapes: chronological age and cultural practice in   the Roman empire/Ray Laurence and Francesco Trifilò. Description: New York: Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022054212 (print) | LCCN 2022054213 (ebook) |   ISBN 9781138288751 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032478869 (paperback) |   ISBN 9781315267708 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Inscriptions, Latin – Rome. | Epitaphs – Rome. |   Inscriptions, Latin – Mediterranean Region. | Epitaphs – Mediterranean Region. |   Funeral rites and ceremonies – Rome. | Sepulchral monuments –   Rome. | Rome – History – Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D. | Rome – Social conditions. Classification: LCC CN528.E6 L38 2023 (print) | LCC CN528.E6 (ebook) |   DDC 929/.5–dc23/eng/20221117 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054212 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054213 ISBN: 978-1-138-28875-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-47886-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26770-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to Mary Harlow, an exemplary academic.

Contents

List of Figuresix List of Tablesxiii Prefacexiv   1 Introduction: The Commemoration of Age-at-Death

1

PART I

Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities15   2 ‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs

17

  3 Understanding the Use of Chronological Age: From the Life Course to Timescapes

32

  4 Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice

50

  5 Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians

68

PART II

Age and Society87   6 Towards a Geography of Age and Gender in the Western Mediterranean89   7 The Family, Age and the Commemoration of the Dead

106

  8 Freed Slaves across the Mediterranean: Commemorating the Dead

129

  9 Cities and Soldiers: The Use of Age in the Cemeteries of Roman Africa

143

viii  Contents PART III

Mediterranean Timescapes161 10 The Roman Armed Forces as an Epigraphic Institution

163

11 Age and Culture in Numidia: Establishing Localized Timescapes

179

12 Explaining Variation in the Use of Chronological Age across the Western Mediterranean

200

13 Timescapes of Life and Death in the Western Mediterranean

222

14 Afterword – the Archaeology of Latin Epitaphs in the Western Mediterranean

236

Index244

Figures

1.1 Epitaph of Primius detailing a life of nine years and three months, probably from Misenum 2 1.2 Distribution map of places associated with Epitaphs that include years lived in the Western Mediterranean 3 1.3 The density of male epitaphs that state a chronological age 4 1.4 The density of female epitaphs that state a chronological age 5 2.1 Comparison of ages in the sample of epitaphs in this study with South Europe life table 25 3.1 The stages of life in antiquity 34 3.2 Children in the stages of life in antiquity 35 3.3 The old in the stages of life in antiquity 36 3.4 The chronological distribution of astronomical papyri 38 3.5 The commemoration of the age of migrants in epitaphs in Rome 39 3.6 Age-at-death plotted against anno provinciae (year of the province) in epitaphs from Mauretania 40 3.7 A comparison of the use of Roman numerals for age-at-death and anno provinciae (year of the province) in epitaphs from Mauretania43 4.1 The display of epitaphs acquired by Charles Nicholson in Pozzuoli (1857–1858) 52 4.2 The epitaph of Marcus Lollius Primitius detailing both his life of 35 years and his military service of 7 years and 10 days and details of his wife, Valeria Primilia, who set up the epitaph 54 4.3 The epitaph of Hermes, a home-born slave, detailing his life and that the armourer of the trireme Mercury set up this epitaph 55 4.4 The epitaph of Euhemeria – setting out no further details and showing that a person could be commemorated through just a name and the formula Dis Manibus (‘to the shades’) 56 4.5 Age-at-death in epitaphs from Italy using the full text for Vixit Annis or Vixit Annos57 4.6 Age-at-death in epitaphs from Italy using the abbreviation VA in place of the full form Vixit Annis or Vixit Annos58

x  Figures 4.7 The regional usage of full, contraction and abbreviation in inscribing Vixit Annos or Vixit Annis in epitaphs 59 4.8 A comparison of ages recorded with full, contraction and abbreviation in inscribing Vixit Annos or Vixit Annis61 4.9 A comparison of the commemoration of age using the abbreviation VA in Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and Italy 62 4.10 A comparison of the commemoration of age using the fully inscribed form Vixit Annis or Vixit Annos in Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and Italy 63 5.1 Roman practices of finger counting 71 5.2 The commemoration of ages between 20 and 40 years in epitaphs 73 5.3 Distribution of female epitaphs recording age-at-death of 30 years 73 5.4 Distribution of male epitaphs recording age-at-death of 30 years 74 5.5 The commemoration of ages between 50 and 70 years in epitaphs 75 5.6 Distribution of female epitaphs recording age-at-death of 80 years and more 78 5.7 Distribution of male epitaphs recording age-at-death of 80 years and more 78 5.8 The commemoration of ages between 80 and 110 years in epitaphs 80 6.1 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Africa Proconsularis95 6.2 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Numidia 96 6.3 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Mauretania 96 6.4 The commemoration of age-at-death in Italy 97 6.5 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Gallia Narbonensis98 6.6 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Hispania Citerior 98 6.7 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Baetica 99 6.8 Age in epitaphs to females 99 6.9 Age in epitaphs to males 102 7.1 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 1 112 7.2 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 2 113 7.3 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 3 114 7.4 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 4 114 7.5 The commemoration of children in Latium and Campania, Africa Proconsularis, Numidia, and the provinces of Mauretania 116 7.6 The commemoration of wives in Latium and Campania, Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and the provinces of Mauretania 117 7.7 The commemoration of husbands in Latium and Campania, Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and the provinces of Mauretania 118 7.8 The commemoration of parents in Latium and Campania, Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and the provinces of Mauretania 119 7.9 Age-at-death of husbands and wives in epitaphs 121 8.1 Distribution map of epitaphs of freed slaves that include age-at-death132

Figures xi

8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6

8.7 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 12.8

Imperial slaves: Epitaphs that include age-at-death 134 Non-imperial slaves: Epitaphs that include age-at-death 135 Freed slaves: Epitaphs that include age-at-death 135 Comparison of the commemoration of age-at-death 136 Comparison of the commemoration of freed slaves in Italy and North Africa 137 The gender of freed slaves commemorated with their age-at-death 138 Cities with more than 100 epitaphs with complete details on age-at-death144 The commemoration of age-at-death at Ammaedara 148 The commemoration of age-at-death at Lambaesis 149 A comparison of commemoration by age-at-death at Ammaedara, Lambaesis and Theveste 150 A comparison of commemoration by age-at-death at Cirta and in its neighbouring cities 151 The commemoration of the military and civilian at Lambaesis 153 The commemoration of the military and civilian in Numidia 153 The commemoration of the military and civilian in Italy 154 The recording of service in the military on epitaphs that include age-at-death 165 The recording of age-at-death in military epitaphs 166 The combination of service in the military and age-at-death in epitaphs168 Epitaphs stating a natio(n) of origin in military epitaphs 170 Age in epitaphs of males at Misenum 172 Age in epitaphs of females at Misenum 173 Distribution of epitaphs with age-at-death in Numidia 180 Age in epitaphs of soldiers and veterans at Lambaesis 180 Age in epitaphs of females in Cirta, Tiddis and Castellum Elefantum 186 Age in epitaphs of males in Cirta, Tiddis and Castellum Elefantum 187 Age in epitaphs of males at Celtianis and Rusicade 188 Age in epitaphs of females at Celtianis and Rusicade 189 Age in epitaphs of children in Numidia 191 Ages in epitaphs featuring names Sittius or Sittia (Numidia) 193 Ages in epitaphs that include the number of days lived 202 The recording of the number of months (below 30) in epitaphs 203 The recording of the number of days (below 30) in epitaphs 204 A comparison of the use of days in epitaphs: Africa, Italy and Rome 205 Probable family members for males across the life course to age 70 207 Probable family members for females across the life course to age 70 208 Age in epitaphs of males at Ostia 211 Age in epitaphs of females at Ostia 212

xii  Figures 12.9 12.10 12.11 12.12 12.13 12.14 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 13.9 13.10 13.11 13.12 14.1

Age in epitaphs of males at Puteoli Age in epitaphs of females at Puteoli Age in epitaphs of males at Carthage Age in epitaphs of females at Carthage Age in epitaphs of males at Carales Age in epitaphs of females at Carales The commemoration of girls under the age of seven The commemoration of boys under the age of seven The commemoration of girls between the ages of 7 and 12 The commemoration of boys between the ages of 7 and 14 The commemoration of females between the ages of 13 and 20 The commemoration of males between the ages of 15 and 25 The commemoration of females between the ages of 21 and 50 The commemoration of males between the ages of 26 and 60 The commemoration of females between the ages of 51 and 80 The commemoration of males between the ages of 61 and 80 The commemoration of females over the age of 81 The commemoration of males over the age of 81 The number of Roman numerals needed to represent different ages between 1 and 50 14.2 Epitaphs and the closeness of cities in Italy, Sardinia and Sicily 14.3 Epitaphs and the closeness of cities in Africa Proconsularis

213 213 214 215 216 216 224 224 225 226 227 227 228 229 230 230 231 232 238 240 241

Tables

5.1 Use of multiples of 3, 5 and 7 in Latin epitaphs 5.2 Long-lived individuals recorded by Pliny (Natural History 7.153–164)  6.1 Male and female epitaphs that include age-at-death 6.2 Number of places associated with the commemoration of females and males with age in epitaphs 6.3 Male and female epitaphs – places with more than 100 epitaphs with age-at-death statement 6.4 Epitaphs from Lusitania, Aquitania, Pannonia, Moesia and Dacia 6.5 Epitaphs from Italy, Narbonensis, Hispania and Baetica 6.6 Epitaphs from the North African provinces 7.1 Hierarchies of kin relations 7.2 Numbers of epitaphs with the gender of the commemorator defined 7.3 Commemoration of family members in Italy and in seven provinces 7.4 Cities with greater numbers of dedicatees with identified kinship (above 45 inscriptions) 8.1 Slaves under and over the age of 30 11.1 Commemoration of children in Numidia according to settlements 12.1 Cities arranged according to average age-at-death 13.1 Commemorative patterns by age group (cities with more than 200 epitaphs)

77 79 90 90 91 100 100 100 108 109 115 120 133 192 210 233

Preface

This book arises from work conducted by Ray Laurence with Mary Harlow on the Roman life course – a research and writing partnership that stretches back several decades and this collaboration has produced on average about a publication each year. Discussion with Mary and, particularly, Hanne Sigismund Nielsen led to the realization that maybe it would be possible to undertake a new study of the age-at-death within a framework of the Roman life course. The principle from the outset was that no single epitaph can be studied in isolation. The idea for this project was pitched to Francesco Trifilò and he was drawn into the project as a research fellow once funding was gained from the Leverhulme Trust for three years. We acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust in enabling this work that simply would not have happened without that support. The advent of the Clauss-Slaby open access database of Latin inscriptions was also a key novelty in the opening up of new possibilities that had previously been bound into the volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionem Latinarum – a monument to the nineteenth-century organization of knowledge. Manfred Clauss kindly gave us permission to work on data downloaded from the open-access website. Yet, there was much work that was undertaken manually, not least the determination of the gender of the deceased for every inscription, as well as the removal of fragmentary inscriptions that did not include a full numeral to indicate the years lived by the deceased. Geo-referencing of places in the ancient world was still in its infancy and research was needed into the location of epitaphs in Algeria, such issues are now overcome and are a credit to the development of digital interfaces over the last decade or so. Francesco’s work in the first three years of this project was instrumental in creating a basis for this book. At the time, Ray moved jobs from the University of Birmingham to the University of Kent and a new role as head of classical and archaeological studies that dug into his research time. Both authors though met each week to discuss the modes of representation and interpretation of the data within the principle that the inscriptions were the source of all knowledge. Although much was written about inscriptions, looking across 23,000 epitaphs, we kept finding the actual inscriptions did not fit what the literature said about them. The work Richard Saller and Brent Shaw in many ways continued to guide us with respect to the approach to familial commemoration and age. Yet, we

Preface xv found we were often stepping into the dark because we were emphatically or even pedantically wanting to account for all epitaphs mentioning age. Our meetings were characterized by discussion of excel chart after excel chart – far greater than the number of figures in this book. This was a period of very productive collaboration and it is with a sense of joy to see the final outcome in this book. The precarious career structure available to recently graduated PhD students in higher education was an ongoing concern and point of discussion for us. Francesco took the decision to move away from academia drawing on his skills to analyse data and his knowledge of languages to shift careers into financial services. This was a very sensible decision, but hugely difficult. The result for the project was that Ray, as a head of department, was finding his time eroded and the project slowed down – something that may have been exacerbated by moving to Macquarie University in 2017 and becoming head of department in 2019, alongside family migration. The work became a slow burn, but an ever-present one. There was a need to bring the book to completion and to set out the patterns that we were seeing in the data. We would like to acknowledge colleagues and PhD students from the Universities of Birmingham and Kent in the UK for their support and patience with our obsession with age in inscriptions, particularly: Gareth Sears, David Newsome, Simon Esmonde-Cleary, Vince Gaffney and Leslie Pollmann at Kent. Lloyd Bosworth needs a special mention for his support of the development of a set of comprehensible maps of all the epitaphs studied. Ray wishes to acknowledge the support of colleagues and PhD students at Macquarie University, whose support may be known or unknown to them: Peter Keegan, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, Petra Heřmánková, Ewan Coopey, Malcolm Choat, Rachel Yuen-Collingridge, Susan Lupack, Trevor Evans and Linda Evans. I need to add that colleagues in Finland at Tampere University and at the Finnish Institute in Rome have also been a constant presence throughout the time of this project. Katariina Mustakallio needs special thanks for forcefully insisting that the epitaphs of the very old or centenarians or simply over 80 years of age should be considered with the same care as those attributed to a younger age in an epitaph. Lena Larsson-Lovèn at the University of Gothenburg has also been a key supporter of our work from the very start of the project and with whom a truly memorable conference was held in 2009 in Gothenburg that produced collaborative work between early career researchers – some of which are still ongoing. The book is dedicated to Mary Harlow, who is an exemplary academic with skills to deliver research, teaching and administration, alongside supporting her colleagues through restructures, and all the missteps of the neoliberal landscape of higher education. She recently ‘retired’ but is actively pursuing research on antiquity. She has read earlier drafts of a number some chapters in this book. It is with much admiration for her knowledge, good humour, kindness and insight into the human condition that we dedicate this book to her. Ray Laurence Wallumattagal Campus (Macquarie University) Sydney

1 Introduction The Commemoration of Age-at-Death

Long has it been a distressing fact to surviving relatives that the PAINTED names of the dear departed soon fade away. Mr EDWARD JAMES PHYSICK, Sculptor, discovered, when in Italy, the successful plan adopted by the ancients, and in 1853 Mr PHYSICK first introduced into this country.1

Age-at-death appears on tens of thousands of tombstones and epitaphs written in Latin. The inscriptions point to the shortness of life of children and the potential longevity of the human life span into old age. Any single inscription can be seen to summarize a variety of emotions, in memory of the dead and so on. Beryl Rawson recalled her experience as a postgraduate of being reduced to tears through reading epitaph after epitaph that recalled the death of a child. This emotional response is in part a feature of a ‘Western’ twentieth-century context, which has attempted to eradicate death in childhood through medical intervention. Demographically, children are far less likely to die today than in antiquity – estimates for antiquity have suggested a 50 per cent mortality rate.2 It is difficult for us to understand the emotions involved in losing a child, but studies today suggest that our knowledge continues to be very subjective.3 The psychological effects vary, but we should note in particular the factor that bereaved parents report: those who have not lost a child cannot understand the experience. This sense of isolation may not have been as strong in societies in which a far larger number of parents lost children, but we should notice that some parts of the Roman Empire commemorated the age-at-death of children more frequently than others.4 Our modern incomprehension of the experience of a child dying lies at the heart of assumptions that parents in antiquity were in some way emotionally immune to the death of a child.5 This is to some extent confirmed by expressions of grief expressed at the loss of a child or a wife, who tended to be younger than the commemorator in both cases.6 Figure 1.1 is a simple inscription recording the name of a child, who lived just nine years and three months. The point of the inscription as an epitaph with age recorded was that the person did matter, and it also mattered how old the deceased was. The very measurement of age engages a wonder at the shortness of life and, also, at the longevity of the old. Between these two extremes are the others who died in adulthood and were commemorated in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and so on. Age on the epitaph calibrates the life of the DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708-1

2

Introduction

Figure 1.1 Epitaph of Primius detailing a life of nine years and three months, probably from Misenum (NMR 1068 Nicholson Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney).

person and engages the viewer through their knowledge of the age of others and their age. In our own experience of age today, the old express wonder at their longevity: ‘I never expected to live this long’ noted one man in his eighties. This new experience of the certainty of longevity in the West, at least until the pandemic of 2020, these epitaphs present a challenge to families and societies in the past, and also ultimately a future scholar may look at all the epitaphs of the dead in his or her sixties and early seventies and experience the same reaction that Beryl Rawson did in the 1960s when she observed the deaths of so many children.7 Our reaction to an individual epitaph is dictated by our expectations of the human life span and anticipation of bereavement. The new dynamics of ageing that developed in the late twentieth century means that our expectations of life and death are very different from those of antiquity if somewhat adjusted by the pandemic of 2020 through to at least 2022 – we have seen the development of a large percentage of people over the age of 60 in most developed and many lessdeveloped countries and a significant reduction in the number of children dying in childhood. There is a danger that we can read a single epitaph in our demographic context. Hence, it is necessary to place each epitaph into a wider context of the commemoration of age-at-death found in all epitaphs from antiquity. Too often, an individual inscription has been presented as evidence for a view of how men, women and children lived within the Roman family.8 What is needed is an overall understanding of the way we might look at age as recorded in all epitaphs across the Latin West (see Figure 1.2 for a map of all places in this study of the commemoration of the dead with a statement of years lived in the western Mediterranean). The use of age seen in this fashion can be understood as a technology that can reveal how people in antiquity considered the time associated with the life span.

Introduction 3

Figure 1.2 Distribution map of places associated with Epitaphs that include years lived in the Western Mediterranean (Lloyd Bosworth).

The Data Set or Data Sample in This Study The main source of data for this project was the online searchable database of Latin inscriptions created and maintained by Manfred Clauss of the Goethe University in Frankfurt.9 The statistics page of the website (www.manfredclauss.de) sets out its long-term aim: to include all known Latin inscriptions is close to being achieved. At the time of consultation and capture of our data set (1 June 2009 downloaded from www.manfredclauss.de), this included a total of 355,068 inscriptions from over 18,000 places located throughout the Empire. The list covers all volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, except Volume XV (dedicated to the Instrumentum Domesticum from Rome) and all volumes of the Année Epigraphique up till the year 2005, in addition to a comprehensive list of other publications.10 Searches of this online database produced a data set of 40,000 inscriptions from which all inscriptions with uncertain ages or were very fragmentary were removed to create a final data set for analysis of 23,227 epitaphs (see Figure 1.2 for all places from which these epitaphs are derived for the Western Mediterranean – note our sample of inscriptions also includes the Danubian provinces).11 These inscriptions provide sufficient breadth for the task of the project – the analysis of the use of age – and were entered into a database with the following fields:

4

Introduction

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

INSCRIPTION (CIL, AE and all other associated publications) PROVINCE PLACE TEXT (whole text of inscription) STATUS OF PLACE (Colonia, Municipium, Civitas or other) DATE OF INSCRIPTION (ancient date) AGE (in Arabic numbers) YEAR OF BIRTH GENDER (m/f) OCCUPATION (of dedicatee) DEDICATEE NAME (tria nomina) DEDICATOR NAME (tria nomina) DEDICATEE SOCIAL STATUS (as stated in the epitaph) DEDICATOR SOCIAL STATUS (as stated in the epitaph) DEDICATOR/DEDICATEE RELATIONSHIP (husband, wife, father, mother, parents, patrons, freedmen12 etc.)

The Geography of Age in Epitaphs The geographical spread of epitaphs that commemorate males and females (Figures 1.3 and 1.4) demonstrates that the recovery of these inscriptions has been far from uniform. Note that we did not include the island of Corsica, Rome, or Dalmatia in our study sample of epitaphs. The mapping of the sample as

Figure 1.3 The density of male epitaphs that state a chronological age (Lloyd Bosworth).

Introduction 5

Figure 1.4 The density of female epitaphs that state a chronological age (Lloyd Bosworth).

heat maps, Figures 1.3 and 1.4, shows that there are concentrations of both male and female epitaphs stating chronological age-at-death or years lived in central Italy in the hinterland of Rome, on the bay of Naples and around the port of Brundisium in southern Italy, as well as at Aquileia and Milan. The heat maps show (Figures 1.3 and 1.4) that there were major concentrations of Latin epitaphs with chronological age or years lived stated in North Africa, not just associated with the Carthage and its hinterland but also inland at multiple sites. The other major concentration in the western Mediterranean is found at Carales and its associated sites in Sardinia. These maps guide us initially to think of age-at-death or years lived as a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon that is unevenly distributed with a strong axis running from Rome and Italy to Sardinian and onto North Africa. Beyond these core areas of concentration of epitaphs with age, we can find age stated in epitaphs right across the provinces with concentrations around major sites of study (e.g. Lyon). Casting our eyes across the Danubian provinces, it is clear that age in Latin epitaphs was in use and could develop in Dacia over the relatively short time frame of that province from 106 to 275 CE. There is also a notable concentration of epitaphs with the inclusion of age in Pannonia. We have presented the data in these two heat maps by gender to show that although there are fewer female epitaphs, the distribution pattern for the epitaphs that include age-at-death or year lived for females follows a very similar distribution pattern to that of males.

6  Introduction Alongside the areas of concentration of epitaphs that include a statement of age, there are vast areas of some provinces that do not produce inscriptions in this format or have not preserved those inscriptions across the centuries after antiquity. This causes us to begin to see that inscriptions that include age-at-death or years lived do not have a uniform or even distribution. It is possible to see the distribution pattern in central Italy influenced by the presence of the Via Flaminia and Via Aemelia running north from Rome and also to see an influence of the Via Appia on the linear distribution of inscriptions. The distribution pattern in Sardinia is also influenced by the nature of communication routes it would seem from the distribution patterns in Figures 1.3 and 1.4. The major rivers of Europe can also be seen as shaping the distribution pattern and we can identify a linear concentration along the rivers: the Danube, the Rhone, the Guadalquivir and the Po. These patterns show a distribution of Latin epitaphs with age that is influenced by transport routes: sea, river and road. In North Africa, the distribution patterns are characterized by concentrations in the east and areas of absence in the west – yet importantly, sites associated with age statements in epitaphs are not concentrated on the coast. Thus, we may suggest that the phenomenon of age statements in Latin epitaphs varied in terms of the density of evidence available to us for effective study and shapes our approach to the evidence – for parts of Italy, Sardinia and Africa, we can undertake single site studies, because we have at least 100 epitaphs that mention age-at-death or years lived. Whilst in the provinces of Spain and Gaul, we can only meaningfully conduct analysis at a province wide level. There are simply too few epitaphs with age from which we might comprehend how the culture of an individual site saw the time of years lived that was included in epitaphs. Strikingly, Figures 1.3 and 1.4 highlight the importance of studying the phenomenon of age in epitaphs in both Italy and Africa – for the very obvious reason that there are substantial opportunities for detailed study of the use of age in epitaphs from both regions. Given the numbers of epitaphs with age statements from the western Mediterranean, we put aside the study of the Danubian provinces to focus our attention towards the highest concentration of evidence. This led us to develop the concept of understanding time in the western Mediterranean based around a sample of inscriptions.

Exploring Age Lived in Epitaphs Our interpretive strategy for the project, as seen in the results in this book, was underpinned by earlier work conducted by Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence in the development of a life course approach to the study of individuals. This work emphasized understanding the expectations of persons of a certain age in society embedded in texts, as well as, the stages of life as set out by authors from Solon through to Isidore of Seville that has come to be seen as a topos.13 However, the division of age into stages is a fundamental organizing feature of societies – ancient and modern. A key question for the research was how does the evidence of age-at-death in inscriptions map onto the stages of life as articulated by these writers? Not all tombstones include age-at-death, and those which do are not a

Introduction 7 reflection of the demographic profile of the population; consequently the inclusion of a specific age in years or even years, months and days should be seen as a deliberate choice that was the result of attitudes to and ideologies of aging within the local community. Hence, by mapping the variation, this book intends to set out the extent to which we may understand the use of a particular age-at-death in an inscription within the context of other uses of age-at-death in inscriptions. The aim here was to extend our understanding of the life course approach and the cultural usage of chronological age in inscriptions. Here, we follow on from the work of Brent Shaw that sees the value of epitaphs as evidence for the cultural meaning of death with the addition that we wish to see them providing evidence for understanding the use of chronological age.14 Shaw shifted the debate from a static discussion of the under-representation of groups, including children, within the epigraphic habit to explaining the variation in the emphasis on the commemoration of children that he shows can be linked to the spread of Christianity and a spread of a preChristian epigraphic practice from Rome and Italy to the provinces.15 Our approach is less concerned with seeing a change in epigraphic practice, particularly given that the dating of formulaic inscriptions is far from straightforward. To avoid these pitfalls, our approach to the data understands the use of age-at-death in epitaphs at any one site as a cumulative cultural practice. As more tombstones or other forms of commemoration are added to a cemetery, it becomes larger over time, but the earlier tombstones remain visible. This means that dating has relevance in the understanding of how the original practice is added-to, but the overall pattern (from what survives) is a reflection of the use of age-at-death that could be read at the end of the process of cultural accumulation. Hence, epitaphs from any one place have within them an accumulative dynamic, in which each use of age-at-death is situated with reference to all earlier uses. This also ties together individual instances over time that forms a fundamental aspect of the life course approach in the social sciences and resists the isolation of the individual from the context of the cultural perception of age. By analogy, an epitaph with the inclusion of age needs to be read in the context of all other epitaphs with a mention of age from the same site. The ambition, here, is to compare patterns of the practice of age-commemoration between cities and between regions to determine how age was used. Today, ancient historians are most likely to have come across age-at-death in the context of the study of the Roman family. Richard Saller and Brent Shaw sought to fill a hole in the historiography of the family, through a better understanding of the recording of family relationships and age on tombstones.16 The latter are treated as data for the elucidation of the family, in which age-at-death was treated as part of the data set to explain the nature of familial relationships.17 Importantly, Saller and Shaw focused on a division between the military and civilian populations but can observe locally some congruence between military and civilian populations in the arena of familial commemoration.18 Our focus has been one of exploration, we wanted to investigate how inscriptions with a clear indication of age lived or age-at-death might contribute to our

8  Introduction understanding of some of the most fundamental features of the Roman Empire: the family, gender, the military, freed slaves, childhood, old age and so on; but, also, to see how these key features may have varied across the Mediterranean. Significantly, as much data is available from North Africa as from Italy, yet in studies for example of freed slaves – the focus can be almost exclusively on Rome and Italy.19 Our exploration of the evidence found an abundance of information from North Africa that would seem to have been largely ignored or studied by scholars exclusively researching that region. This disjuncture within the foci of scholarship in Roman history and Roman archaeology has become the subject of discussion in recent years and it has been pointed out that researchers tend towards a Euro-centric approach with a strong focus on Rome and Italy as a proxy for the whole Roman Empire. In exploring over 23,000 epitaphs from across the Western Mediterranean and into the Balkan provinces, we detected a fundamental disconnect between the use of age in epitaphs in Italy and nearly every other part of the Roman Empire. Italy simply was not representative of the use of age in epitaphs found in the provinces. As readers will see, it is as though there were two very different approaches to the use of age in epitaphs which raises the question: what other evidence might contribute to elaborating this difference across what has been seen in recent scholarship as one of the most connected regions in history, via the internal sea of the Mediterranean? It is easy perhaps with hindsight and the new opportunities emerging each year through digital technologies to consider better methodologies. This is perhaps the key aspect of research in digital humanities, an idea is pursued, and data is analysed – yet, the process of learning how to deal with more than 23,000 epitaphs with a mention of age-at-death may be more important than the publication of the results. However, the data produced needs to be shared, even if the patterns, need not be easily explained. The latter is one of the challenges of the work: the data produced need not easily correlate with findings of other scholars building their paradigms from literary texts, yet at the same time: by studying age in epitaphs, we are revealing a hidden aspect of Roman history or Roman archaeology – it is unclear whether an epitaph is a text or an artefact with writing upon it. In some senses, we are taking an archaeological approach to a distribution pattern of artefacts (i.e. epitaphs) with a set of variables (the use of Roman numerals) that links to the identity of individuals living in the past.

Plan of the Book: Approaching Age-at-Death The authors of this book set out on an academic journey funded by the Leverhulme Trust in 2009, working together Francesco shaped the project before setting out on a new career in financial analysis, Ray – whilst being a Head of Department first in the UK and then in Australia, attempted to bring the project to a conclusion. Revisiting the data and rethinking some of the key concepts, but always within the final book – there is an ever-present Francesco with a sharp focus on the data contained in our sample of inscriptions. This is a book very definitely by two authors, but the final writing was undertaken by just one of them.

Introduction 9 The journey in the book (Chapter 2) for the reader begins with demography and the ever-present expectation of ancient historians, contrary to all the studies undertaken, to interpret the age-at-death found in inscriptions as in some way an indication of life expectancy.20 This implausible expectation has to be addressed, first to remove it from the mind of the reader. To do this, we explore the phenomenon of counting using Roman numerals I, V, X, L and C in combination to produce age-at-death. This opens up the whole topic of age-rounding to the five (V) and ten (X) and the ‘inaccuracy’ of the use of Roman numerals in epitaphs to represent chronological age. From here, we move on to a review of earlier approaches to age in epitaphs and set out the twists and turns of scholarly endeavour that has concluded that age-at-death in epitaphs provides evidence not of demography, but of cultural practice/s of commemoration, in which age of death was a key indicator of the identity of the deceased. Moving into Chapter 3, we open up key concepts for this study – not least that societies have timescapes that can be different, in the case of the ancient Mediterranean: a Latin West that commemorated age-at-death and a Greek East that did not do this. Timescapes builds out of work on the stages of life in antiquity and focus on knowing someone’s age, or knowing the time of your birth (if alive in antiquity) to facilitate knowledge of your future from astrology and a horoscope. We suggest here that the commemoration of an individual with their age-at-death positions that individual within a structure of time, that is recorded via a global system of the use of Roman numerals, but that the use of those numerals and the decision to commemorate the deceased with an age-at-death was fundamentally a local phenomenon. Chapter 4 shifts our focus onto the epitaph as an inscription. Our concern here is with how the statement of age-at-death is constructed, the full formula vixit annis or vixit annos was abbreviated to vixit A or vixit An/n or just VA. This allows us to open the subject of regional variation between the two major sources of epitaphs in the Roman Mediterranean: Africa Proconsularis and Numidia on the one hand and Italy on the other. Abbreviation of the formula dominates the sample of inscriptions from Numidia, whilst it does not in Italy. The deployment of the abbreviated and non-abbreviated formulas is studied at different ages. Here, we use a moving average (set at an interval of ten years) to create comparable trends by removing the visual noise associated with the phenomenon of rounding to the numerals five (V) and ten (X), which tend to obscure all phenomenon beyond the rounding to these numerals. The phenomenon in our data of a substantial number of epitaphs commemorating the dead with an age-at-death of more than a hundred was an early discovery in the project and a cause of a level of perplexity and is a focus of Chapter 5. We looked to earlier work on age-at-death and found that studies simply removed these epitaphs of centenarians from the discussion. Katariina Mustakallio was instrumental in persuading us that these were as worthy of study as any other inscription. However, inaccurate these ages may be (and we will never actually know), there is a sense by which they epitomize the project and prompt explanation of why the ancients measured time, how they counted years from their birth,

10  Introduction as well as the use of Roman numerals to calibrate the life span. The chapter also shows how multiples of three (III) or of three numerals such as XXX and seven (VII) shape the patterns of age commemoration that have come down to us. Chapter 6 concentrates on the differentiation between male and female commemoration. When we began the project, we had assumed that there would be a very strong bias towards the male commemoration of all ages. However, although there are more male than female epitaphs in our sample, we do not see an absence of commemoration of females with age-at-death for any particular age. It is in this chapter that we set out the data of our sample of epitaphs (we exclude those without a name or a full age on the inscription) and analyse the regional distinctions by province and then concerning a sample of cities. Much of the discussion of age-at-death in epitaphs has been directed towards the definition of the Roman family. In Chapter 7, we explore the subject to identify the gendered nature of the naming of a commemorator. More epitaphs of males than of females include the mention of a family member, but when we look at who is commemorating the deceased, we find an agency for widows in setting up an epitaph, particularly in Africa. We also set out how the gendered nature of societies in antiquity caused wives to commemorate husbands at an older age, whereas husbands commemorated wives at a younger age. It has to be said with the proviso that we are dealing with a smaller group of inscriptions that include the familial relationship between the deceased and the commemorator of the deceased. Moving from gender to freedom and slavery, in Chapter 8, we focus our attention on freed slaves with epitaphs that include their age-at-death. The pattern of ages used in commemorative epitaphs show convergence with that of Italy rather than with patterns associated with the commemoration of soldiers or that found in Africa. There is, however, a higher level of commemoration of freedmen at an older age than is found across the commemorative practices in Italy. Yet, when comparing the epitaphs of freed slaves found in Africa; it is possible to identify a convergence with the commemorative practices of all epitaphs found in those provinces of the Roman Empire. Chapter 9 opens the discussion of the use of age in Latin epitaphs from Rome’s African provinces. Here, we situate the evidence in the colonial context in which many of the inscriptions from cemeteries were recorded. Moving on from this, we discuss the influence of the military in particular Legion III Augusta and make a comparison of the use of age between towns associated with a military presence and as places of veteran settlements with the town of Cirta and its associated pagi or villages – the latter have produced substantial numbers of Latin epitaphs. The chapter as a whole shows a convergence of age-related commemoration focused on the institutional ages associated with recruitment, service and discharge from the Roman military. Following on from Chapter 9, the discussion moves on in Chapter 10 to the wider consideration of the military in the western Mediterranean looking specifically at the commemoration of those serving both in the fleets at Misenum and Ravenna. This allows us also to consider the connectivity of peoples from a

Introduction 11 diverse range of places from Pannonia to Syria to Cilicia and Thrace, who sought to serve in the army and navy through migration to the major ports of Italy: Puteoli, Portus, Ostia and Misenum. The latter has a collection of epitaphs that contains evidence for the length of service and age-at-death, as well as the place of birth or nation of birth, providing a powerful body of evidence to demonstrate the institutionalization of age, that was recorded less precisely, than the length of service in the military. In Chapter 11, we return to Africa to provide a full account of the use of age in epitaphs within this province that contains more evidence for the use of age than any other. This includes a discussion of the key feature of African cemeteries: the commemoration of the very old and the presence of the military. We suggest that the focus on the elderly can be related to the celebration of long-lived ancestors and the creation of status through longevity, seen via the social institution of a council of elders. We also pursue further the convergence and divergence of commemoration according to age within several cities across Numidia, including Cirta and some of its pagi or villages. The variation in the commemoration age across the Mediterranean is explored in Chapter 12 and an explanation is sought to focus on the port cities of Carthage, Carales in Sardinia, Ostia and Puteoli. The port cities show a fundamental difference in their patterning which we see produced by connectivity, but with an additional variable that Ostia and Puteoli were destinations for migration; whereas Carthage and Carales were ports through which people travelled. In making these distinctions, we also observe the variation in the use of age with precision to the hour in Italy and Africa. The absence of mention of family members is also considered a factor in creating the patterns of commemoration; what is very clear is that in Italy commemoration of age in adulthood was not a major focus; whereas in Africa, it was. Chapter 13 examines the commemoration of age as a geographical phenomenon to show the variation by gender in early childhood, middle childhood, early adulthood, the period of life associated with marriage in the Augustan legislation on marriage, early old age and those over the age of 80. This is followed by a brief afterword to reflect on how this project may have been tackled in a quite different way, if it had been created in 2022 rather than 2009.

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6

Advertisement in Croft 1867: 80 advertising inscriptions filled with lead. Hin 2013: 102–24; Parkin 1992: 67–90; Scheidel 2001: 13–25; Frier 2000. Dijkstra and Stroebe 1988. Woolley and Jolley 1997. Boswell 1984. Carroll 2006: 196–201; Hope 2009: 137–44; On mourning, see papers in Hope and Huskinson 2011. We should include here the inscriptions referring to delicia (children or young adults kept for sex), Sigismund Nielsen 1990; see also Laes 2011: 222–77. 7 Papers in Walker 2017. 8 Sigismund Nielsen 2007.

12  Introduction 9 The idea of using computers to analyse inscriptions can be found at least as early as 1973, see Jory 1973. Forty years on, when this project began with the download of data – the use of computing in the study of inscriptions was primitive, for example, the issue of dating and the variables associated with dating are well-known, for example Lassere 1973, that could now in 2022 be approached successfully – for examples of recent developments in the development of computational applications, see Chapter 14 for discussion. 10 www.manfredclauss.de/gb/index.html 11 The original data for the project was deposited the Archaeological Data Service based in York (UK) in 2012. 12 The condition of freedman is indicative both of social status and of the existence of a social relationship. This should therefore be recorded both in the status and relationship fields. In the latter case at least when a patron is indicated. We devote a full chapter to this matter in the book – see Chapter 8. 13 Harlow and Laurence 2002; on topos of stages of life see Parkin 2010; see also Harlow and Laurence 2007. 14 Shaw 1991. 15 Shaw 1991: 76–8. 16 Saller and Shaw 1984. See critique of methodology by Martin 1996. 17 Saller and Shaw 1984: 124 suggest age had been well-studied through the 1960s and 1970s – but then at note 7 it does not seem to point to any such studies per se. 18 Saller and Shaw 1984: 139–41. 19 For example, Mouritsen 2011 that in spite of a title suggesting the ‘Roman world’ is focused on Rome and Italy with little to no consideration of freed slaves in the provinces. 20 Every conference or seminar or workshop, at which we have presented our work on this sample of epitaphs, has always ended with a discussion beginning with ‘Surely this is information for life expectancy’ and our refutation of the issue with reference to studies going back to 1965.

Bibliography Boswell, J.E., 1984. ‘Expositio and Oblatio: The Abandonment of Children and the Ancient and Medieval Family’, American Historical Review 89: 10–33. Carroll, M., 2006. Spirits of the Dead. Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe, Oxford. Croft, H.J., 1867. Guide to the Kensal Green Cemetery, London. Dijkstra, I.C., and Stroebe, M.S., 1988. ‘The Impact of a Child’s Death on Parents: A Myth (not yet) Disproved’, Journal of Family Studies 4: 159–185. Frier, B.W., 2000. ‘Demography’, In A.K. Bowman, P. Garnsey, and D. Rathbone (eds) Cambridge Ancient History XI The High Empire A.D. 70–192 (2nd edition), Cambridge, 788–797. Harlow, M., and Laurence, R., 2002. Growing up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome. A Life Course Approach, London. Harlow, M., and Laurence, R., 2007. ‘Introduction: Age and Ageing in the Roman Empire’, In M. Harlow and R. Laurence (eds) Age and Ageing in the Roman Empire (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 65), Portsmouth, 9–24. Hin, S., 2013. The Demography of Roman Italy, Cambridge. Hope, V.M., 2009. Roman Death. The Dying and the Dead in Ancient Rome, London. Hope, V.M., and Huskinson, J., 2011. Memory and Mourning: Studies in Roman Death 2011, Oxford.

Introduction 13 Jory, E.J., 1973. ‘Towards a Data Bank of Latin Inscriptions’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 20: 145–148. Laes, C., 2011. Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders within, Cambridge. Lassere, J.-M., 1973. ‘Recherches Sur la Chronologie Des Epitaphs Paiennes de l’Africa’, Antiquités Africaines 7: 7–151. Martin, D.B., 1996. ‘The Construction of the Ancient Family: Methodological Considerations’, Journal of Roman Studies 80: 40–60. Mouritsen, H., 2011. The Freedman in the Roman World, Cambridge. Parkin, T., 1992. Demography and Roman Society, Baltimore. Parkin, T., 2010. ‘Life Cycle’, In M. Harlow and R. Laurence (eds) A Cultural History of Childhood and the Family in Antiquity, Oxford, 97–114. Saller, R.P., and Shaw, B.D., 1984. ‘Tombstones and Roman Family Relations in the Principate’ in Journal of Roman Studies 74: 124–156. Scheidel, W., 2001. ‘Progress and Problems in Roman Demography’, In W. Scheidel (ed) Debating Roman Demography, Leiden, 13–25. Shaw, B., 1991. ‘The Cultural Meaning of Death: Age and Gender in the Roman family’, In D.I., Kertzer and R.P. Saller (eds) The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, New Haven & London, 66–90. Sigismund Nielsen, H., 1990. ‘Delicia in Roman Literature and in the Urban Inscriptions’, Analecta Romana Institutum Danese 19: 79–88. Sigismund-Nielsen, H., 2007. ‘Children for Profit and Pleasure’, In M. Harlow and R. Laurence (eds) Age and Ageing in the Roman Empire, Journal of Roman Archaeology (supplement 65), Portsmouth, 37–54. Walker, A., 2017. The New Dynamics of Ageing (vols 1 and 2), Bristol. Woolley, M.M., and Jolley, S.G., 1997. ‘The Death of a Child – The Parent’s Perspective and Advice’, Paediatric Surgery 32: 73–74.

Part I

Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

2 ‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs

The simple fact that there are so many inscriptions that mention the age-at-death of individuals causes us today to continue to suspect that, in some way, these inscriptions may form a body of data from which we may gain knowledge of the nature of life expectancy in antiquity. Having given papers at conferences, where we have been very clear that age-at-death on any number of tombstones does not provide statistical data; we were consistently urged to see the use of age in epitaphs as some sort of proxy for demographic data. This wish to see data, where there is no data, was not expressed by the uninitiated in ancient history or archaeology – but by very serious scholars with a wealth of experience in the discipline. Thus, we need to set out both the nature of our data as subject to age-rounding or exaggeration and the journey made by the subject from seeing epitaphs with the mention of age as data from which to develop demographic knowledge of the past to the current situation in which the ages on epitaphs have become non-data and a subject to be avoided. What wish to establish is an understanding of how the inaccuracies in the reporting of age-at-death provide us with an interesting phenomenon that has a geography, which – we will argue – has a relationship with the types of societies and the social circumstances that caused age-at-death to be both included and recorded with a specific Roman numeral.

Counting in Fives The system of numbers of itself needs to be understood within the context of the Romans counting in fives in connection with their use of time. The Roman system of numerals I, V, X, L and C was combined to produce numbers that in epitaphs frequently record the number of years lived. Some numbers can be described as simple – the combinations such as III or VII or XI, but others look distinctly messy and consume space on the tombstone VIIII, XVIIII, XXVIIII and LXXXVIIII. These last numbers utilize the dominant convention for the number nine, VIIII, which is less familiar to us than IX. Indeed, it would appear that IX is a product of inscribing numbers on stone, for the reason that IX causes the greatest problems for the use of Roman numerals in mathematics.1 By contrast, if using the full form VIIII – it is a relatively simple exercise to do for example the subtraction of seven – you cross out the digits: VII. Roman numerals as a mathematical DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708-3

18  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities system of notation has been shown, by Dirk Schlimm and Hansjörg Neth, to be perfectly capable of advanced mathematical calculation and there are some advantages over our modern Arabic notation.2 This runs counter to the assumption that Roman numerals and maths can only mix with an abacus to hand, and the use of the epigraphic as opposed to mathematical notations for nine and four as IX and IV, rather than VIIII and IIII. There are, though, some issues of the representation of numbers in inscriptions that may shape the way people used the system to represent age-at-death. The focus on the use of divisions by five was that parts of longer numbers were abbreviated to signify for example that a person had lived more than say 15 years (XV) – where that person’s actual age was 18 or 19. This can be described as counting in fives resulting in the erasure of other numbers.3 We need also to recognize that counting in fives is not something that is done in the same way by humans, for example in modern finger counting to ten – North Americans and Europeans do this quite differently.4 We need not suggest that the Roman world was not numerate – counting is an oral linguistic system primarily that is represented by numbers.5 Thus, Roman numerals in inscriptions represent the sounds of numbers. It is worth noting that there was a recognition in antiquity that the reading of inscriptions was something that had a wider knowledge than the reading of cursive script.6 If thinking on cognition of numbers is applied to epitaphs in this context, we may see the system of Roman numerals as distinguishing people of different ages and providing an easy form of notation to measure the difference in age-at-death in cemeteries. Reading just the first two numerals created knowledge of the approximate age of a person and may define a category of persons: XV was very clearly less than XX and the following digits need not have been important.7 Rising in age over 25 more numerals needed to be accounted for: XXV or XXX, or XXXV and XXXX, but never going beyond five numerals until reaching the age of 85: LXXXV or LXXXX or LXXXXV. Thus, just four numerals can define most numbers with the exceptions of those at the higher end of a decade and numbers between 40 and 49 – as well as any number over 80.8 The reading of inscribed ages can be seen as a material representation of time that focused back to when that person was alive and situated temporal thinking around the materiality of the numbers utilized – notably those ending in V and X.9 Whereas the Greeks divided time into periods of four years or Olympiads, Romans used a five-year period – a lustrum.10 It has become clear during the republic five-year periods were less common than following the development of time based on the solar year in 46 BC. Although many say that the censors held office for a lustrum of five years, this seems to be the case exceptionally in the first half of the second century BC.11 The system of numerals would appear to have affected the measurement of time in years and this can be demonstrated concerning the reign of Augustus from the time Octavian took on that identity in 27 BC. A system of Augustan years was introduced at the same time as 27 BC as year 1.12 Yet, it would seem the use of numerals and a focus on counting in fives created points of celebration and renewal: the holding of the Ludi Saeculares after 10 Augustan years; the giving of the Lares Augusti to the first (new) magistrates of

‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs 19 the vici after 20 Augustan years; and the assumption of the title Pater Patriae after 25 Augustan years being the most prominent.13 The thinking about time comes in five-year periods that can be doubled into ten-year periods, which is precisely the mathematician’s definition of the numerical system V and X. Thus, Augustan years can be measured out concerning BC and AD, or BCE and CE, as follows: V (23 BC), X (17 BC), XV (12 BC), XX (7 BC), XXV (2 BC), XXX (AD 3), XXXV (AD 8) and XXXX (AD 13).14 Each of these years ending in five or ten was what Censorinus, writing in the 265th Augustan year, called a lustrum or Great Year.15 Cassius Dio, writing a little earlier, divided the 40 years of Augustus’ reign into four periods of 10 years to shape his history of the reign.16 The presence of measuring time in five-year periods or a lustrum was also used to measure time for the lives of Romans, who did have a system of time named after them. The guild of carpenters (Collegium Fabrum Tignuariorum) was set up in Rome in the twentieth Augustan year (7 BC) with a system of magistrates that held office for five years with each group identified by the lustrum of their office, hence their epitaphs feature their office, magister quinquennalis, and the number of the lustrum.17 The system was replicated in Ostia from the establishment of the guild in 60–64 CE, but again a system of lustra and magistri quinquennales was created.18 It should also be noted that all municipia had a system of duumviri quinquennales that held office every five years (for one year) from the point at which the municipium was constituted.19 A system of counting was also prevalent in the creation of the cult of Lares Augusti from 7 BC with magistri quinquennales in Rome and Italy.20 This provides a clear indication that the system of counting years – that focused on the lustra of Augustus’ reign – was replicated in the guilds and neighbourhoods of Rome (vici) that were ultimately related to the five-year cycles of magistrates in the municipia of Italy that appear to have been established from 80 BC with a focus on a five-yearly census of citizens and property.21 Interestingly, the latter included a statement of the age of each citizen.22 Thus, every five years, a citizen had to state his age – the convergence of birth with a year of a lustrum may have resulted in the measurement of age by lustra that we find in Ovid with his age given as ten lustra or 50 years.23 It is worth adding that leases of property were made for five years, most clearly seen in the lease of the property of Julia Felix at Pompeii ‘from the 13th of August of the 6th year, for 5 continuous years’. The lease will expire at the end of five years.24 This points to both a measuring time and a calculation of time into the future in units of five.

Inscribed Age – A Flawed Data Set? There were clear warnings against undertaking the project. Richard Duncan-Jones assessed the use of Roman numerals to represent age-at-death using I, V, X, L and C. His article set out to highlight the nature of age-rounding to numbers that were multiples of 5 or 10.25 This is a feature of the data set that we will examine in this book. It is an interesting feature that needs further explanation, in the context of other inscriptions that can record age down to not just years, but months, days and hours. Duncan-Jones focused on seeking to use the inaccuracy in the recording

20  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities of age to provide him with evidence for illiteracy that could find parallels in the modern world.26 Bruce Frier subsequently questioned the assumption of illiteracy concerning the recording of age in the census returns from Egypt.27 There is a certain clarity here from Frier’s study, more recently confirmed by Sabine Hubner that the census data and the representation of age in epitaphs need not converge.28 Epitaphs belong to a funerary context that lay at a distance from the world of the living (census returns) that may have wished to account for the age of each person and included individual reporting by the living.29 Thus, an epitaph attributes an age to the dead, it need not be their actual age (but could be) – yet the age given forms an important element of recording the dead and remembering the dead. There was a further warning in the literature. Ramsay MacMullen had, in a very influential article in 1982, delineated what he termed ‘the epigraphic habit’.30 Inscribing on stone was seen to have been an uneven phenomenon in both time and space across the Roman Empire. The numbers of inscriptions increase over time to peak in the Severan period, using the graphs by Mrozrek and Lassère of their dating of inscriptions, pointed to an increase in the distribution of the epigraphic habit over time.31 The epigraphic habit allows any pattern or even individual inscription to be referred to as localized and unique to its context. He, like Duncan-Jones, suggested that the use of age in epitaphs was approximate, but that it was still important to record that age – perhaps even suggesting that the use of age could be seen as a statistical proxy for cultural integration that scholars refer to as ‘Romanization’.32 This demonstrates the importance of writing Latin, including the use of age in epitaphs, taking hold across the Roman Empire and the survival of tombstones with age-at-death can be seen as a variable to be studied. However, the ability to use inscribed letter forms was limited to places that did have abundant supplies of stone, or stone might be transported to enable the use of Latin as can be seen in London.33 However, even with this proviso, epitaphs that include the age of death provide us with an important body of evidence that highlights the cultural importance of recording the age-at-death of the deceased that seemingly had no practical or functional purpose.34 This position creates importance for age-at-death in the symbolic realm but means that age-at-death cannot illicit evidence for the functional or structural functionalist preoccupations that have dominated the study of the Roman Empire, including the debates from in particular the 1990s over Romanization.35

The Cost of an Epitaph? The cost of setting up a tombstone is recorded as being as little as 96 sesterces.36 The very basic tombstones found all across the empire with only a few lines of text on a piece of stone maybe half a metre in height may have cost considerably less.37 If these were not high-cost items, their availability was within the reach of substantial numbers of people, we would not associate with the elite. Yet, we can expect the very poor to have been excluded from any surviving sample of epitaphs. Hence, the epitaph is a form of material culture associated with people

‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs 21 in all the provinces of the Roman Empire. More importantly, the epitaph reveals (unlike many other items of material culture) the gender of the person, who was commemorated. Thus, being found in all provinces, it provides us with a means to make comparisons between provinces to have some indications of the variation in the social production of gender in relation to the stages of the life course or life trajectories within the various timescapes of the Roman Empire. A note of caution is needed though, the making of tombstones would have depended on the availability of stone in any particular province, thus in Britain, we can explain the presence or absence of epigraphy concerning this variable.38 Thus, in areas without local stone available, it would have been imported and become a rare commodity with the possibility that epigraphic consciousness would not have developed. Yet, if the stone was available, the potential to make tombstones to commemorate the dead appears to be a universal feature of the Roman Empire, if rather restricted to urban settings. However, note that tombstones could be set up without a carved inscription with any wording being painted and, thus, too ephemeral to survive across the best part of 2,000 years.

Epitaphs and Statistics: The Early Years Age-at-death in inscriptions emerged as a subject for Classical Scholarship in the second half of the nineteenth century. Scholars were discovering new Latin texts, whilst at the same time using these texts to enumerate an understanding of life expectancy and demography in the Roman Empire. A set of the systematization of existing/developing knowledge was combined with the emergence of the use of statistics. The publication of known inscriptions became systematized via the work to compile the Corpus Inscriptionem Latinarum (CIL) led by Mommsen to create a standard reference point, from which scholars (in whatever country) could have access to the texts. The classic work of Beloch appeared in 1886 and was followed by MacDonnell in 1913 – both continue to be reference points for the study of demography.39 It is to Beloch and MacDonnell that we owe the origin of the study of Roman demography through the adoption of quantitative, statistical approaches. Beloch’s Bevolkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt40 was the first work to affirm demography as a key sub-discipline in the study of Roman History.41 This work on the demography of the Roman world is distinguished by a few key features: a keen interest in the absolute numbers of Roman (and, later, medieval) populations, with a keen awareness of the role, played by geography. In the Bevolkerung, sources are largely extracted from ancient literature. His key chapter is the one dedicated to the figures emerging from the Roman census but one small chapter is devoted to the study of epitaphs, specifically those recorded in the CIL and from the Italian regions I, II and X (pp. 41–54). Here Beloch substantially introduces key themes of ancient demography: comparative evidence to determine age structure and Ulpian’s life tables as a tool for the study of Roman demography, and anticipates crucial variables such as selective commemoration and age-rounding.42 In contrast, a businessman converted to demographic research in early retirement was primarily

22  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities focused with the modern world, published in the journal he assisted to edit – Biometrika. He published just one article on demography in antiquity article dedicated to the expectation of life in Rome, Hispania, Lusitania and Africa.43 In contrast to Beloch, Macdonell focused exclusively on epigraphic data, derived from the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and analysed statistically. His article shows awareness of some of the limitations, but he was confident of the overall suitability of data for demographic analysis. Differences such as the higher representation of the old in the African provinces are associated by him with biological causes (survival of the fittest) in work which, though aware of issues such as age rounding, he was largely mechanistic in his approach. The method was simple to add up the ages and then divide by the number of inscriptions to produce the average life expectancy of the place from which the epitaphs had been recorded for CIL. Epitaphs as simple texts through their sheer number were of utility to these historians and provided them with empirical evidence of the brevity of life in the Roman Empire and an ability to communicate their findings beyond their discipline – especially to demographers and the new discipline of historical demography.44 It is worth detailing here how the subject moved on by the mid-twentieth century. The article ‘Hic Breve Vivitur’ by A.G. Burn, written some 40 years after MacDonnell, provides a means to account for the recognition of the role of cultural practice in the study of epigraphy.45 Yet he sees considerable progress made in the critical study of recorded age-at-death as an indicator of life expectancy trends in Roman antiquity.46 This leads him to define his data set as a composition of different social groups, spread between the earlier and the later Roman Empire, in parts that were differently affected by the spread of Roman culture, and especially that of the military.47 Gender differentiation is based largely on comparing Roman data and that from sources such as the League of Nations Statistical Year-Book (1940–1941) and the Census of India Report for 1931, which allowed him to account for the effect of high mortality rates, especially in birth-giving age, and ‘childbearing exhaustion’ for women in their twenties and thirties, as well as child mortality. It is maybe too easy, years later, to criticize these early scholars for not taking into consideration the variation in practices of commemoration, the survival rates of inscriptions and other factors. We need to recognize that, at the time, they were pioneers who founded a new area of study: the demography of the Roman Empire and communicated both within their discipline and to other disciplines, well beyond the remit of Classics and Ancient History. Importantly, they identified the variation in the patterns of ages recorded on tombstones. This also highlights the importance of experimentation in the study of large numbers of inscriptions. It leads to new knowledge or better understanding and a basis for the further development of study of inscriptions, rather than producing absolute answers that will stand the test of time (something that we return to in Chapter 14).

Recalibration – Demography and Life Tables In 1966, any confidence in the objectivity of epitaphs as indicators of demographic reality in the Roman Empire was shattered by Keith Hopkins’ devastating critique published in the journal Population Studies.48 This followed a series of articles

‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs 23 that addressed issues of close-kin marriage, contraception, and the age of girls at first marriage that would be drawn on in the development of approaches to the subject some two decades later in the 1980s.49 The work explicitly engaged with the use of epigraphic evidence to draw conclusions and presented a strong critique of recent work from the 1950s and 1960s by revisiting the initial statistical work of Harkness to establish a presence in Rome of early female marriage. His analysis of inscriptions and the tricky question of the population structure in the Roman Empire identified a fundamental weakness of using the age found in epitaphs as representative data for the construction of the demography of the Roman Empire. The problems he presents lie in the distribution over the human life span of agesat-death recorded on tombstones: The deaths of infants (under one year of age) are underrepresented, whilst old age appears in many examples, especially in the North African provinces, to be overstated.50 Informing this study was comparative data in the form of the UN model life tables compiled in 1956 as a summary of worldwide demographic data. Three key points need to be borne in mind: (1) Hopkins demonstrated that in all probability recorded ages on tombstones could not be read off as a demographic truth when compared to the data from the UN model life tables. (2) Personal circumstances were a factor in commemoration with an inscribed epitaph. Through an assessment of the age-at-death of women, Hopkins explained how age and familial circumstances were likely to affect the overall epigraphic sample and thus would give skewed results.51 (3) Fundamental to Hopkins’ work was the use of average (mean) and median values in describing general patterns from which conclusions can be drawn about the inaccuracy of the representation of overall demographic patterns in surviving epitaphs. For our study with a different focus on the cultural context of the representation of age, it is necessary to realize that averages do not describe the full pattern of ages found in epitaphs.52 The result of this article was to break the link between age-at-death found in inscriptions and demography. Instead, demography was to be located within the Life Tables produced by the United Nations. to establish a probable age structure for antiquity. The proof of the veracity of the life tables though was to prove somewhat bothersome, because scholars later in the 1980s sought to find evidence for demographic patterns that were predicted by the life tables.53

Age-at-Death – A Continuing Cause of Concern It would be simplistic to say that the age-at-death on tombstones vanished in the 1960s and simply ceased to be an area for researchers. The major project to categorize age was undertaken in Hungary by Szilági right through the 1960s which was later to provide the basis for work in the 1980s – a series of publications that provides a snapshot of the overall patterns found in epitaphs from the Roman Empire.54 The data produced was systematic, but was flawed in terms of its demographic veracity, since the surviving evidence reflects the choice to commemorate a person

24  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities with an epitaph that included a statement about their age-at-death.55 Interestingly, when results of our study have been presented and we have stated categorically that epitaphs cannot be used to establish demographic patterns, most audiences still wish to discuss epitaphs in the context of possible demographic patterns. Despite more than 50 years of knowledge that demography and the commemoration of the age of death are two quite separate things, scholars continue to wish to have evidence that might crossover. Our own culture continues to wish to calibrate age-at-death in the Roman Empire through its understanding of demography – even though for almost a half-century, scholars have known this to be a dead end.56

Rehabilitating Age-at-Death for the Demography of the Roman Family The work of Brent Shaw and Richard Saller that developed an age-related model of the Roman Family in the 1980s was undertaken in the context of links through Keith Hopkins to Peter Laslett’s Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and with Jack Goody’s research on the family in early modern Europe. Saller and Shaw independently set out to establish the age at first marriage of men and girls respectively building on Hopkins’ observations on the age of girls at first marriage that itself led back to studies from the late nineteenth century.57 Importantly, Richard Saller saw the ages of those over 10 but under 38 years of age subject to the biases identified by Hopkins and the age-rounding set out by Duncan-Jones, but these biases were seen to be small or insignificant and it is these age groups that would have been recorded with the greatest accuracy (especially by parents before the age of 25). It is in these younger teen to 30-something age groups that we might be able to view age as having greater accuracy and that greater care over its deployment was taken.58 This causes the commemoration of teens to adults in their thirties to be given robustness that rehabilitates the evidence for the study of demography, in particular the age at first marriage, which is determined as c. 25 for males and 15 for young girls. This, in turn, feeds into demographic models of the Roman Family – most notably Richard Saller’s 1994 simulation of the kinship world based on demographic probability.59 This work is also a key factor for the study of demography and creates key data – the age of first marriage that has implications for the modelling of fertility.60 There is a sense in which there is not a single pattern and this is where epigraphy indicates regional variation. To give some examples: •

•

Early marriage (pre-15) can be identified in 40 to 46 per cent of the samples from Rome and Ostia, whereas this drops to c. 3 per cent or less in all other samples right down to 15 per cent in Spain with a record of just 2 per cent recorded in Castellum Celtianum.61 In Spain, mothers were the commemorators of daughters, rather than both parents or the father found to be dominant elsewhere.62

‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs 25 16%

14% % Epitaphs

South Europe

12%

10%

8%

6%

4%

2%

0%

1

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

65 Age

70

75

80

85

90

95 100 105 110 115 120 125 130

Figure 2.1 Comparison of ages in the sample of epitaphs in this study with South Europe life table.

These and other observations add to our understanding of marriage to create not an average age of marriage by 15, but an expectation of female marriage by the age of 20 and of males by the age of 30. Observations from the epitaphs that mention family relations have become an established ‘fact’ that ultimately depends on the patterns derived from age-at-death found in epitaphs and is subject to biases of under and over-reporting of certain ages. Much more significantly, the question: why did so many inscriptions omit mentions of who the commemorator was? The answer to which may speculate that it was unnecessary because, in a face-to-face society, people knew who the commemorator was; which only leads to another question: Why was it necessary to say who commemorated a person from their family? We will return to this question later in Chapter 7, where we discuss the role of family members as commemorators.

Catastrophic Mortality and Age-at-Death in Rome Richard Paine and Glenn Storey in the first decade of the twenty-first century set out to rehabilitate age-at-death for the study of demography for the evidence from Rome.63 They suggest that age-at-death in Rome showed few signs of age-rounding (or digit preference) and would be accurate to within 10 per cent and thus usable for demographic purposes. The focus on age-at-death just in Rome allows them to make statements such as: ‘Older individuals are less likely to enter the sample because they lack close living relatives to commemorate them’.64 If taken to be true of Rome, it should be true of other parts of the empire and in North Africa, we can find a bias towards the commemoration of older

26  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities individuals. This may be a case of confusion between the acts of commemoration of a person of a certain age with a need to explain that action beyond the cultural realm through actual family structure. The age distribution, Paine and Storey observe, does not fit a living population with a typical death distribution with more older children and young adults commemorated. Instead, they chose to model a demographic model of catastrophic epidemic and migration to see if the age-at-death data from Rome might fit these scenarios. Certainly, epidemics would have a greater effect, within these models, on the rates of mortality of older children and young adults. However, ultimately, the sample of inscriptions remains a pattern of commemoration in which the elderly were underrepresented. It is impossible to isolate a demographic variable from the ‘noise’ associated with decisions around whether age-at-death should be mentioned and, even, whether an inscribed stone was required.

Conclusion: After Demography – Age and Culture The conclusion of all studies of ages recorded in epitaphs demonstrates that these cannot be used simply to reconstruct any demographic pattern. Figure 2.1 sets this out for the sample of epitaphs that underpins the work in this book. It compares the ages recorded in these epitaphs to the expected pattern for a UN Southern Europe life table. This is not a cause for despair but underlines a fundamental aspect of funerary evidence in archaeology. There is simply too much cultural noise around the creation of tombstones and the burial/cremation and commemoration of the deceased for this material to be regarded as in any way objective data.65 We would argue that the age recorded on tombstones was not objective but was a cultural indicator of the identity of the deceased within a framework of carving on stone.66 In some cases, it could be very accurate and in others, it might be way off the mark (after all a person of over 160 years is recorded). To go further with the evidence we have, we need to understand the use of age-at-death from a cultural perspective and step away from the discussion of demography and of the family (mostly omitted from the commemoration of the dead in epitaphs). Thus, we have data on age in epitaphs, which provides points of comparison: regionally; by gender; by status; by concepts of free and unfree; and so on. We wish to present this data in the following chapter to set out how this evidence can reveal cultural variation across the Mediterranean and to reveal the differing conceptions of time expressed within the usage of Roman numerals on tombstones to create an identity of the deceased as living a life of so many years, which was in many cases one of the fundamental ways of recording the identity of the deceased – their length of life.

Notes 1 The use of IIII and VIIII rather than IV and IX would resolve the problems encountered by Hollings 2009. 2 Schlimm and Neth 2008. Supported by subsequent experiments, for example, Krajcsi and Szabo 2012.

‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs 27 3 This is not just an ancient phenomenon – the process is recalled as a childhood obsession with counting in fives in the song of the same name released by The Horrors in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_in_Fives. 4 Bender and Beller 2012. 5 Wiese 2007. Justus 1999 on the use of numerals. 6 Petronius Satyrica 58.7 sed lapidarias litteras scio, see Susini 1989 and Corbier 2013. 7 Zhang and Norman 1995 define Roman numerals as depending on shape (S) and quantity (Q) to be conceived of as (QxS)xS. 8 Numbers needing more than four numerals to represent them are as follows: 18 and 19; 27 to 29; 36 to 39; any number between 40 and 49; 58 and 59; 67 to 69; 76 to 79 and any number from 81 to 99. 9 De Smelt and De Cruz 2011. 10 It should be noted that the use of both systems and inclusive counting could result in a lustrum of four years – see Cicero De Oratore 3.127: he uses quinquennium to refer to four years or an Olympiad. 11 Laou-Grille 2001. 12 Censorinus De die Natali 20.10. 13 Lott 2004: 81–127. 14 See Harlow and Laurence 2017. 15 Censorinus De die Natali 18.13. 16 See Harlow and Laurence 2017: 14. 17 Panciera 1981 reasserts the 7 BC foundation date; Royden 1989; Pearse 1975; Pearse 1976–1777; Haeck 2005. 18 Royden 1988: 25–7. 19 Haeck 2005. 20 Silvestrini 1992a and 1992b that are in fact very similar, see also examples in the catalogue of Lott 2004: 180–219. 21 Laou-Grille 2001:594–5. 22 Tabula Heracleensis 142–56; Lex Agraria 7–11, 28 for text, translation and commentary, see Crawford 1996 volume 1. 23 Ovid Tristia 4.8.30–34 has lived ten lustra. 24 CIL 4.1136, translation by Cooley and Cooley 2004: H73 compare with legal texts including Lex Coloniae Genetivae LXXXII in Crawford 1996: 440 with links to practice in Rome found in Gaius Institutes 145. 25 Duncan Jones 1977; Carroll 2006: 281 follows this reasoning based on illiteracy but considers the possibility of falsification and lack of knowledge of birth dates. See also Paine and Storey 2006. 26 Duncan Jones 1977: 334. 27 Frier 1992, especially discussion at 288. 28 Huebner 2011; compare census data from Egypt analysed by Scheidel 1996. 29 Hope 2001: 7–15 on the need to see the whole monument as well as the inscription. 30 Macmullen 1982 to be read with Meyer 1990. 31 Mrozrek 1973 to be read with Lassere 1973. 32 Macmullen 1982: 238, following Mócsy 1966: 409, 419–21 develops the concept that the use of age as a statistical measure of Romanization. 33 Mann 1985. 34 Macmullen 1982: 238 following Mócsy 1966 op cit n.28; interestingly age-at-death is relegated to little more than a mention see Hope 2009 pp. 42–4, 170, 183; Carroll 2006: 129, 281, but is recognized as an important element of the epitaph that appears frequently. 35 See Laurence 2012: 59–73 for further discussion. 36 Duncan Jones 1974: 99–101 for prices from Africa. 37 Saller and Shaw 1984: 128 suggest just ‘tens of sesterces’.

28  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities 38 Mann 1985 discusses the matter in relation to the availability of stone for the setting up of inscriptions. 39 Beloch 1886: 41–54; MacDonnell 1913. 40 Beloch 1886. 41 Bowersock 1997. 42 Beloch 1886: 41–54; Scheidel 2000: 5. 43 MacDonnell 1913. 44 Culminating in Burn 1953: 25. 45 Burn 1953. 46 Burn acknowledges directly the contributions of MacDonnell 1913 and others. 47 Burn 1953: 5–7. 48 Hopkins 1966. The whole issue of age-at-death in inscriptions as an indicator of population was looking shaky even in the previous decade: Henry 1959. 49 Hopkins 1965a and 1965b. 50 Hopkins 1966: 245. 51 In a recent ‘reprise’ of Hopkins’ article, Scheidel 2001 has taken further this critique by addressing the shortcomings of model life tables (specifically: Coale and Demeny 1983) as control groups that can aid reconstructions of ancient demographics. This article is both on the unsatisfactory ability of these models to be transposed to antiquity and on the unreliability of comparanda such as burial evidence, aged-epitaphs and census. 52 Hopkins 1966. 53 See for example, Parkin 1992: 67–90; Scheidel 2000: 13–25; Frier 2000. 54 Szilági 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967 remarkable achievements in all cases from the pre-digital age. See Éry 1969: 51–69 for analysis of the data published by Szilági with comparison to Model Life Tables. 55 Scheidel 2001: 11. 56 Restated by Hopkins 1987, and a feature of every seminar or conference paper submitted during the development of our project. We have concluded that our audiences simply want the tombstones to have demographic meaning and this reflects our human response to a tombstone – it tells us an age and we perceive/understand people as of an age – making chronological age a fixed thing from which we may know a ‘truth’ about the past. We have disappointed all who raised the possibility, and they have never seemed content to accept the argument commemoration does not tell you about demography. 57 Saller 1987; Shaw 1987; Hopkins 1965b and Harkness 1896 for a much earlier study. 58 A conclusion also made by Sigismund Nielsen 1997: 173–5 based on evidence of inscriptions from Rome. 59 Saller 1994 accepted most recently by Hin 2011: 103. 60 Hin 2013: 172–209 on fertility. 61 Shaw 1987 for figures pp. 44–6. 62 Shaw 1987 p. 38. 63 Paine and Storey 2006. 64 Paine and Storey 2006: 71. 65 There is a problem in shifting from the specific moment found in the age-at-death on tombstones or the specific or even micro-history of a family in one action of commemoration and scaling up to a macro-level model of demography, because family formation varied across the life cycle of the family, see Pudsey 2011: 66–8. 66 Grasby 2009, 2002 and 1996 on the making of Latin inscriptions.

Bibliography Beloch, K.J., 1886. Die Bevölkerung Der Griechisch-Römischen Welt, Berlin. Bender, A., and Beller, S., 2012. ‘Nature and Culture of Finger Counting. Diversity and Representational Effects of an Embodied Cognitive Tool’, Cognition 124: 156–182.

‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs 29 Bowersock, G.W., 1997. ‘Beloch and the Birth of Demography’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 127: 373–379. Burn, A.G., 1953. ‘Hic Breve Vivitur: A Study of the Expectation of Life in the Roman Empire’, Past and Present 4: 2–31. Carroll, M., 2006. Spirits of the Dead. Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe, Oxford. Coale, A.J., and Demeny, P., 1983. Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations, Princeton. Cooley, A.E., and Cooley, M.G.L., 2004. Pompeii and Herculaneum: A Sourcebook (2nd edition), Londo. Corbier, M., 2013. ‘Writing in Public Space’, In G. Sears, P. Keegan, and R. Laurence (eds) Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300, London, 13–48. Crawford, M., 1996. Roman Statutes, London. De Smelt, J., and De Cruz, H., 2011. ‘The Role of Material Culture in Human Time Representation: Calendrical Systems as Extensions of Mental Time Travel’, Adaptive Behaviour 19: 63–76. Duncan Jones, R.P., 1974. The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies, Cambridge. Duncan Jones, R.P., 1977. ‘Age-rounding, Illiteracy and Social Differentiation in the Roman Empire’, Chrion 7: 333–353. Éry, K.K., 1969. ‘Investigations on the Demographic Source Value of Tomb Stones Originating from the Roman Period’, Alba Regia: Annales Musei Stephani Regis 10: 51–69. Frier, B.W., 1992. ‘Statistics and Roman Society’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 5: 286–290. Frier, B.W., 2000. ‘Demography’, In A.K. Bowman, P. Garnsey, and D. Rathbone (eds) Cambridge Ancient History XI: The High Empire A.D. 70–192 (2nd edition), Cambridge, 788–797. Grasby, R.D., 1996. ‘A Comparative Study of Five Latin Inscriptions: Measurement and Making’, Papers of the British School at Rome 64: 95–138. Grasby, R.D., 2002. ‘Latin Inscriptions: Studies in Measurement and Making’, Papers of the British School at Rome 70: 151–76. Grasby, R.D., 2009. Processes in the Making of Roman Inscriptions, Oxford. Haeck, T., 2005. ‘The Quinquennales in Italy: Social Status of a Roman Municipal Magistrate’, Latomus 64: 601–618. Harkness, A.G., 1896. ‘Age at Marriage and at Death in the Roman Empire’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 27: 35–72. Harlow, M., and Laurence, R., 2017. ‘Augustus Senex: Old Age and the Remaking of the Principate’, Greece and Rome 64: 115–131. Henry, L., 1959. ‘L’Āge au Décès les Inscriptions Funéraires’, Population 14: 327–329. Hin, S., 2011. ‘Family Matters: Fertility and its Constraints in Roman Italy’, In Holleran, C. and Pudsey, A (eds) Demography and the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge, 99–116. Hin, S., 2013. The Demography of Roman Italy: Population Dynamics in an Ancient Conquest Society 201 BCE – 14 CE, Cambridge. Hollings, C., 2009. ‘An Analysis of Non-Positional Numerical Systems’, The Mathematical Intelligencer 31: 15–23. Hope, V.M., 2001. Constructing Identity: The Roman Funerary Monuments of Aquileia, Mainz and Nimes (British Archaeological Reports, International Series no. 960), Oxford. Hope, V.M. 2009. Roman Death. The Dying and the Dead in Ancient Rome, London. Hopkins, K., 1987. ‘Graveyards for Historians’, In F. Hinard (ed) La mort, les morts et l’au-delà dans le monde romain, Caen, 113–126.

30  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities Hopkins, M.K., 1965a. ‘The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage’, Population Studies 18: 309–327. Hopkins, M.K., 1965b. ‘Contraception in the Roman Empire’, Comparative Studies in Sociology and History 8: 124–151. Hopkins, M.K., 1966. ‘On the Probable Age Structure of the Roman Population’, Populations Studies 20: 245–326. Huebner, S., 2011. ‘Household Composition in the Ancient Mediterranean – What Do We Really Know?’ In B. Rawson (ed) A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Chichester, 73–91. Justus, C.F., 1999. ‘Indo-European Numerals since Szemerényi’, In S. Embleton, J.E. Joseph, and H.J. Niederehe (eds) The Emergence of Modern Language Studies (vol 2), Amsterdam, 131–152. Krajcsi, A., and Szabo, E., 2012. ‘The Role of Number Notation: Sign-Value Notation Number Processing is Easier than Place-Value’, Frontiers in Psychology 3: 463. Laou-Grille, B., 2001. ‘Le Lustrum: Périodicité et Durée’, Latomus 60: 573–602. Lassere, J.-M., 1973. ‘Recherches sur la Chronologie des Epitaphs Paiennes de l’Africa’, Antiquités Africaines 7: 7–151. Laurence, R., 2012. Roman Archaeology for Historians, Abingdon. Lott, J.B., 2004. The Neighbourhoods of Augustan Rome, Cambridge. MacDonnell, W.R., 1913. On the Expectation of Life in Ancient Rome and in the Provinces of Hispania and Lusitania, and Africa’, Biometrika 9: 366–380. Macmullen, R., 1982. ‘The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire’, American Journal of Philology 103: 233–246. Mann, J.C., 1985. ‘Epigraphic Consciousness’, Journal of Roman Studies 75: 204–206. Meyer, E.A., 1990. ‘Explaining the Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire: The Evidence of Epitaphs’, Journal of Roman Studies 80: 74–96. Mócsy, A., 1966. ‘Die Unkenntnis des Lebensalters im Römischen Reich’, Acta Antiqua 14: 387–421. Mrozrek, S., 1973. ‘À Propos de la Repartition Chronologique des Inscriptions Latines Dans le Haut-Empire’, Epigraphica 35: 113–118. Paine, R.R., and Storey, G.R., 2006. ‘Epidemics, Age at Death, and Mortality in Ancient Rome’, In G.R. Storey (ed) Urbanism in the Preindustrial World. Cross-Cultural Approaches, Tuscaloosa, 69–85. Panciera, S., 1981. ‘Fasti fabrum Tignariorum Urbis Romae’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 43: 271–280. Parkin, T., 1992. Demography and Roman Society, Baltimore. Pearse, J.L.D., 1975. ‘A Forgotten Altar of the Collegium Fabri Tignuariorum’, Epigraphica 37: 100–23. Pearse, J.L.D., 1976–1977. ‘Three Alba of the Collegium Fabrum Tigniariorum of Rome’, Bullettino Communale 85: 163–76. Pudsey, A., 2011. ‘Nuptiality and the Demographic Life Cycle of the Family in Roman Egypt’, In C. Holleran and A. Pudsey (eds) Demography and the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge, 60–98. Royden, H., 1988. Magistrates of Roman Professional Collegia, Pisa. Royden, H., 1989. ‘The Tenure of Office of the Quinquennales in the Roman Professional Collegia’, American Journal of Philology 110: 303–315. Saller, R.P., 1987. ‘Men’s Age at Marriage and its Consequences for the Roman Family’, Classical Philology 82: 21–34. Saller, R.P., 1994. Patriarchy Property and Death in the Roman Family, Cambridge.

‘Demography’ and the Measurement of Time in Epitaphs 31 Saller, R.P., and Shaw, B.D., 1984. ‘Tombstones and Roman Family Relations in the Principate’, Journal of Roman Studies 74: 124–156. Scheidel, W., 1996. ‘Digit Preference in Age Records from Roman Egypt’, In W. Scheidel (ed) Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire: Explorations in Ancient Demography (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 21), Portsmouth, 53–91. Scheidel, W., 2000. ‘Progress and Problems in Roman Demography’, In W. Scheidel (ed) Debating Roman Demography, Leiden. Scheidel, W., 2001. ‘Age structure: Evidence and models’, The Journal of Roman Studies 91: 1–26. Schlimm, D., and Neth, H., 2008. ‘Modelling Ancient and Modern Arithmetic Practices: Addition and Multiplication with Roman and Arabic Numerals’, In V. Sloutsky, B. Love and K. McRae (eds) 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Conference, Austin, 2097–2102. Shaw, B.D., 1987. ‘The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage. Some Reconsiderations, Journal of Roman Studies 77: 30–46. Sigismund Nielsen H., 1997. ‘Interpreting Epithets in Roman Epitaphs’, In B. Rawson and P. Weaver (eds) The Roman Family in Italy, Oxford, 169–204. Silvestrini, M., 1992a. ‘L’Augustalia Alla Luce di Una Nuova Iscrizione Per i Lari Augusti’, Quaderni di Storia 35: 83–110. Silvestrini, M., 1992b. ‘Una Nuova Iscrizione Per I Lari Augusti dal Territorio di Vibinium’, Melanges de l’École française de Rome Antiquité 104: 145–157. Susini, G., 1989. ‘Le Scritture Esposte’, In G. Cavallo, P. Fedeli and A. Giardina (eds) Lo Spazio Letterario di Roma Antica II: La circolazione del testo. Rome, 271–305. Szilági, J., 1961. ‘Beiträge zur Statisik der Sterblichkeit’, Acta Archaeologica 13: 125–155. Szilági, J., 1962. ‘Beiträge zur Statisik der Sterblichkeit’, Acta Archaeologica 14: 297–396. Szilági, J., 1963. ‘Beiträge zur Statisik der Sterblichkeit’, Acta Archaeologica 15: 129–224. Szilági, J., 1965. ‘Beiträge zur Statisik der Sterblichkei’t, Acta Archaeologica 17: 309–334. Szilági, J., 1966. ‘Beiträge zur Statisik der Sterblichkeit’, Acta Archaeologica 18: 235–277. Szilági, J., 1967. ‘Beiträge zur Statisik der Sterblichkeit’, Acta Archaeologica 19: 25–59. Wiese, H., 2007. ‘The Co-Evolution of Number Concepts and Counting Words’, Lingua 117: 758–772. Zhang, J., and Norman, D., 1995. ‘A Representational Analysis of Numeration Systems’, Cognition 57: 271–295.

3 Understanding the Use of Chronological Age From the Life Course to Timescapes

There is a question asked within modern discussion of ageing – how can we put ourselves in the position of someone of a different age?1 This comment is made in the context of the generational belonging or identity being formed not just by a person’s birth cohort or the horizontal dimension but also by their familial lineage or vertical dimension that is intergenerational. In other words, age defines our cultural identity in terms of both chronological time and relationships to others. The point at which the horizontal and vertical axes (i.e. age and relationships) meet is where a person has reached according to their current age. The epitaph can set out information on age effectively and, in its more sophisticated formats, also about the relationships or those relationships that were seen as more important. However, in some ways, the epitaph provides those with a relationship to the deceased with a means to calibrate their relationship to that person. Thus, when set up initially, those gazing at the epitaph together can identify the end point of life, but subsequently may look back to the epitaph as a means to create memories of both the deceased and of themselves at the moment of that person’s death.2 Whilst at the same time, the viewers had the opportunity to create a conception of their own identity based on their own age in the present, alongside their relations with the deceased from the past and, at the same time to imagine a future in which ageing occurs. Knowledge of that future has been found in the modern world to be shaped by the experience of intergenerational contact that normatively occurs in families, but might be accentuated through the encounter with epitaphs in cemeteries.3 Thus, age in an epitaph creates a position within the human life course, from which the imagination of a future and an explanation of a past is seen from a fixed position either in the present or with reference to the age in the epitaph. The life course has a long-ish pedigree in sociology and developmental psychology,4 but interestingly, it is chronological age that provides the calibration of the socially constructed stages of the human life span. To say a person is old or young, a child or an adult, places that person in a continuum relative to other people, and it would seem that normatively human societies produce schemas that differentiate child, adult and old. Today, the UK Office of National Statistics in the UK sees age as a key variable that can be categorized for adults as: 16 to 24; 25 to 44; 45 to 54; 55 to 64; 65 to 74 and over 75.5 Interestingly, the age categories vary in length 8 years from 16 to 24 but then 19 years from 25 to 44; followed by decades and then a DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708-4

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age 33 longer phase for those over 75.6 Thus, when undertaking qualitative social research, it is not necessary to have evenly spaced age categories and this is a principle that we adopt for the analysis of age later in the book. There are other modern schemas – as all readers, who have ever filled in a market research survey, will know. The impulse to categorize persons by age is probably a part of being human and existed in antiquity. These divisions allow us to think about populations around us as a series of age groups, and, to even, undertake statistical surveys based on them. In classical antiquity, these schemas were calibrated by age to create normative stages of life – many of which were later incorporated into medieval and modern European thinking on ageing. As Tim Parkin has suggested, these schemas may form a series of topoi that do not reflect practice but provide us with a guide to elite thinking or a conception of what some expected to happen over the course of the human life span.7 Hence, of course, we should not see these schemes as accurate representations of what happened across the life course; yet, these schemas provide information on the ideologies of age-related behaviours and, thus, should inform our understanding of the construction of timescapes in antiquity.

Stages of Life in Antiquity Writing about age in antiquity was not uncommon, particularly with reference to the years passing and the passage into old age (e.g. Cicero de Senectute). Most remarkable is an ancient topos of the stages of life from birth to old age. Solon is credited with ten stages each of seven years from birth to 70 years of age.8 Plato has nine stages; whereas the Hippocratic corpus could produce seven stages and the Pythagoreans just four stages, each of 20 years. Censorinus could follow Varro in producing four stages of 15 years followed by a period of old age from 60 years of age.9 The way this type of subdivision has been received in modern studies of ancient life varies enormously. The conception of Varro appears to influence directly, or indirectly, Tracy Prowse’s sample division into age groups in a recent study of diet and dental health derived from skeletal evidence in Italy.10 Tim Parkin considers these to be artificial divisions and the way authors divided up the chronology of life varied considerably in terms of the number of stages or the chronological points of transition from one stage to the next.11 These, he informs us, do not describe the stages of life, but they do provide us with information on the categorization of age in antiquity. Tables 2.1–2.3 set up the variation in ancient systems describing stages of life. If split into two halves, each schema can be observed to have many more categories for the first half of life than the second half. The transition points from one half of life to the second half of life tends to fall into the period of late twenties and early thirties with 28, 35 and 40 marking boundaries in schemes with an even number of stages and the stages 25–35, and 30–45 marking this transition in schemes with an uneven number of stages. As a point for mid-life, this is earlier than we would expect and is in part caused by the absence of differentiation in old age – simply being on-going from 56, 60, 68, 70, but could be divided into an early and late old age that could begin in its earlier phase at 49 or even 45, when Romans became

34 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

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seniores in Censorinus’ schema. In contrast, we can identify many categories of the young, with transition points at 4, 7, 10, 14, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28 and 30. This would imply that age as a means of categorization and differentiation was viewed as defining ancient cultural identity, especially with regard to the creation of identities in childhood and young-adulthood. These observations might suggest in the study of epitaphs that we should expect greater attention given to the age of the young than to the old, but also there might be a transitional phase from one half of life to the other half at some point between 28 and 35. It needs to be remembered that there is considerable rounding to the number 7 in all these stages of life with divisions into seven years and seven stages being present as well.

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Figure 3.1 The stages of life in antiquity – shading indicates the first half of the life span.

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Understanding the Use of Chronological Age

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Figure 3.2 Children in the stages of life in antiquity – shading shows stages that include ‘children’ – that is, those below age of 20.

Astrology and Timescapes in Ptolemy These schema reveal the thinking of the ancients about the pattern of the human life span. The presence of Ptolemy’s schema in his work the Tetrabiblos (Tetr.4.10.) is worth further discussion, each phase was constructed with a connection to astrology/astronomy. The Moon was associated with the infant from birth to 4 years; from 4 to 14, Mercury takes over; Venus takes charge from 14 to 22; followed by the Sun in the middle years from 22 to 41; for the next 15 years, Mars assumes command; from 56 to 68, Jupiter takes charge of elderly age and finally Saturn

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36 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

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Figure 3.3 The old in the stages of life in antiquity.

takes charge of the end of life.12 These are preliminary descriptions of the characteristic of the stages of life, but further attention is needed to years, months and days to develop an understanding of the particulars of a life lived. Ptolemy saw human life as having phases not dissimilar to the phases of the moon or the orbits of the planets. The position of the planets and stars at a person’s birth produced a potential reading of their future, but the horoscope was not read at birth. The horoscope could include death and disease not just for the person, but also for his father – for example loss of sight of both fathers and mothers.13 Instead, the position of the stars at a person’s birth needed to be reconstructed some 20 or 30 years later in adulthood.14 The ordering in the Tetrabiblos like that

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age 37 of the planets creates the Sun at its centre (i.e. mid-life) with the lesser planets below it, the Moon, Mercury and Venus (corresponding to infancy, childhood, and youth) with the superior planets above it, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (corresponding to the later stages of life).15 The effect of the planet being in one’s age was not dissimilar to the planet’s effect as it moved through the heavens on an event.16 Thus, knowledge of the ordering of the life span could provide knowledge of the actions of a person at a set stage of life.17 Interestingly, there is a gendered switch through life in which the female goddesses are present in early life, alongside the hermaphroditic Mercury; whereas later in life male gods dominate.18 This can be linked to the infant as born, in some ways still being part of their mother, followed by a period of childhood that leads to puberty and what Ptolemy saw as a period that was frenzied and seeking any chance of sexual gratification.19 The find of discarded papyri in Egypt, particularly from Oxyrhynchus, points to the prevalence of astrology with finds of horoscopes, handy tables, and horoscopes.20 These papyri show dates of the birth of individuals given by the year of an emperor’s rule; the month, the day and the hour of the night or day with details of the position of the planets, for example ‘Mars in Gemini’.21 These documents provided the recipient with details of their birth and the position of the planets at their birth from which a deduction of the future might depend. These are the result of calculations about the past, in which the inhabitant of Oxyrhynchus knew the hour of their birth. The Handy Tables of Ptolemy were distributed, commented on, and seem to have informed less able mathematicians to make the calculations of the position of planets for clients wishing to know more about their horoscope at birth. This provides us with a means to link elite knowledge, via an expert, to an individual who knew the hour, the day and the year of their birth.22 The actual horoscope, as we understand it, was full of contradictions, mathematics, and complexity, but remained an important phenomenon that could not be cast without knowledge of a person’s birth date.23 It is notable that the horoscopes and astronomical papyri from Egypt and, in particular those of Oxyrhynchus, show a marked increase in their number from the first century CE through to the midfourth century with a peak in their numbers in the second and third centuries (see Figure 3.4).24 Alongside the time of birth, the astrologer needed to know the place of birth. In book two of the Tetrabiblos, Ptolemy explains the broad definitions: those people near the equator (the ‘Ethiopians’), who live with the sun above them, at one extreme and at the other the more northern peoples, who live with the constellations of the Bears over their heads, and a third group living between these extremes.25 There were a whole series of further sub-divisions and definitions that explained that peoples of Britain, Gaul and Germany were fiercer and stronger than the people of Cisalpine Gaul, Apulia and Sicily, who were more masterful, benevolent and co-operative.26 It links to Ptolemy’s need to know the geographical location of places as set out in his Geography.27 The Handy Tables of Ptolemy range from the Equator, through Lower Egypt and Pontus through to Southern Britain and Brigantium and onto Thule and Scythia.28 This work, like his Geography, positions places throughout the known world and, thus, anyone born

38 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

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or present at a particular location can be positioned on the globe that was intrinsically related to celestial movements.29 This draws us to another feature of timescapes in the Roman Empire: people did not stay where they were born but were mobile and travelled to live in other parts of the Empire. The transport of people by ship may even have been more profitable than a cargo of wheat for Rome.30 Alexandrian Greeks found their way to Rome, just as every other people of the Roman Empire did and referred back in inscriptions to their place of origin.31 There were also phases of movement of populations associated with colonization (removal of people from the centre, Rome and Italy, to other places) and the movement of captives or traded slaves to Rome and Italy.32 Stable Isotope analysis of teeth (grown in childhood), when compared to bone (renewed to point of death), has radically extended our understanding of migration and to realize that migration occurred within provinces, by whole families to Rome, and was very much part of the life course of individuals in the past.33 David Noy analysed the age-death of the individuals in Rome according to whether they were in the military or were civilian (divided by pagan and Christian/Jewish inscriptions). The results demonstrated very different patterns of commemoration (Figure 3.5). The absence of children (in contrast to their presence in other epigraphic groups) might suggest that the young did not migrate,34 but this might miss a point. A child born elsewhere, unlike an adult, had few real connections to that place unlike their parents or young adults, who had left

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age

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after childhood. In a sense, only adults might be said to have been from a place; whereas children might be seen to have just been dependents who were with the adult from another place. There is a striking contrast with the military population, whose age-at-death peaks more than ten years after recruitment. Mark Handley has identified 567 inscriptions of this type found outside Rome.35 The majority are from Italy (119) with substantial numbers coming from North Africa (62) and the Balkans (67), with smaller numbers from Gaul (39) and Britain (17) and some 251 from the Eastern Empire.36 The broad distribution does not reflect the intensity of migration to or from a place, per se, but is a function of the number of inscriptions recovered for the most part, but does indicate that migration to Italy continued to be dominant from the fourth to the eighth centuries AD. Males were far more likely than females to commemorate their origins (84.3 per cent to 15.7 per cent, respectively).37 The ages recorded by Handley point to an increase in male commemoration at an older age than female ages amongst those with a mention of their place of origin, but it needs to be remembered that he does not separate soldiers from the data represented in Figure 3.6.38 The inscriptions mentioning a place of origin, like the actions of the astrologer, look back in time to a person’s birth as a reference point in the past. Interestingly, knowledge of this date and place provided information that can be seen to be accurate. It provides us with a better understanding of the possibility of the accurate recording of ages and, thus, also, age-at-death. Knowledge of your own birth was fundamental for

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Figure 3.6 Age-at-death plotted against anno provinciae (year of the province) in epitaphs from Mauretania.

any interaction with an astrologer, as was your place of birth. Given the universality of astrology as a form of knowledge, those who did not know their date of birth were excluded from this form of information about their own future.

Timescapes and the Meaning of Age-at-Death in Epitaphs Today, in English, we use the verb ‘to age’ which tends to signify how we ‘grow old’, but is also a measure of time. The former is about identity; whereas the latter can be seen to be a measurement of time.39 The two meanings of age do not necessarily converge, because there is no direct relationship between how someone ages and chronological time – for the reason that ageing of the body varies from person to person.40 Yet, the two are related via expectations of people of a certain chronological age. On Latin epitaphs, the age-related formula vixit annis (and its linguistic variants e.g. bixit annis) signifies how long a person had lived, and, at the same time, allows for an identity of the person to be mapped at their point of death via their age-at-death. This causes age in epitaphs to be a signifier of more than one sense of temporal identity – chronological time spent alive. Age on epitaphs expresses the identity of the deceased as a person of a certain age. If we accept that biological ageing is varied, and does not map easily onto the passing of chronological time, it is not difficult to postulate that human attempts

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age 41 to categorize persons by their age, especially in later life, tend to fail, or are found wanting. However, it must be recognized that humans categorize others by their age, and the use of age in Latin epitaphs was a means to categorize and measure a life by its length from birth. It can be related to the lives of others. However, not everyone setting up an epitaph to a dead person included their age (length of life), and it could be said that for many this aspect was not seen as important; whereas those who did include a person’s length of life were engaging with an understanding of a timescape that was measured by years and, even, months, days and hours. Underpinning timescapes found in all cultures is a division of the human life span into distinct stages, whether understood as childhood, adulthood, motherhood, fatherhood or old age. These have become stages to be studied by historians working within the subject area of the Roman Family to compare with an individual stage of life as recognized today. What is produced in these studies of the evidence from antiquity is a social constructivist perspective of a single stage of life that creates a normative vision of, for example, Roman childhood that draws mostly on legal and literary sources. A development from this single-phase focus was Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence’s study of the Roman life course in literary sources a decade or more ago that brought into focus age as a dimension of the lives of people in Rome.41 That book tended to focus on what has been termed ‘personal and biological life spans’ – as seen by authors in texts. It did not account for a third dimension of age – the social life span, which extended into the period after their deaths.42 In many ways, it is the epitaph that provides a social identity for the person after their death once their biological and personal presence becomes absent, and their chronological life span is over. The latter as recorded on epitaphs need not have a one-to-one relation with the actual age-at-death of the person commemorated, but instead should be seen as a usage of chronological age that is related to a global cultural concept of chronological age found within the Roman Empire. The fact that our data is taken from epitaphs – a material record found on memorials to the dead – needs to be related to conceptions of time associated with death. Advances in medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West have caused us to view death and age in quite different ways to those found in the past or within cultures studied by anthropologists in the twentieth century. This causes an adjustment in the demographic timing of death and an expectation of our children dying prior to adulthood. These changes have caused modern scholars of the Roman family to seek an explanation of the cultural experience of the loss of a child.43 In contrast, sociologists see a need to explain, what may be understood as, a denial of the possibility of death in modern western societies.44 Age lived as recorded in any Latin epitaph is a form of classification that describes both their point of death in the chronology of the human lifespan, and the length of their life span. This is combined with other formulae, such as Hic situs/sita est – here he or she is, to create a fixed time and place of the dead. The epitaph explains the immateriality of the dead and creates a locale of remembrance of both their life and death, as signified in the inclusion of years lived (age) on the epitaph. The

42  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities absent deceased person becomes, via commemoration in an epitaph, metaphorically present, and is present at their specific age of death that allows them to be categorized as – young, adult or old – relative to the age of those, who were still living.45 The time of death becomes a point of remembrance, which is informed by the everyday experience of the living that includes an understanding of chronological age. This allows for the viewer of an epitaph not just to create an identity for the deceased, but to create their own identity through age difference – they may be older (lived longer) or at an age younger than the deceased, and create a relationship through similarity or difference.46 Hence, in studying epitaphs, we are effectively gaining access to the variation in the use of time, as expressed in terms of chronological age, across the Roman Empire.

The Temporalities of Commemoration – Time and Age-at-Death Today, in the twenty-first century, the new dynamics of ageing has produced a global demography unlike any other in history, in which many more people will live to the very extremes of the human life span. It has also produced a need to create equality for the old, and in the care of the old.47 Intriguingly, the discourse about old age in this new situation continues to be shaped by ancient thinking.48 Far fewer people, in antiquity, experienced the full longevity of the human life span but the rarity of that experience was incorporated into epitaphs – often via age exaggeration to a life span beyond 150 years. This raises the whole question of the accuracy of age reporting. However, what we have evidence for is the possibility of precise age reporting down to the months, days and even hours through the use of Roman numerals to represent age. It is a system that was predominant in the Roman west and can be seen to be one of the effects of Roman culture on the societies of the west – they used Roman numerals to measure chronological age. In the past, Roman numerals have been seen as wanting in comparison to Arabic numerals used today in mathematics. However, recent research on logic has proven that using Roman numerals can be a simpler and easier to use system of mathematical notation.49 This has some importance, because the calculation of a person’s age can involve mathematics – if a person knows that he or she was 40 (XL) when my son was born and that they are now 48 (XLVIII), it is simple to calculate the age of a son as 8 (VIII) years of age. In addition, to this basic mathematical logic between two ages to create the age of a descendant, we can also identify relationships between ages in epitaphs and numerical dating systems. In Mauretania, a system of anno provinciae (year of the province) is found on 228 epitaphs that also include a mention of age-at-death. The range of numbers for anno provinciae is from 127 to 642 CE – causing the system to survive antiquity into the seventh century CE and imply that the use of Latin epitaphs with commemorated age, including formulae such as Dis Manibus Sacrum (To the Sacred Shades) continued for more than half a millennium from the mid-second century CE (if the system of counting was based on a year one in 40 CE).50 For our study of epitaphs, we can see the direct relationship between ages and ‘year of the province’ to plot the use of age within a chronological framework (Figure 3.6). The pattern of ages

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age

43

relating to the chronologically of provincial years shows little variation over time, as can be clearly seen from the trendline and distribution in Figure 3.6. The combination of age-at-death and year of the province provides us with an insight into the role of numerical rounding in two systems of counting. The range of ages commemorated runs right across the life span (Figure 3.6), but with the greatest incidence of the commemoration of the young occurring after the province had existed for more than 100 years (the province came into being in 40 CE). The two systems of counting that of a person’s age and the age of the province could have been used together with a person’s age being derived from the year of the province at their birth. To take a modern analogy, if I know I was born in 1963 and the current year is 2023, I also know that my age is 60. Similar calculations should have been possible using the year of the province in Mauretania. We do not have both the date of birth in year of the province and year of death to confirm whether such a system of cross-referencing was utilized. Instead, what we have are just the age-at-death and year of death (in year of the province). Looking at these together, we can compare how the Roman numerals are used and, in particular, what the number ends in: I, II, III, IIII, V, VI, VII, VIII, VIIII or X (Figure 3.7). This is done to establish, whether we see very similar patterns of rounding to the V and X across the 166 examples that use both age-at-death and year of the province. An even distribution would result in 16 or 17 examples being associated with each numeral from I to X. Rather than an even pattern, the resulting comparison in Figure 3.7 shows that both the year of the province and age-at-death sequences strongly feature numbers ending X (or in Arabic numerals

35

30

Number of Inscriptions

25

20

15

% Anno Provinciae

% Age at death

10

5

0

I

II

III

IIII

V

VI

VII

VIII

VIIII

X

Figure 3.7 A comparison of the use of Roman numerals for age-at-death and anno provinciae (year of the province) in epitaphs from Mauretania.

44  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities to numbers ending in zero). There is a clear differentiation between the sequences that shows that V (or in Arabic numerals to numbers ending in five) was far more prominent in the age-at-death sequence. Interestingly, the year of the province sequence shows that numbers ending in II or III have a far greater prominence than V or any other final number apart from X. This would suggest that the use of these two systems of time were probably not cross-referenced, and that age-at-death was expressed with a degree of imprecision that was not associated with the statement of the year of the province in epitaphs. This is perfectly logical since a person’s age was a knowledge that was shared amongst a small group; whereas the year of the province was a system of time-reckoning that was shared by a far larger constituency. The year of the province found in Mauretania would seem to become prominent more than 100 years after the province had been established. It has few parallels with time-reckoning elsewhere. However, mention does need to be made of the system established in Rome by Augustus in 7 BC that became known as Anno (Year) I with the vici (neighbourhoods) of Rome counting the years through to at least the middle of the fourth century utilizing this system. The adoption of such systems of counting by year is also indicated by the lease on the property known as the Praedia Julia Felix in Pompeii, which was to be leased in the sixth year on the Ides of August.51 Hence, the localized counting of years may have been undertaken, alongside the usage of consular years – as can be seen in the context of painted graffiti/inscriptions at Pompeii.52

Timescapes as Temporalities of Identity This chapter has set out to explore the use of age in antiquity. The presence of concepts of stages of life was articulated by the elite for males in the Roman world. The variety of means of division of chronological age points to a cultural prominence of age as a key element of identity. The astrological papyri from Egypt point to the importance of knowing the year, the day and the time of birth. The greatest number of these papyri can be found in the third century CE, but with a substantial number coming from the previous century. These documents suggest a wider age awareness than has been suggested by some scholars.53 However, when comprehending the record of age-at-death found in epitaphs – we need to take into account of the use of numerals in inscriptions. Our comparison of the use of numerals through a comparison of numerals in epitaphs and numerals in recording anno provinciae (the year of the province) in Mauretania demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to accurately record the year, but the age-at-death across epitaphs shows a high level of rounding to the V (five) and X (ten). Thus, culturally, the accurate recording of age to the year was not a priority in all cases; whereas recording of age within five years was a much higher priority. This does not imply that the recording of age was not important. It was a key element in an epitaph to determine the deceased’s identity. One thing worth considering is the simple possibility that like the words in an epitaph, the age could also be shortened say VIIII (nine) to V (five) or rounded up from VIIII (nine) to X

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age 45 (ten). Viewing these two factors – in the context of many epitaphs being formed not from inscribed tombstones, but stones set up perhaps with a painted epitaph or simply a stone marker – there is a need to comprehend the epitaph inscribed on stone within this context. The very action of inscribing in Latin in a manner that could have been read by travellers from afar, using similar words to those used at their place of origin in the Latin West, was an act of identity creation, which spoke to a wider community that used a language of commemoration to create an identity for the deceased. The Latin epitaph, even with some variations, is a universal phenomenon across the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire. Within this language of commemoration, age had prominence. How communities used this language of commemoration varied, and which age groups were more frequently provided with epitaphs carved in stone was a variable that is the focus of this book.54 It is worth stating here though that there was a clear limit to the universality of age-at-death in epitaphs – it is a phenomenon associated with Latin inscriptions and the Western Empire – there is simply no equivalent from the Eastern Roman Empire. Thus, age-at-death was limited as a cultural phenomenon to the Western Mediterranean; but, as we shall show in the chapters that follow, ages recorded across the human lifespan varied considerably from province to province and from city to city. This variation can enable us to begin to see how the varied cultures of the Western Mediterranean had differences in their conceptions of chronological age or gave greater importance to different points in the life course of an individual. The seemingly universal of recording an age-at-death was subject to the considerable local variation that allows us to begin to see a Mediterranean that was engaging with a universal phenomenon: the Latin epitaph; but at the same time could incorporate a local cultural priority concerning the age of the deceased.

Notes 1 Biggs et al. 2011. 2 Wiseman 2014: 51. Working from literary texts stresses the role of reading in memory that combines with what was heard about a person. 3 Antonucci et al. 2011. 4 Elder 1975 is a summation of a much larger project on migration and the life course in the United States, but sets out key determinants that have shaped the approach to the life course in sociology and history. 5 Bytheway 2011: 7. 6 Bytheway 2011: 7–9. 7 Parkin 2010. 8 Philo, De opificio mundi 35.103–104 (Solon fragment 27). 9 For sources and discussion, see Parkin 2010. 10 Prowse 2011. 11 Parkin 2010: 101–3. 12 Eyben 1993: 34–7 sets out each stage. 13 Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 3.4. 14 Beck 2007: 20–37 provides a guide on how to construct a horoscope; Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 3.1–2. Compare Cramer 1954 on the politics of astrology and legal ramification of knowing one’s time of birth and, thus, having knowledge of future via a horoscope.

46  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities 15 Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 1.4–9. 16 Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 2.8 discusses dominance of a planet over an event to determine its nature. 17 Taub 1993 on ancient knowledge derived from astrology/astronomy. 18 Barton 1994b: 107 discussing Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 1.6. 19 Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 4.10. 20 For documents, see Jones 1999a and for Ptolemy’s handy tables see Tihon 2011 and Mercier 2011. 21 Jones 1999a: 397, no.4259. 22 Jones 1999b. 23 Barton 1994b: 85–90 for an example of a horoscope cast and its confusions or complications. 24 Jones 1994. 25 Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 2.2. 26 Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 2.3. 27 Much discussion of geography in antiquity is undertaken with a view to the discussion of how Romans travelled, rather than the theoretical construction of geography in the manner of Ptolemy that links astronomy and astrology with geography – thus linking time to geographical space via these modes of thinking. See the following volumes for a selection of approaches to travel and geography in antiquity: Adams and Laurence 2001; Adams and Roy 2007; Dueck 2012; Fasce 1994; Roller 2006; Rathman 2007; Talbert and Raaflaub 2010 are examples of recent works. 28 Mercier 2011 pp. 129–31 on Table A2 Column 2, and p. 1 ‘Of all the astronomical works of Greek antiquity the Handy Tables of Ptolemy went further than any other to satisfy the needs of practical and straightforward calculation’. 29 Fundamental discussion of this connection is made by Jones 2012. See also Bergren and Jones 2000: 5–14, at 21 for the linkage of celestial movements to the Tetrabiblos, see also Bakhouche 1995. Toomer 1984 observes that: there is a sense that the Geography plots places on the earth, just as the Almagest positions the celestial bodies for discussion in his introduction and full translation of the text. 30 Handley 2011: 11 citing Cassiodorus. Variae 5.35. 31 Noy 2000 provides a full analysis of the textual record. 32 Scheidel 2004 and 2005. 33 Laurence 2012: 113–27 provides an overview of the impact of stable isotope analysis with references to key studies. 34 Noy 2000: 74. Handley 2011: 39 ‘a largely young and male population moving to the bright lights of Rome to start afresh.’ 35 Handley 2011: 13. 36 Handley 2011: 15. 37 Handley 2011: 37. Contrast to findings for example via stable isotope analysis of skeletons from the Isola Sacra cemetery: Prowse et al. 2007; see Laurence 2012: 116–21 for discussion of migration and implications of this evidence. 38 Handley 2011: 39–41, but note the very small numbers of inscriptions involved in the study 42 females and 107 males. 39 Bytheway 2011: 6–7. 40 Baars 2007, see also Bytheway 2011: 51–5. 41 Harlow and Laurence 2002. 42 Sofaer 2011; following Harré 1991. 43 It should be noted that looking across to evolutionary psychology, it is difficult to sustain the notion that human emotions were substantially different in the Roman period, see for discussion Carter Wood 2011 in a broader historical perspective. 44 Hockey 1996.

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age 47 45 Tilley 2002. 46 Hockey et al. 2010: 1–18 for a thorough discussion. 47 See campaigns in the UK – www.ageuk.org.uk/. 48 See Cokayne 2003 and Parkin 2003 for discussion. 49 Lengnink and Schlimm 2010; Schlimm and Neth 2008. 50 Fishwick 1964. 51 CIL 4 1136. 52 See Aoyagi and Motomura 2012: 78 for the full list of consular years used. 53 Duncan Jones 1977. 54 Abedal et al. 2009 for definitions and further discussion across this valuable chapter on variation in the forms of identity.

Bibliography Abedal, R., Herrera, Y.M., Johnston, A.I., and McDermott, R., 2009. ‘Identity as a Variable’, In R. Abdelal, Y.M. Herrera, A.I. Johnston and R. McDermott (eds) Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists, Cambridge, 17–32. Adams, C., and Laurence, R., 2001. Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire, London. Adams, C. and Roy, J., 2007. Travel and Geography and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt and the Near East, Oxford. Antonucci, T.C., Birditt, K.S., Sherman, C.W., and Trinh, S., 2011. ‘Stability and Change in the Intergenerational family: A Convoy Approach’, Ageing and Society 31: 1084–1106. Aoyagi, M., and Motomura, R., 2012. A Comprehensive Index to Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Vol. IV), Tokyo. Baars, J., 2007. ‘Introduction. Chronological Time and Chronological Age: Problems of Temporal Diversity’, In J. Baars and H. Visser (eds) Aging and Time, New York, 15–42. Bakhouche, B., 1995. ‘Limites et Quadrillages du Ciel “de la Sphère au Globe” ’, In A. Rousselle (ed) Frontières Terrestres, Frontières Célestes dans l’Antiquité, Paris, 309–329. Barton, T., 1994a. Ancient Astrology, London. Barton, T., 1994b. Power and Knowledge. Astrology, Physiognomy, and Medicine under the Roman Empire, Ann Arbor. Beck, R., 2007. A Brief History of Ancient Astrology, Oxford. Bergren, J.L., and Jones, A., 2000. Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation, Princeton Biggs, S., Haapala, I., and Lowenstein, A., 2011. ‘Exploring Generational Intelligence as a Mode of Examining Intergenerational Relationships’, Ageing and Society 31: 1107–1124. Bytheway, B., 2011. Unmasking Age. The Significance of Age for Social Research, Bristol. Carter Wood, J., 2011. ‘A Change of Perspective: Integrating Evolutionary Psychology into the Historiography of Violence’, British Journal of Criminology 11: 479–498. Cokayne, K., 2003. Experiencing Old Age in Ancient Rome, London. Cramer, F.H., 1954. Astrology in Roman Law and Politics, Philadelphia. Dueck, D., 2012. Geography in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge. Duncan Jones, R., 1977. ‘Age-rounding, Illiteracy and Social Differentiation in the Roman Empire’, Chiron 7: 333–353. Elder, G.H., Jr., 1975. ‘Age Differentiation and the Life Course’, Annual Review of Sociology 1: 165–190. Eyben, E., 1993. Restless Youth in Ancient Rome, London.

48  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities Fasce, S., 1994. Temi e Discussioni di Geografia Antica, Genoa. Fishwick, D., 1964. ‘The Institution of the Provincial Cult in Africa Proconsularis’, Hermes 92:343–363. Handley, M., 2011. ‘Dying on Foreign Shores. Travel and Mobility in the Late-Antique West’, Journal of Roman Archaeology (Supplement 86) Harlow, M., and Laurence, R., 2002. Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome. A Life Course Approach, London. Harré, R., 1991. Physical Being: A Theory for a Corporeal Psychology, Oxford. Hockey, J., 1996. ‘The View from the West: Reading the Anthropology of Non-Western Death Ritual’, In G. Howarth and C. Jupp (eds) Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal, Basingstoke, 3–16. Hockey, J., Komaromy, C., and Woodthorpe, K., 2010. ‘Materialising Absence’, In P. Fitzpatrick (ed) The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality, Basingstoke, 1–18. Jones, A., 1994. ‘The Place of Astronomy in Roman Egypt’, In T.D. Barnes (ed) The Sciences in Greco-Roman Society, Edmonton, 25–52. Jones, A., 1999a. Astronomical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 233, Philadelphia. Jones, A., 1999b. ‘Uses and Users of Astronomical Commentaries in Antiquity’, In G. Most (ed) Commentaries – Kommentare, Aporemata 4, Göttingen, 147–172. Jones, A., 2012. ‘Ptolemy’s Geography: Mapmaking and the Scientific Enterprise’, In R.J.A. Talbert (ed) Ancient Perspectives. Maps and their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, Chicago, 109–128. Laurence, R., 2012. Roman Archaeology for Historians, London. Lengnink, K., and Schlimm, D., 2010. ‘Learning and Understanding Numeral Systems: Semantic Aspects of Number Representations from an Education Perspective’, In B. Löwe, and T. Müller (eds) PhiMSAMP: Philosophy of Mathematics: Sociological Aspects of Mathematical Practice, London, 235–264. Mercier, R., 2011. Ptolemy’s Handy Tables (vol 1b, Tables A1-A2): Transcription and Commentary, Louvain. Noy, D., 2000. Foreigners at Rome: Citizens and Strangers, London. Parkin, T., 2003. Old Age in the Roman World, Baltimore. Parkin, T., 2010. ‘The Lifecycle’, In M. Harlow and R. Laurence (eds) A Cultural History of Childhood and the Family, Oxford, 97–114. Prowse, T.L., 2011. ‘Diet and Dental Health through the Life Course in Roman Italy’, In S.C. Agarwal and B.A. Glencross (eds) Social Bioarchaeology, Oxford, 410–437. Prowse, T.L., Saunders, S.R., Schwarcz, H.P., Garnsey, P., Macchiarelli, R., and Bondioli, L., 2007. ‘Isotopic Evidence for Age-Related Immigration to Rome’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 132: 510–519. Rathman, M., 2007. Wahrnehmung und Erfassung Geographischer Räume in der Antike, Mainz. Roller, D.W., 2006. Through the Pillars of Herakles: Greco-Roman Exploration of the Atlantic, London. Scheidel, W., 2004. ‘Human Mobility in Roman Italy, I: The Free Population’, Journal of Roman Studies 94: 1–26. Scheidel, W., 2005. ‘Human Mobility in Roman Italy, II: The Slave Population’, Journal of Roman Studies 95: 64–79. Schlimm, D., and Neth, H., 2008. ‘Modelling Ancient and Modern Arithmetic Practices: Addition and Multiplication with Arabic and Roman Numerals’, In V. Sloutsky, B. Love,

Understanding the Use of Chronological Age 49 and K. McRae (eds) 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin Texas, 2097–2102. Sofaer, J., 2011. ‘Towards a Social Bioarchaeology of Age’, In S.C. Agarwal and B.A. Glencross (eds) Social Bioarchaeology, Oxford, 285–311. Talbert, R.J.A., and Raaflaub, K.A., 2010. Geography and Ethnography. Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies, Oxford. Taub, L.C., 1993. Ptolemy’s Universe. The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy’s Astronomy, Chicago. Tihon, A., 2011. Les Tables Faciles de Ptolémée (vol 1a, Tables A1-A2), Introduction, Édition critique, Louvain. Tilley, C., 2002. ‘Metaphor; Materiality and Interpretation’, In V. Buchli (ed) The Material Culture Reader, Oxford, 23–56. Toomer, G.J., 1984. Ptolemy’s Almagest, London. Wiseman, T.P., 2014. ‘Popular memory’, In K. Galinsky (ed) Memoria Romana. Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory, Memoirs of the American Academy at Rome (Supplement 10), Ann Arbor, 43–62.

4 Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice

Altogether, Roman tombstone inscriptions do not provide us with a good random sample of ages at death. Instead and this point seems worth stressing, Roman tombstones provide us with a biased set of commemorations. Commemorative practice is useful for analysing commemorative practice; it may or may not also be useful for analysing the relative importance of relationships within the Roman family . . . But commemorative practice is useless, I maintain, for understanding patterns of death.1

Books on Roman death and books on Latin epitaphs discuss many features associated with tombstones and the cemeteries in which they were placed, but the inclusion of age-at-death is seldom discussed in any detail or is even completely omitted.2 Where it does appear in recent publications, it is used as a means to discuss the young or the very old or as a means of categorizing the age and then relating this feature to the debate over epigraphy as a demographic indicator. Keith Hopkins revealed the absurdity of using age-at-death from epitaphs as demographic data due to biases in commemorative practice, but little attention has been paid to the actual inscribing of age as a commemorative practice.3 There is much more discussion of the relations between the deceased and family members, as revealed by the tombstone or a selection of tombstones. Many begin with the fictional narration of Trimalchio’s tomb in Petronius’ Satyrica that tends to shape how we may read real tombstones and their meanings (see Chapter 8 for discussion of freed slaves).4 Age-at-death is an epigraphic phenomenon worthy of study in its own right and should not be regarded as a simple chronological measure that happened to be included in an epitaph. Instead, we would suggest that age-at-death was included for a reason – but the reason for its inclusion as part of commemorative practice varied from place to place. To demonstrate the nature of the variation, we examine a corpus of epitaphs: those from Dougga in North Africa and the museum display of epitaphs concerning the Nicholson Collection in the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney. In the first study, that of Dougga, we set out to examine the contextual homogeneity of epitaphs from this city’s cemeteries. The second focus on a museum collection seeks to illustrate the variation in the writing of age-at-death and to seek to highlight its emblematic deployment DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708-5

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 51 as a commemorative practice. In both these case studies, we will set out the parameters of how age was written: what abbreviations were used; where was age placed in the epitaph relative to other information, and – finally – we will set out to explain its inclusion.

Abbreviating and Standardizing Writing on Tombstones – Dougga D M S

D(is) M(anibus) s(acrum)   To the sacred spirits of the dead

T. ABENIUS

T(itus) Abenius    Titus Abenius

HONORATUS Honoratus  Honoratus PVAXLV

p(ius) v(ixit) a(nnis) XLV   loyal, lived 45 years

H S E

H(ic) S(itus) E(st)   He lies here.

(ILAfr.588)

There are 1,615 tombstones recorded from the site of Dougga in Tunisia. For the most part, these are extremely formulaic and follow a pattern found in the inscription set out earlier.5 They open with a dedication to the spirits of the dead (Dis Manibus Sacrum). Our example then sets out the name of the deceased over two lines (Titus Abennius Honoratus). This is followed by the abbreviated form PVAXLV (pius vixit annis XLV) which sets out the man’s loyalty and then his age-at-death at 45 years. Finally, there is the statement in just three letters that the man lies here (hic situs est). It is the man’s name and age that created his identity at death but refers back to a longer time range of his life. Interesting, the many inscribed tombstones at Dougga were found to be associated with dolmens and un-inscribed stones associated with the dead of an earlier period.6 The repetition of the format seen earlier across the full corpus at Dougga is remarkable and shows that the words that needed to be written out in full were just the person’s name and the number. The rest of the forms were simple abbreviations, almost like abbreviations used when texting. There is some variation and extension of the formulae PVAXLV to PV ANN LVIII (CIL VIII 26956) or extended to P V A CI (CIL VIII 26959). The feature of abbreviation, for modern readers – makes Latin Epigraphy tricky to read.7 In contrast, if you were situated and grew up in this world of abbreviated words in antiquity, the abbreviated letters would map onto words – whilst those words written out in full would have claimed your attention. Thus, walking through the cemeteries of Dougga, a reader of tombstones would identify names and age-at-death routinely whilst knowing the rest of the formulae. A modern reader becomes quickly attuned to the abbreviated formats when reading all 1,615 tombstones from Dougga and the impediment of unfamiliarity is lost. There is an efficiency to the abbreviated formulae that allows the name and age of the deceased to be the focus of the reader. Your attention, as a reader, would also have been drawn to the more elaborate items – those tombstones that

52  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities were not of this pattern and included poetry with all the words written in full (e.g. CIL VIII.26670) or abbreviated in the standard formats of DMS, HSE and P VA alongside other words written in full (e.g. CIL VIII 26933).8 These are simply elaborations of the name and age-at-death with formulae and fit into the funerary genre of Dougga. What the abbreviated forms DMS and HSE do though is to construct the tomb as a different sort of space by marking it out as a locus religious, in which the remains of the named person were placed.9

To Inscribe Age or Not to Inscribe Age When we visit a museum collection of inscriptions, whether it is the Capitoline Museums or the National Museum at Diocletian’s Baths in Rome,10 or the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney, we are presented with items that have been very deliberately selected for display. The texts are intrinsically interesting and have been selected. The collection of Latin inscriptions on display in the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney is a case in point (Figure 4.1). Most were purchased in Italy by Charles Nicholson (1808–1903). There are examples of children who died young (Figure 1.1); sailors stating both their age and nation of origin; and freed slaves. The inscriptions on display tend to be texts that are complete, rather than incomplete.

Figure 4.1 The display of epitaphs acquired by Charles Nicholson in Pozzuoli (1857– 1858), now displayed as the Nicholson Collection, at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 53 They represent the nature of Latin epigraphy to visitors and students at Sydney University with a false impression that the abbreviation of phrases in Latin epitaphs is quite limited, in complete contrast to the epitaphs discussed earlier found at Dougga. Inscriptions displayed in museums tend to be placed there to instruct and, for us, to view with a sense of wonder – whilst at the same time involving us in the gentle art of translation. The inscriptions were mostly purchased by Charles Nicholson, a doctor from New South Wales, in the nineteenth century, whilst travelling in Italy.11 The process of selection of this collection was from what was available for sale – several inscriptions are epitaphs of the fleet at Misenum and were purchased on the bay of Naples. Others seem to have been selected for the young age of the deceased to illustrate child mortality, it is notable that most of the epitaphs on display in the Capitoline Museums in Rome feature the commemoration of children. Thus, the action of collecting will have influenced the survival of inscriptions. Today, it is impossible to prove how this may have affected the survival rates of inscriptions from sites across modern Italy. There is a contrast between the cemeteries of North Africa that were explored and tombstones recorded by colonial powers in North Africa – the tombstones were in situ in nearly all cases; whereas from the Renaissance or even earlier in Italy: inscriptions were collected or selected for inclusion in collections (others may have been discarded). In other European countries, the relative rarity of inscriptions may have caused them to be collected. Yet the museum display is a place to begin to understand the choices made in creating an epitaph and the structure of the text inscribed on stone. Many epitaphs open with the abbreviation DM for Dis Manibus (to the ghosts), which establishes that the person this commemorates is deceased – compare to the earlier example from Dougga using DMS (Dis Manibus Sacrum). This is followed by the name of the deceased, which may seem an obvious point – but is a statement of identity and it is worth noting that most graffiti in Pompeii are simply created by a person writing their name. Thus, the name is probably the most important element of the epitaph. We can see this in the layout of the epitaph in Figure 4.2 with the name M. Lollius Primitius running across the top of the inscription below the abbreviation for Dis Manibus. The next line of the inscription indicates that he was from Italy with the verb vixit (he lived) with the abbreviation of Annos to just the letter A. The fourth line indicates the number of years that he lived, 35, and that he had served as a soldier for seven years and ten days. The last two lines explain who the commemorator was, his wife, Valeria Primilia. This epitaph was carved to fit within the frame of the piece of stone, now broken, and was laid out to fit the information into a number of lines, but notice how the commemorator’s name is in larger letters. There is a logic to reading such an epitaph. DM signifies death but is abbreviated because it is a formula that signifies that this is an epitaph; whereas the name of the deceased was written in full. Annos in line two is abbreviated to fit the phrase vixit annos into the third line, perhaps, so that the numeral XXXV on the fourth line has greater prominence. There follows the designation of the commemorator, a wife of a soldier, with the abbreviation BMF or bene meranti fecit – ‘well deserving wife made this’. A series of choices to include information had been made and these produced the structure of

54 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

Figure 4.2 The epitaph of Marcus Lollius Primitius detailing both his life of 35 years and his military service of 7 years and 10 days and details of his wife, Valeria Primilia, who set up the epitaph. NMR1081 Nicholson Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 55

Figure 4.3 The epitaph of Hermes, a home-born slave, detailing his life and that the armourer of the trireme Mercury set up this epitaph. NMR1098 Nicholson Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

the text that explained the 35 years of the life of Marcus Lollius Primus, an Italian, who was briefly a soldier, commemorated by his wife. The contrast in layout between this inscription and that in Figure 4.3. The spacing is quite different but there are similarities in structure. DM (Dis Manibus) is placed on the same line as the name Hermetia, who in line two is revealed as a verna – a homebred slave. There is a similarity in that this line also contains the formula vixit annis, but rather than abbreviate annis to A, as in Figure 4.2, the scribe has split the word and carried the letters NIS into the following line, which contains the numeral for the years lived XVIIII (19) years and the first part of the name of the commemorator Valerius Clemens, who is identified as a sailor on a trireme called the Mercury. Interestingly, the 17 Latin words (some abbreviated) have been fitted into the space available, in contrast in our previous example of 21 words were used in the commemoration of the deceased. In some ways, an epitaph does not need as many words as these two examples (Figures 4.2 and 4.3), what is critical is the definition of the person named as

56 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

Figure 4.4 The epitaph of Euhemeria – setting out no further details and showing that a person could be commemorated through just a name and the formula Dis Manibus (‘to the shades’). NMR1070 Nicholson Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

deceased using the words Dis Manibus or the abbreviation of these two words, and the inclusion of the name of the deceased. This can be seen very clearly in Figure 4.4.

Abbreviations in Inscriptions and the Recall of Age Age, as we have seen, is in some contexts omitted and in others is a central aspect of commemoration of the deceased. Most tombstones do not include elaborate decoration or give the Latin words in full rather than as abbreviations. The act of abbreviation or writing in full would seem to have been a variable and needs further investigation in connection with the inclusion of age in epitaphs. The inscribed forms of the words that are associated with the statement of age are the fullest form vixit annis/annos, various shortened forms: vix. ann, vixit A., and the abbreviated form VA. In our database of some 23,000 examples, the abbreviated forms are by far the most common (46 per cent), when compared to the fully written out format (5 per cent). If the full form might be considered an act of care to ensure that the age-at-death was fully comprehended, and might be hypothesized

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 57 25

Number of Epitaphs

20

15

10

5

0

1

3

5

7

9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 34 36 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 62 64 68 73 75 80 83 85 87 100 Ages Recorded in Epitaphs

Figure 4.5 Age-at-death in epitaphs from Italy using the full text for Vixit Annis or Vixit Annos. Note: Note that the trend line is a moving average set at an interval of ten years.

as a measure of ‘sentiment’ with the possibility of sentiment as a generator of care in commemoration of loved ones.12 The plotting of age-at-death in epitaphs with the full formulae vixit annis/annos (Figure 4.5) provides data for comparison. The graph shows very clearly the patterns of age rounding to numerals associated with V, X, L, and, perhaps also to 5, 10, 50, 100 in Arabic numerals. Rather than seeing this as age-illiteracy, it is possible to comprehend the use of XXV as an abbreviation for ages from XXV to XXVIIII. It is worth noting that the use of this abbreviated form of the numeral recording age itself is more pronounced as the age of the deceased increases (Figure 4.6). Looking at those under the age of 30, we can point to a degree of age-rounding/age-abbreviation over the age of five, but also its absence before the achievement of the age of five years. A means of compensating for the Roman forms of abbreviation is to follow the moving average in the charts in this book, which distributes the peaks in the graph to create an overview of the underlying ages represented. What the moving average indicates is a ‘trend-line’ that can be read as a pattern of epigraphic commemoration in relationship to age. The trend-line of the moving average, as we shall see, varies from province to province and according to what variables we may be selecting. Hence, it is a measurement of the value of age within a set of parameters. It is still

58 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities 60

50

Number of Epitaphs

40

30

20

10

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 48 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 65 68 71 73 75 77 79 81 90 95 100 114 135

0 Ages Recorded in Epitaphs

Figure 4.6 Age-at-death in epitaphs from Italy using the abbreviation VA in place of the full form Vixit Annis or Vixit Annos. Note: Note that the trend line is a moving average set at an interval of ten years.

worth going back to the actual data to see the nature of rounding/abbreviation of numbers to V and X, and where relevant in this book we will do so. Looking at the overview of the use of the fully written out formulae vixit annis/annos in Italy (Figure 4.5), and the abbreviation to VA. It is possible to say this was much more strongly used in association with the young under the age of 14 and also the group between late teens and late twenties. The full form of the formula vixit annos/annis, the shortened form vixit Ann/An/A and the abbreviated form VA were used in most provinces to some degree. As we have seen, all are effective in commemorating the age-at-death of the deceased and making this age-at-death a prominent element in the written memorial that would trigger memories of the deceased. We have observed variation in the association of these three forms of the formula vixit annis/annos with particular ages with points of convergence in the trends found in Numidia, Africa Proconsularis and Mauretania, and divergence with the pattern found in Italy – when considering the use of each variation of the formula. Traditionally, from 1982, such patterns are seen as an epigraphic habit. That habit though is underpinned by cultures that use Latin to commemorate the dead with a set of formulae, of which vixit annis/annos and its contraction and abbreviation form a prominent part. Looking at provinces within our focus, Figure 4.7, we can see

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 59

100% 90% 80%

70% 60% 50% 40% 30%

Vixit ann@s Vixit a_an_ann VA

20% 10% 0%

Figure 4.7 The regional usage of full, contraction and abbreviation in inscribing Vixit Annos or Vixit Annis in epitaphs.

that there is a degree of variation with the abbreviated form VA being the most common in the North African provinces, whereas in all other parts of the Western Mediterranean and the Danubian provinces the contracted form vixit Ann/ An/A can be seen to the most common use of the formula. The dating of epitaphs is fraught with difficulty and often is a reflection of how dating based on letter forms has been applied.13 Looking at the internal dating that can be found within the epitaphs themselves – the abbreviated formula A(nno) P(rovinciae) provides a point of cross-reference (see discussion in Chapter 3). What we find is a range of dates of such a size that it allows us to state clearly that the variation in the usage of the full, contracted and abbreviated form of the formula vixit annos/annis cannot be explained by reference to chronology. With years running from 127 to 642 associated the full formula vixit annis, we have identified the use for at least 500 years and with the abbreviated form VA found in association with years of values of anno provinciae between 157 and 303 (based on AE 1992: 1909 and CIL 8.20472), we can identify a period of over 150 years (see Chapter 3). Interestingly, where the calibration of years concerning anno provinciae does occur, we tend to find it mostly associated with the full formula of vixit annis/annos. This perhaps indicates that where a greater number of letters were inscribed on a tombstone, we gain a greater amount of information than that found on the most abbreviated tombstones – for example, those found

60  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities at Dougga discussed at the start of this chapter. What is perhaps occurring is for some cemeteries to develop a particular form of commemoration on the establishment of the cemetery and for the simple format of the gravestones to be replicated over the lifetime of the cemetery. This is where we need to move away from our conception of the nineteenth- or twentieth-century cemeteries (I think of those in the UK and New South Wales) that were originally new spaces for burials that were quite simple, but within two decades of their establishment might boast a wide variety of architecture and use a variety of stone in commemorating the dead. In short, the cemeteries of the nineteenth century have to be seen in their context of technological change that could transport granite from Ireland or Scotland for tombstones in London.14 As much as epigraphers might wish to chart the full variation of epitaphs, the ones that are simple, similar and even boring point to a development of a written memorial and the creation of a stable format for commemorative writing in cemeteries. This does not mean that the settlement associated with such cemeteries was not dynamic – the data compiled on the development of public architecture in cities points to a very developed technology of sculptors and builders to carry out monumental projects on a large scale. The highest number of epitaphs comes from Numidia, over 8,000, and it is in Numidia that we can see the greatest usage of the abbreviated format VA (90 per cent). Africa Proconsularis with some 4,000 uses of the formula has more than 60 per cent usage of the VA format – a phenomenon that is also present in Mauretania. In contrast, in Italy, or Sicily, we find the contracted formulae vixit Ann/An/A most frequently recorded with a much higher representation of the formula written in full vixit annis/annos. This broad pattern of the contracted form of the formula being dominant is also found in the rest of the provinces, but it needs to be noted that the number of inscriptions on which the statistics are based declines significantly when discussing Dacia (82) or Aquitania (15). The very usage of the formula and choice of words to abbreviate – annos/annis (years), but not the word vixit (she or he lived) is demonstrative of the preference of the sculptor to highlight the verb, vixit, and to assume that there would be comprehension of the abbreviation of annos/annis to A, or An or Ann. It is as though with the word vixit clearly written and fully articulated the need for the word annos/annis was not redundant but could be reduced as the reader looked for the numeral that would indicate the age of the deceased. The total abbreviation to VA was most favoured in the provinces of North Africa and demonstrates a difference in the approach to the recording of the deceased. As we saw from the example of Dougga, other words were also abbreviated to single letters. The language is the same and signifies the same thing in the abbreviated, contracted and full forms, but there was a clear preference in Numidia for the contraction that was not as pronounced elsewhere. This demonstrates the regionality of Latin epigraphy and the choices of usage within the phenomenon of writing epitaphs. The identification of variation in the usage of full form, contraction and abbreviation in the use of the formula vixit annis/annos raises questions about how we make comparisons between sets of data recording age. For the most

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 61 part, ages recorded vary between 1 and 100 years (with quite a number exceeding 100). Thus, an even distribution of ages in epitaphs across the range of one to 100 years would result in 1 per cent being allocated to each year of life. This observation provides us with a means to scale the variation in ages recorded. If the number of epitaphs recording people aged 60 exceeded 1 per cent that is a significant variation, if it reaches 2 per cent that is double an even distribution of ages recorded. This causes us to scale graphs in what follows concerning an even distribution. Demographically, we would expect an uneven pattern with a far greater number of children recorded than adults. However, the use of Latin epitaphs to record age does not reflect a demographic pattern and instead shows us the cultural preference of societies of the Roman Empire to commemorate people at a certain age at a higher rate of incidence than people at other ages. Our procedure of conversion of ages into percentages also allows for the comparison of data that numerically vary, for example, the differential of fully written form of vixit annis/annos numbering 1,186 to the fully abbreviated form VA, numbering 10,966. Figure 4.8 sets out the variation in the use of the full, contracted and abbreviated forms of vixit annis/annos. We set the moving average at the interval of ten so that the pattern of the recording of age can become explicit, bearing in mind the data underlying the three lines constitutes 23,000 epitaphs.

3%

10 per. Mov. Avg. (VA) 10 per. Mov. Avg. (Vixit Annos/Annis) 10 per. Mov. Avg. (Vixit Ann/An/A) 2%

1%

0%

1

11

21

31

41

51

61

71

81

91

101

111

131

Ages Recorded in Epitaphs

Figure 4.8 A comparison of ages recorded with full, contraction and abbreviation in inscribing Vixit Annos or Vixit Annis. Note: Note that the trend lines are set at a moving average of 10 years.

62 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities There is a very clear peak in early adulthood associated with all variations of the form vixit annis/annos. The fully abbreviated form, VA, shows a much lower set of peaks in early adulthood and the overall distribution is much more even than the full and contracted forms with the exception of childhood and old age. In contrast, the contracted and full form of the designation of age drops below 1 per cent in late forties or early fifties with a very similar trajectory in both lines representing the data before this point. There is some divergence subsequently, but the broad pattern is clear as the number of elderly to be commemorated decreased demographically in the past, and so did their commemoration after death. Yet, the elderly were still commemorated and constitute a substantial body of the epitaphs that we studied. This illustrates how antiquity valued age and a long-lived person was to be commemorated for their long life.

Regional Variation: Africa and Italy In Figure 4.7, we set out how the use of formulae varied regionally with greater use of abbreviation to VA in the North African provinces compared to Italy; whereas in Figure 4.8, we demonstrated the very different association between the abbreviated, contracted and full use of vixit annis/annos. This difference can be investigated to comprehend the geographical distribution of the use of 3%

10 per. Mov. Avg. (Proconsularis) 10 per. Mov. Avg. (Numidia) 10 per. Mov. Avg. (Italia)

2%

1%

0%

1

11

21

31

41

51

61

71

81

91

101

111

Ages Recorded in Epitaphs

Figure 4.9 A comparison of the commemoration of age using the abbreviation VA in Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and Italy. Note: Note that the trend lines are set at a moving average of 10 years.

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 63 3% 10 per. Mov. Avg. (Proconsularis) 10 per. Mov. Avg. (Numidia) 10 per. Mov. Avg. (Italia)

2%

1%

0%

2

12

24

34

45

56

70

88

Ages Recorded in Epitaphs

Figure 4.10 A comparison of the commemoration of age using the fully inscribed form Vixit Annis or Vixit Annos in Africa Proconsularis, Numidia and Italy. Note: Note that the trend lines are set at a moving average of 10 years.

the abbreviation and full forms by setting out the contrast between Italy and the African provinces shown in Figure 4.7 to have very different rates of usage. This is the point at which we can begin to understand the differentiation in the use of age across the Mediterranean Sea. Figure 4.9 shows the moving average trend line for these three regions concerning the fully abbreviated for VA. immediately, we can see a substantial differentiation between Italy and the two African provinces. For Italy, we can observe the substantial commemoration of children under ten followed by a decrease in commemoration in the teens, and a peak in commemoration in the mid-twenties. This pattern is completely different to that found in the African provinces that show lower levels of commemoration of children and a more even commemoration of adults with peaks in early adulthood and old age, or might say a dip in commemoration of people in their late forties and early fifties. Looking back at Italy, we see the commemoration of adults over the age of 45 dropping significantly in a manner that we simply do not see in the commemoration of adults in the African provinces. The writing of vixit annis/annos in full involved an increase of effort on the part of the inscriber from just two letters to ten letters or a five-fold increase in effort. We may assume more letters would imply a greater cost in terms of labour, but also the size of the piece of stone being inscribed. Figure 4.10

64  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities demonstrates the difference in the pattern of commemoration. The two African provinces have a similar trajectory of commemorative pattern across the life span, but it is notable that for Africa Proconsularis that young children are commemorated to a higher degree than in Numidia. In contrast to the data derived from the abbreviated form VA, the elderly in Africa Proconsularis and Numidia are commemorated with the full form of vixit annis/annos to a much higher level – exceeding all others. This points to a high value attributed to those who live longer, maybe due to the simple rarity of those living beyond the age of 70. Such a system of values seems to be absent in Italy, where the full form of vixit annis/annos is associated with young adults and other adults to the age of 40. The rather jagged pattern to the trendlines in later life is generated by the presence of considerable age rounding to the V (five) and X (ten) within the data. Thus, the absence of the abbreviation of vixit annis/annos does not associate with age-rounding to a lesser extent. These observations on Figures 4.9 and 4.10 suggest that the use of age in epitaphs was not a phenomenon that simply shifted from Italy to the provinces in the same format with the same cultural priorities for the commemoration of the dead. We might be able to hypothesize that in Italy, a person’s age-at-death became simply less important as they got older and other statements regarding the person’s identity may have been more important. Thus, in an older person, it may have been less important to state the age-at-death. This hypothesis is unprovable from the evidence of epitaphs without age-at-death, for the obvious reason, we cannot tell if the deceased is young or old. What is clear though is that in North Africa stating a person’s age-at-death became more important in early adulthood and continued to have significance into later life. The fundamental discrepancy in the data on the commemoration of age in Latin epitaphs across the Mediterranean Sea, although recognized previously, needs further discussion. Latin epitaphs as a cultural phenomenon are found as abundantly in North Africa as in Italy, but the use of age to commemorate the dead has quite a different patterning with the mention of age becoming less common in Italy for those who lived longer lives; whereas in North Africa, the opposite would seem to have been the case. This would suggest that the societies and cultures of these two well-connected parts of the Roman world simply did not have the same priorities in the use of age in relation to the commemoration of the deceased, which we wish to suggest reflected a fundamental difference in the role of age in Italy when compared to the role of age in North Africa. Yet, both societies utilized very similar or even congruent forms of language to commemorate the dead through inscriptions in stone. However, the higher utilization of the abbreviation of words in epitaphs found in North Africa, also, points to differentiation in commemorative practices. Finally, it is worth mentioning the different modes of recovery of epitaphs in Italy and North Africa in the modern world. In Italy, many collections of inscriptions were created in the early modern period for display in palaces and museums; whereas those from North Africa remained in situ before their exploration by European colonial archaeologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, we might say the Italian evidence may be more disrupted by

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 65 processes of selection, yet it would seem that there was an emphasis on recording inscriptions from the Renaissance onwards in Italy. The dynamic difference between North Africa and Italy had been known previously,15 but it tended to be dismissed, or not discussed as simply an aspect of Ramsey MacMullen’s ‘epigraphic habit’ and, thus, need not be studied further.16 We wish to suggest that such a fundamental difference in the evidence requires a full investigation. Indeed, it is concerning that the evidence from North Africa that is so different from Italy has not been investigated within Anglophone scholarship; whereas the Italian evidence has been subject to numerous studies of age in epitaphs in connection to the study of childhood and the family.17 A survey of Roman archaeologists conducted in 2019 (focused mainly on UK-based scholars) found an inherent bias in the discipline to the study of evidence from the modern nations of the UK and Italy with a general tendency towards the study of Roman archaeology in Europe.18 The following chapters will explore the nature of the evidence from both Africa and Europe with a view to a fuller understanding of the use of age across the Mediterranean Sea in the Roman Empire, but will also endeavour to reveal the local or regional variation that underlies the use of a global phenomenon – inscribing age lived onto the stone to create or commemorate a person’s identity after death.

Notes 1 Hopkins 1987: 115. 2 Examples include: Carroll 2006; Hope 2007, 2009. Compare papers in Pearce et al. 2000. The last has a stimulating critique of the overt focus on the social status of living and the dead. 3 Hopkins 1987. The debate can be compared with that in archaeology over the interpretation of cemeteries and their excavation, see papers in Scheid 2008. 4 Most of the focus of discussion of tombs and inscriptions is on the section describing the tomb (Satyrica 71), note there is no mention of his age at this point in the Satyrica, perhaps because it had already been established in the initial description of Trimalchio as a senex (old man) who has a horologium and a trumpeter in his dining room to keep telling him how much of his life has been ‘lost’ (Satyrica 26–27). The sense of time of the course of Trimalchio’s human life span continues at Satyrica 28 with a fresco of the stages of his life and a shrine holding the shaving of his first beard. For Satyrica 71 as a starting point for archaeological discussion, see Hope 1997 or Toynbee 1985: 74–5. Trimalchio also heads us down an architectural route to a comparison of houses and tombs: Hope 1997 extended by Wallace Hadrill 2008. However, this idea is not universalized to all epitaphs by any means – yet the Hic sita/situs est formula builds this connection. See further for discussion in connection with the cemeteries of Dougga. 5 For the full corpus of inscriptions from Dougga with photographs, see Khanoussi and Maurin 2002 and Khanoussi and Maurin 2000. 6 Khanoussi and Maurin 2002. 7 Keppie 1991: 138–9 provides an introduction and includes a section on common abbreviations. 8 Khanoussi and Maurin (2002) p. 64 for a list of the 19 examples. 9 Ducos 1995; de Visscher 1963: 55–63. Key passages to make the connection between Manes and locus religiosae are Gaius Institutes 2.4; CIL V 2915; Cicero De Legibus 2.22.57. On the connection between the deposition of a body (defined epigraphically

66  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities in Dougga by HSE) and locus religiosae, see Digest 9.7.2.5; 9.7.42 – compare for Italy Hope 1997, and Wallace-Hadrill 2008. 10 See the catalogue by Friggeri et al. 2012 – note that only those inscriptions from internal galleries are published in this volume, stones from the garden and former cloisters are not included. 11 Bevilacqua 2022 for full discussion of the travels and acquisitions of Charles Nicholson. 12 Sentiment has been a focus of the study of the Roman family, mostly deriving its findings from literary and legal texts, see Dixon 1991; Saller 1997. 13 Cherry 1995. 14 Robinson 2001. 15 Saller and Shaw 1984. 16 Macmullen 1982; compare Lloris 2015 for a more recent overview. 17 Examples of volumes focused on Italy: Keegan 2014; Cooley 2000 – even the Handbook and the Companion to epigraphy tends to focus on European examples – even though Latin epigraphy is as much an African phenomenon as a European one. This phenomenon is at its most extreme in the chapter by Mouritsen 2015 entitled ‘Italy and the Western Provinces’ in juxtaposition to Schuler 2015 entitled ‘Local Elites in the Greek East’. The former contains little mention of the provinces apart from those in Europe with space devoted mainly to Italy – there is a reference to one inscription from Bulla Regia though, our point is that the Latin inscriptions from Africa that are so prolific are often omitted in favour of examples from Europe. It is worth flagging up a determination of the language of inscriptions creates an illusion of a Greek or European eastern Mediterranean. Neither author nor editors should be held accountable for this; it is quite simply the sub-plot of the discipline of ancient history to focus much more on the Latin of Italy and the Roman provinces in Europe and to see the Eastern Empire as Greek and, thus, European. 18 Kamash 2021 includes a full survey that shows a clear focus on Italy and Britain amongst Roman archaeologists at the expense of Africa – compare Garland 2021 shows the marginalization of Roman Africa within the theoretical Roman archaeology community via a bibliometric analysis.

Bibliography Bevilacqua, L.M., 2022. The Nicholson Epigraphic Collection at the Chau Chak Wing Museum of the University of Sydney, unpublished Tesi di Laurea, University of Ca’Foscari Venice. Carroll, M., 2006. Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe, Oxford. Cherry, D., 1995. “Re-Figuring the Roman Epigraphic Habit,” Ancient History Bulletin 9: 143–156. Cooley, A., 2000. The Epigraphic Landscape of Roman Italy, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies (supplement 73), London. De Visscher, F., 1963. Le droit des tombeaux romains, Milan. Dixon, S., 1991. ‘The Sentimental Ideal of the Roman Family’, In B. Rawson (ed) Marriage, Divorce and Children in Ancient Rome, Oxford, 99–113. Ducos, M., 1995. ‘Le tombeau, Locus Religiosus’, In F. Hinard (ed) La mort au quotidian dans le monde romain, Paris, 135–144. Friggeri, R., Granino Cecere, M.G., and Gregori, G.L., 2012. Terme di Diocleziano: la collezione epigrafica, Rome. Garland, N., 2021. ‘TRAC at 30: A Bibliometric Analysis of the TRAC Community’, Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 4(1): 1–37.

Inscribing Age-at-Death as a Cultural Practice 67 Hope, V.M., 1997. ‘A roof over the dead: Communal tombs and family structure’, in R. Laurence and A. Wallace-Hadrill (eds) Domestic Space in the Roman World, Journal of Roman Archaeology (Supplement 22), Portsmouth, 69–88. Hope, V.M., 2007. Death in Ancient Rome, Abingdon. Hope, V.M., 2009. Roman Death, London. Hopkins, K., 1987. ‘Graveyards for Historians’, In F. Hinard (ed) La mort, les morts et l’au delà dans le monde romain, Caen, 113–126. Kamash, Z., 2021. ‘Rebalancing Roman Archaeology: From Disciplinary Inertia to Decolonial and Inclusive Action’, Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 4(1): 1–41. Keegan, P., 2014, Roles for Men and Women in Roman Epigraphic Culture and Beyond: Gender, Social Identity and Cultural Practice in Private Latin Inscriptions and the Literary Record (BAR international series, vol. 2626, Archaeopress), Oxford. Keppie, L., 1991. Understanding Roman Inscriptions, London. Khanoussi, M., and Maurin, L., 2000. Dougga, Fragments d’histoire, Bordeaux. Khanoussi, M., and Maurin, L., 2002. Mourir à Dougga, Bordeaux. Lloris, F.B., 2015. “The ‘Epigraphic Habit’ in the Roman World”, In C. Bruun and J. Edmondson (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy, Oxford, 131–148. Macmullen, R., 1982. ‘The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire’, American Journal of Philology 103: 233–246. Mouritsen, H., 2015. ‘Local Elites in Italy and the Western Provinces’, In C. Bruun and J. Edmondson (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy, Oxford, 202–226. Pearce, J., Millett, M., and Struck, M., 2000 Burial, Society and Context in the Roman World, Oxford. Robinson, E., 2001. ‘A Geology of Kensal Green Cemetery’, In J.S. Curl (ed) Kensal Green Cemetery. The Origins and Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London 1824–2001, London. Saller, R.P., 1997. ‘Roman Kinship: Structure and Sentiment’, In B. Rawson and P. Weaver (eds) The Roman Family in Italy: Status, Sentiment and Space, Oxford, 7–34. Saller, R.P., and Shaw, B.D., 1984. ‘Tombstones and Roman Family Relations in the Principate: Civilian, Soldiers, and Slaves’, Journal of Roman Studies 74: 124–156. Scheid, J., 2008. Pour une archéologie du rite. Nouvelles perspectives de l’archéologie funéraire, Rome. Schuler, C., 2015., ‘Local Elites in the Greek East’, In C. Bruun and J. Edmondson (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy, Oxford, 250–273. Toynbee, J.M.C., 1985. Death and Burial in the Roman World, London. Wallace-Hadrill, A., 2008. ‘Housing the Dead: the Tomb as House in Roman Italy’, In L. Brink and D. Green (eds) Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artefacts in Context, Berlin, 39–78.

5 Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians

Age-at-death in epitaphs can be found in inscriptions right across the Latin West, but far less often in the Greek East. This striking pattern needs some explanation and, to do this, we look to identifying those features of Roman time-reckoning, particularly birthdays, rites of the dead and counting systems based on Roman numerals, to reveal what may be creating this very distinct pattern of commemorative practice. Following on from this, we examine the role of sacred numbers, in particular seven, to identify whether this feature drawing on Chaldean astrology and Hippocratic medical thought might have affected the ages represented on epitaphs. Finally, we examine those whose age was stated as being 100 years – a feature of epitaphs in North Africa and in other parts of the Western Mediterranean that deserves comment – for the reason that these individuals as commemorated constitute a significant element of epigraphic practice in the Latin West. This range of seemingly unconnected elements, we suggest, provides us with the pieces with which to deploy an explanation of what constituted the timescape of the Western Mediterranean that was distinct from that of the Greek East.

Birthdays of the Living and the Dead Age was measured by the number of years lived mapped onto the celebration of birthdays. Interestingly, there is good evidence that the celebration of birthdays was a feature of Roman culture that did not have its origins in Hellenism.1 Indeed, the very focus of the commemoration of years lived in epitaphs was not commonly found in the Eastern Mediterranean. The birthday was a temporal feature not just for humans but also for temples and cities.2 Kathryn Argetsinger argues that there was an intrinsically sacred quality to the human birthday because it celebrated the creation of the Genius or the Juno of that individual.3 Censorinus (2–3) makes it clear that the Genius was present for the living from the time a person left the womb to the point of their death.4 Thus, the birthday was a sacred festival involving libations and celebrations. Crucially, it involved knowledge of the age of others – for example, Pliny celebrated the birthday of his wife’s grandfather.5 The birthdays of children, even if not present, were days of reflection and were of themselves religious occasions.6 This points to a level of age consciousness on the part of the living that was interconnected to the dedication of temples. It can be DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708-6

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians 69 documented both in Italy and in the provinces – notably in Africa, where a genius of the place is also well attested.7 This focus on the birthday of the Genius should be seen alongside the Roman emphasis on the annual commemoration of the dead at tombs via the festival of the Parentalia, which Fanny Dolansky argues was also a feature of the western empire and somewhat absent in the East.8 Poignantly, she presents the Parentalia as a time for remembering the dead including children and grandchildren, who were outlived by Ausonius’ father who outlived his children to the age of 90.9 The annual ritual of naming the dead, for Ausonius, created a context to recall a person’s life. Of the 30 deceased relatives named, not all are recalled with their chronological age given – but those that provide us with some guidance to the use of chronological age: his father aged 90; his grandfather also 90 – who lost a son at the age of 30; his aunt aged 63; his wife aged 28 – whom he has mourned for 36 years.10 Others were referred to concerning their stage of life – a son beginning to speak like a puer (boy).11 This links age-at-death or stage of life at death to annual rites of commemoration in a provincial setting. The epitaphs on tombstones and any associated images would have been a reminder of the age at which a person died and, significantly, Ausonius enumerates not just the age of his wife at death – but also the years since her death.12 A similar feature can be seen with his grandfather, of whom he could recall his age as 30 when he lost his son. This form of thinking interconnects the ages of family members, so that memory of the death of a child/wife was linked to the memory of a person and their identity at a certain age. Thus, the memory of the dead also was linked to memories of the lives of the living with the action of going to the cemetery to remember the dead at the Parentalia as a feature of both Italian and provincial societies. This illustrates that the age of the living and the ages of death of family members created a structure for a family’s history to be recalled at the Parentalia. The epitaph which records age provided a means to create an identity for the dead that went beyond just naming. It is distinctly Roman, as opposed to Greek, inclusion and should be seen within a framework of difference that created a disjuncture between commemorative practices in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. There are other features of Roman culture linked to identity and death that may help to explain why age appears in Latin epitaphs so frequently in the Western Mediterranean. Roman funerals traditionally featured death masks worn by the mourners of ancestors, one of whom also wore the dress of the highest office held by the deceased.13 These elements were identified by Polybius in the second century BC as a key feature of Roman culture with the implication that they simply did not exist in the Greek world.14 There is a link made between these masks and the development of portraiture in Rome that can be read as a system of signs about the character of the person.15 Moreover, as Michael Squire has shown, by removing the head from the body to create the portrait bust, the Roman extraction of the head and face from the body marked a major shift in representation from the Greek face-head-body ensemble.16 The face of the portrait was the equivalent in life to what is summarized in the use of the Latin word vultus, which Cicero states the Greeks, unusually, did not have a word for – even though they understood the

70  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities concept of the face providing ‘the image of emotions’.17 The portrait also could provide an image that had an age associated with it, just as an epitaph could provide a measure of the length of a life lived by the deceased – alongside magistracies held, in the case of the elite. There would seem to be a connection from the epitaph to the visual representation of the dead via death masks and portraits. We might suggest that, like the extraction of the face from the body in portraiture, the use of name and age in the representation of persons in epitaphs extracted identity in a similar way that was utterly Roman. Like the face or death mask, chronological age in an epitaph projects identity and an image of that person, whether old or young. Placed together, we might describe death masks, portraits, and epitaphs as all part of a technology of commemoration, which did not fully represent the person, but enabled the remembering of the dead or the imagining of their lives at the Parentalia or on other occasions. The epitaph – though often minimalist in format within this technology of commemoration – emphasizes name and age to create this sense of recall and identity for the dead. Hence, the measurement of chronological age was a key variable that distinguished the dead from each other within Roman culture. The transmission of this technology into the provincial setting of the Western Mediterranean will be discussed further in Chapters 11 and 12. However, for now, we need to recognize that this technology of commemoration did not spread widely into the Eastern Mediterranean and we have been clear that Greek and Roman cultures were far from unified in the representation of the dead.

Thinking about Age and Its Numbers Having examined the face and its relation to age in epitaphs, we now need to consider the hands about Roman numerals: I, V, X, L and C.18 Finds of ivory gaming counters with numbers on one side and hands in particular positions to symbolize those numbers provide information for the representation of numbers by the hands.19 A feature reported of the statue of Janus with his hands representing the number 365 – that is the number of days in a year. The counters provide a guide to how Roman numerals could be represented and combined on two hands for numbers from one to well beyond 100, with the possibility of reaching 10,000 or more.20 The fact that the counters show Roman numerals on one side and a hand representing that number on the other side suggests that the counters reinforced the relationship between the two systems to represent numbers. Burma and Richard Williams argue that this system of representation was essential for elementary computation and the communication of numbers in noisy settings.21 Speakers and crowds would communicate both by stating numbers or calculations and by representing them with their hands.22 This shows that fingercounting was illustrative of the process of mental arithmetic.23 In a letter to Atticus, Cicero distinguishes simple and compound interest and anticipated that Atticus’ fingers would be representing the numbers as he read the letter, and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that counting was undertaken through this representational system.24 Thus, someone reading the numeral to indicate the number of years on an epitaph may have represented the numbers using their hands. All

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians

Figure 5.1 Roman practices of finger counting. Source: From Hilton Turner 1951.

71

72  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities representations of numbers on counters are shown with the left hand except numbers over 100 that are shown with the right hand.25 The ubiquity of the system of finger counting is less well-known than the use of the abacus in the discussion of Roman arithmetic.26 There are numerous representations of finger counting – most notably that from Aesernia of an inn-worker enumerating individual costs to a traveller to create their final bill on arrival.27 It is also worth noting that this system survives throughout antiquity into the Middle Ages.28 More importantly for the study of age in epitaphs, there is a direct connection between how these ages were represented and key ages in the life course – particularly of women. Three numbers had a particular symbolism in terms of age that was explained by the formation of that number by the shape of a human hand. Jerome saw the number 30 representing marriage because the finger and thumb embrace each other representing the number.29 Along with others, he also saw 60 as an age of self-control and widowhood, because the bending of the fingers signified reciprocity.30 Jerome reformulates these two numbers with 100 into a hierarchy with virginity represented by 100, widowhood by 60 and marriage by 30.31 The system could be utilized by the sick to represent their age,32 and errors in counting could be picked up concerning a person’s age, as we find in Apuleius’ Apologia, in the law courts concerning the age of a former widow.33 This passage is worth setting out the details, Apuleius suggests that an error could have occurred in the confusion of the finger gesture of 30 being mistaken for ten, but Aemilianus said 40 – he finally suggests that you would calculate the age of 60 for Pudentilla by counting not the consular years of her life, but counting each of the two consuls of each year. The indication here is that the actual age of Pudentilla was vital to her identity. It mattered whether she was 30 or 40 or 60 – the prosecution would seem to have added some 20 years to make her 60 (the age synonymous with widowhood, as we see from Jerome).34 Indeed, Apuleius points out that widowhood and Pudentilla’s insistence on not marrying affected her health – thus we might say she was a widow at the wrong biological/chronological age.35 Importantly, for our study of age, Apuleius and Jerome are provincials and provide us with evidence about the use of age in the provinces.36 Looking at the range of ages utilized to represent females in epitaphs, we have observed that the age of 30 and 60 have been picked out at points at which these ages are well represented. Indeed, there are clear peaks in representation at 30 (442 examples) and 60 (369 examples) for females. The literary sources on finger counting provide us with an explanation concerning both ages 30 and 60. No other source apart from those referring to the formation of numbers by the fingers creates a connection between the age of 30 and marriage. It is also an age far later than the age at which marriage was created in the late teens. However, clearly, this is a symbolic number that represents not marriage formation, but, instead, the point in marriage at which it was stable or successful. Moreover, Censorinus suggests that although a Genius was something males were born within married households, there were two Geniuses.37 This points to the significance of 30 in the female life course and may explain the pattern of ages if we take into account age rounding. Figure 5.2 illustrates the pattern of male and female ages represented in our sample of epitaphs ranging from age 20 to 40 years. The male and female patterns are broadly

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians

73

600 Female

Male

500

Number of Epitaphs

400

300

200

100

40

39

38

37

35

36

34

33

32

31

30

29

28

27

26

25

23

24

22

21

20

0

Age Figure 5.2 The commemoration of ages between 20 and 40 years in epitaphs (whole sample).

Figure 5.3 Distribution of female epitaphs recording age-at-death of 30 years: Africa Proconsularis and Italy (Lloyd Bosworth).

similar, but with one difference the number of females peaks at 30; whereas the male pattern is maintained at 25, 30 and 35 with a peak at 40 rather than 30. It is worth considering the geographical distribution of epitaphs with the specific age of 30 as a key characteristic. We wanted to test whether the distribution of the

74 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

Figure 5.4 Distribution of male epitaphs recording age-at-death of 30 years: Africa Proconsularis and Italy (Lloyd Bosworth).

phenomenon was associated primarily with particular cities or was a practice found in North Africa, but not in Italy. To undertake this research, we compared the province of Africa Proconsularis with Italy with the data divided by gender (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). it is very clear from the maps that the distribution pattern is not even with a clear concentration around Rome, the Bay Naples and Brundisium with a further concentration in the towns of the Po Valley in Northern Italy. Looking at Africa Proconsularis, we can pick out the coastal ports of Carthage and Hippo Regis with the distribution inland from these port cities. What is clear though is that the distribution of epitaphs recording the age of 30 as the end of a person’s life is not unique to Africa Proconsularis. However, if we were to view the data objectively, we would suggest that the phenomenon of recording age-at-death of 30 was found across Africa Proconsularis in more inland locations than in Italy, where it is predominantly in the places associated with migration to Italy that we found age-at-death of 30 years commemorated. The distribution pattern opens up the possibility, that although the recording of age-atdeath in Latin epigraphy has its origins in Italy. The usage of age-at-death in funerary epitaphs and the commemoration of the deceased at a specific age needs to be seen in the context of migration patterns to Italy over the course of the imperial period.38 A full discussion of the distribution patterns of epitaphs will be a focus of the final chapter of this book but will be referred to periodically in the chapters that follow this one. It is worth noting at this point that the distribution of female and male epitaphs of those said to be 30 at their death does not show any gender-based divergence (see Chapter 6 for the discussion of gender and age in epitaphs). The age of 60 is also one that we have found to be frequently represented in epitaphs and is identified by Jerome as a point of transition and also widowhood. This makes sense if age of marriage of males was older than females, and we should expect the Roman Empire to contain widows.39 Whether widowed or not,

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians

75

700

Female

Male

600

Number of Epitaphs

500

400

300

200

100

70

69

68

67

66

65

64

63

62

61

60

59

58

57

56

55

54

53

52

51

50

0

Age Figure 5.5 The commemoration of ages between 50 and 70 years in epitaphs (whole sample).

the age of 60 marked a point of transition, but as Ilse Mueller observes concerning inscriptions from Rome – it is after 60 that the commemoration of women by freed slaves increases to some 20 per cent.40 It is worth bearing in mind the observation made that there were two Geniuses in married households, which might suggest the widow was a powerful figure associated with her Genius after the death of her husband.41 The epitaphs with the age of 60 (Figure 5.5) demonstrate a sharp spike in the number of males and females commemorated. Interestingly, 60 is the highest level of commemoration for males across our sample of over 23,000 epitaphs. Thus, 60 was a symbolic age for males as well – partially confirmed by the stage of life literature (see Chapter 3). It is particularly prominent in some cities in North Africa, notably Carthage, Lambaesis, Sigus and Cirta. The shift between ages of 30 or 40 to 60 in Apuleius Apologia is also mirrored in the patterns found in epitaphs that show high levels of representation of these three ages and far less representations of ages in the fifties.

The Number Seven (VII) Our focus in this chapter has been on the role of counting in the creation of special numbers associated with marriage (30) and widowhood (60). However, there was a range of other ‘sacred’ numbers that might shape how ages were set out in epitaphs. The number seven will be a particular focus and we should say at the start that this number was a feature of innumerable everyday and religious activities.

76  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities There were seven grades within the hierarchy of Mithraism, which can be found on objects and in mosaics from Mithrea.42 There are seven celestial bodies that the ancients could track in the heavens (moon and sun plus five planets).43 There is also the issue of the solar year being divided into lunar months producing the summer solstice in the seventh month.44 Statue groups arranged in sevens on triumphal monuments and even seven laps counted by eggs in the Circus Maximus point to the ubiquity of seven and its desirability.45 The use of five or seven witnesses in legal documents suggests that both V and VII had a symbolic significance, but that it is the number seven that is discussed about ageing.46 Christer Bruun recently reminded us of an important point when discussing seven in terms of months and years of children: due to inclusive counting, this refers to a foetus in its sixth month and a child in its sixth year – but had not yet had its seventh birthday.47 However, the epitaphs of seven-year-olds refer to those who were past their seventh birthday, as is made clear through the addition of months and days to the year VII in several inscriptions. The third-century pagan author Censorinus discusses this matter at some length in the Birthday Book given as a gift to Quintus Caerellius (De die natali liber 1).48 This book provides us with a text that communicates thinking about age, as communicated to another at an age between 49 and 56 (15). It draws on the work of Varro, as does Aulus Gellius (3.10.1–9) – naming the book as the Hebdomades written in Varro’s 12th hebdomad (i.e. when he was in his 72nd year). The focus on seven produced a series of years thought to be especially dangerous to individuals that were multiples of seven – often known as a climacteric; a variety of ages are found but most seem to be associated with the transition into old age: 49, 56, 63, 81 and 84.49 The thinking is derived from astrology, but can equally be found in Hippocratic medicine. Medicine may provide us with a model of how the system of seven years may have been incorporated or adjusted for the measurement of age in the Roman West. Celsus’ De Medicina drew on the work of Hippocrates (Aphorisms) focused on hebdomads, but then needed to adjust the system to account for a Roman context of age conventions, which did not necessarily utilize hebdomads.50 If like Varro, we measure age found on epitaphs in hebdomads or multiples of seven, we need to be aware that any pattern could be influenced by other factors. To provide a control, we added in a comparison of multiples of five which we know is associated with a higher number of ages and also with multiples of three. Table 5.1 shows the pattern that demonstrates the preference for certain numerals over others in recording the age at the death of the deceased. 25, 30, 35, 40 and 60 are all associated with more than 900 examples with 60 associated with the highest number of examples (1,011). The scale of bias to these numbers is by a factor of four or five times that of an even distribution of ages recorded from 1 to 101 – this would create a pattern of c. 230 examples for each age recorded. Any number above this in Table 5.1 indicates a bias towards using that Latin numeral, below c. 230 examples shows a bias away from using that Latin numeral. In contrast, looking at the number of 20-year-olds recorded in epitaphs (657), we find the bias towards this age to be more than twofold. Our focus has been on how ancient thinking about numbers may shape how people used numerals to represent their age or the ages of the dead in epitaphs. The question moves us from seeing the number of years in an epitaph as a product of

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians 77 Table 5.1  Use of multiples of 3, 5 and 7 in Latin epitaphs Number (Numeral) Multiple

3 (III)

5 (V)

7 (VII)

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12

348 (III) 257 (VI) 226 (VIIII) 247 (XII) 365 (XV) 378 (XVIII) 363 (XXI) 194 (XXIIII) 297 (XXVII) 973 (XXX) 149 (XXXIII) 161 (XXXVI)

360 (V) 250 (X) 365 (XV) 657 (XX) 925 (XXV) 973 (XXX) 921 (XXXV) 981 (XXXX) 647 (XXXXV) 827 (L) 620 (LV) 1011 (LX)

229 (VII) 213 (XIV) 363 (XXI) 201 (XXVIII) 921 (XXXV) 98 (XXXXII) 49 (XXXXVIIII) 88 (LVI) 92 (LXIII) 850 (LXX) 49 (LXXVII) 10 (LXXXVIII)

the use of a system based on I, V, X, L and C being influenced by the symbolism of numbers.51 What we have found is that numbers ending in X or V have a far greater influence on the overall pattern of use. However, we do see roles for multiples of three and seven in the late teens and early twenties: XV, XVIII, XXI and XXVII.

Centenarians and the Not Quite-so-Old – Those Over 81 Years of Age in Epitaphs The very old are a feature of the inscriptions in our sample of 23,731 Latin epitaphs with age.52 There are 679 persons over the age of 100 in our database, which constitutes 3 per cent of the sample. Thus, it needs some discussion as to the significance of those of the greatest longevity in the Roman world. It is easy just to dismiss this phenomenon or suggest it causes a ‘pause for thought’. However, it would seem the phenomenon of recording extremely high ages in the context of a demographic pattern that we might assume, only 7 per cent lived beyond 60 years needs some explanation.53 It is itself an interesting take on the use of age in commemoration, once we get over the fact that it need not represent actual age-at-death, and should be seen as an indicator of a very long life span. There is a general assumption in the modern literature that the phenomenon of very high numbers of years is associated with the North African provinces, rather than parts of Europe that lay within the Roman Empire. Figure 5.6 shows the distribution of females over the age of 81 commemorated with a Latin epitaph. The concentration of examples is in the provinces of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia with cities with as many as ten examples of long-lived women. There are examples of one or two epitaphs found in some cities in Italy, in Baetica and within the Balkan provinces. When we turn to males commemorated over the age of 81 in Figure 5.7, we find that the distribution is much more extensive than for females. There is a clear cluster of such long-lived individuals in the towns of the Bay of Naples in Italy. However, the main concentration of such ages at death being commemorated is found in the provinces of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia.

78 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities

Figure 5.6 Distribution of female epitaphs recording age-at-death of 80 years and more: Africa Proconsularis and Italy (Lloyd Bosworth).

Figure 5.7 Distribution of male epitaphs recording age-at-death of 80 years and more: Africa Proconsularis and Italy (Lloyd Bosworth).

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians 79 Yet the phenomenon should not be solely located in these two provinces. Thinking that people could live well beyond 100 years also occurs the census of 71 CE as recorded by Pliny the Elder.54 His discussion of the long-lived examples is summarized in Table 5.2. He carefully names his sources initially to discredit them. There follows more certain examples in the range of 97–120 years, before drawing on the census material. Here, Pliny is clear that individuals reported their ages at between 120 and 140 in the eighth region of Italy (Aemilia). He concludes the discussion of the census by noting that 54 individuals from the region declared themselves as 100 years old; 14 as 110 years of age; 2 as 125 years of age, 4 as 130, plus 4 as 135 or 137, and 3 as 140. The numbers reveal a level of age rounding and when the specific age of 137 is discussed, Pliny brackets it with 135, thus effectively rounding it down.55 What is certain is that there were individuals in the Roman world, who believed that they had lived well beyond 100 years and made that declaration to the censors. This would suggest that living beyond 100 years was regarded as possible and needs to be considered as part of the timescape/s of Table 5.2  Long-lived individuals recorded by Pliny (Natural History 7.153–164) Known Persons

Age in Years

Pliny’s Source

Arganthonius (King of Tartessians) Cincyras (King of Cyprus) Aegimus Epimenides of Cnossus Tribe of Epii in Aetolia Pictoreus of the Epii Arcadian Kings Dando from Illyria King of Island of Lutmii Son of King of Island of Lutmii Arganthonius of Gades (reign of 80 years) Gorgias of Sicily Marcus Perperna M. Valerius Corvinus Livia wife of Rutilius Statilia (Claudius’ reign) Terentia (wife of Cicero) Clodia (wife of Ofilius) Lucceia (actress) Copiola (actress) Parma – 3 people Brixellum – 1 person Parma – 2 people Placentia – 1 man Faventia – 1 woman Bononia – L. Terentius Ariminum – M. Aponius Ariminum – Tertulla Veleia – 6 people Veleia – 4 people Veleia – M. Mucius Felix

150 160 200 157 200 300 500 500 600 800 120 108 98 100 97 98 103 115 100+ 104 120 120 125 130 130 135 140 137 110 120 140

Anacreon Anacreon Anacreon Theopompus Hellanicus Pictoreus Ephorus Alexander Cornelius Xenophon Periplus Xenophon Periplus

Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE Census 71 CE

80 Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities the Mediterranean in antiquity. Moreover, Pliny’s evidence from northern Italy would suggest that it would be wrong to simply associate the phenomenon as belonging to North Africa (i.e. not part of the Italian or European experience of Roman culture). Most of these ages over 100 found in Latin epitaphs are identified with the letter C signifying their age, but at the same sites, there are also examples of LXXXXX being used.56 The rate of recovery of the long-lived may simply be explained by their longevity – it was worth recording. The discovery of a small cemetery in Tripolitania featured several tombstones of which only one was inscribed to a 110-year-old with the ungrammatical formula vixit annorum.57 100 as a Roman numeral, we saw in the discussion of finger-counting as a number to be represented on the right rather than the left hand. This would suggest that 100 had the significance of itself as a number, but when applied to age to be recalled in finger counting the shift from left to right hand can be seen as transitional to a phase of life that was numerically beyond that of other humans. The number of inscriptions commemorating those over 100 is substantial, and we need to set out the overall pattern of how centenarians were commemorated in epitaphs. 295 of the 697 centenarians commemorated were female in line with the generic pattern of 40 to 45 per cent female representation, and thus centenarians are not commemorated differently according to gender (see Chapter 7). 644 of the 697 examples come from the North African provinces with 469 from Numidia and 153 from Africa Proconsularis. Mostly only one or two are found at sites, but there are a 500 450

Female

Male

400

Number of Epitaphs

350 300 250 200 150 100 50

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

0

Age

Figure 5.8 The commemoration of ages between 80 and 110 years in epitaphs (whole sample).

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians 81 series of towns in North Africa with much higher numbers with over 20 and as many as 82 examples: Castellum Arsacalitanum, Castellum Elefantum, Tiddis, Dougga; Cirta, Thibilis and Celtianis (see Figures 11.2–11.5). We will return to these Numidian towns in Chapter 11. The inscriptions are brief and rather unrevealing of kin relations or almost any information beyond the name and the age of the deceased. The pattern of commemoration of ages from 80 to 110 shows a greater representation of males over females, but there is still considerable convergence in male and female patterns of commemoration that is dominated by rounding to multiples of five with a degree of representation of 101 years. The extremely old does not seem to have been subject to different modes of representation from other ages (see Figure 5.8).

Implications for Understanding the Nature of Roman Timescapes Time was a thing to be measured in the Latin West and its measurement was set out succinctly by Censorinus. The conceptions of time varied from the absolute – the years counted from 45 BC (Caesar’s years) or 27 BC (Augustan Years) or the date of Rome’s foundation.58 There was also a sense of time associated with the creation of the physical infrastructure of the Roman world, whether the foundation of colonies and cities,59 temples60 and also the lives of individuals to their death. After their death, their temporal span was divided into the time alive and the time since their death. Their time whilst alive was the key feature of an epitaph featuring their name and age. The system of counting based on either Roman numerals, finger counting or an abacus created a bias or an abbreviation of numbers by stone-cutters on tombstones. This form of memory or recording of personal time fitted into the wider conception of time and the ageing of things. The word vetustas is found in numerous Latin inscriptions (some 641 in a recent search) and is associated with words that suggest due to age part of the built environment (temples, baths, aqueducts, bridges, roads etc.) had collapsed.61 This state of decay due to age was, of course, revoked through a restoration that the inscriptions focus on. Interestingly, for buildings, the life span might be defined by the decline in value of a rubble wall – which was said by Vitruvius to have reduced in value by 1/80th for every year from the time of construction.62 Thus, after 80 years was of no value at all. However, vetustas could imply a longer period; it took 127 years for the Aquae Annio and Appia to become decayed and in need of repair alongside the building of a new aqueduct.63 The collapse of a whole range of infrastructure due to its ageing is a key theme of building inscriptions in the second century CE – particularly associated with Trajan and Hadrian.64 The link back to the human life course was present: Rome was seen to have had a childhood, youth, maturity and old age.65 The physical infrastructure found in Rome and the provinces needed renewal, in the same way, that families were renewed through the birth of new members.66 After all, time or the passing of years was expected to destroy stone structures, creating the need for renewal after years.67 Vetustas was also applied to the very old living in Rome. It is also noticeable that in Livy, we find a man over the age of 80 being able to inform the community of what happened and thus the elderly was a repository of knowledge.68 These 80-somethings were regarded at

82  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities the top-end of the age range – even if people’s ages to over 100 were recorded, and were seen as a category of their own – partly defined by a decline in mental abilities and no longer sacrificing to the gods for their good health.69 The shift between the age of things and the age of people demonstrates a focus on measuring time and relating the age of all things to one another.

Notes

1 Bowerman 1917. 2 Argetsinger 1992 on sources discussed in this section. 3 Argetsinger 1992: 176. 4 Freidin 2020 highlights the cyclical nature of this text. 5 Pliny Epistulae 6.30. 6 Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 15.7. 7 For example, ILAlg 2.820 discussed in Kos 2006: 187; Maritz 2006. 8 Dolansky 2011. 9 Dolansky 2011: 125 on his grandfather outliving his children and grandchildren Ausonius Epicedion in patrem 41–50, 61–62; and himself commemorating his son-in-law and infant son Parentalia 10.1–4, 14.3–4. 10 Sivan 1993: 49–66. 11 Lolli 1997 for text and commentary of Ausonius’ Parentalia. 12 Ausonius Parentalia 9; on tombstones and connection to Parentalia see Laubry 2009. Compare the role of time in the celebration of Cynthia’s birthday by Catullus – she wears a dress she wore when he met her – Cairns 1971. 13 Flower 1996. 14 Polybius 6.53–55 Polybius suggests funerals with eulogies by grown-up sons were a means of inspiring the youth of Rome and was a key feature of Rome’s success – that is, the inspiration of young men, which should be read in the context of Polybius’ understanding of the weaknesses of youth – a theme discussed by McGing 2013. See also Erskine 2013. 15 Ray had the privilege to attend a seminar by Michael Squire ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’ Optatian and the Face of Constantine’ (15/10/15, London) that reshaped my thinking about epitaphs through his discussion of portraits. Drawing on particularly, Nodelman 1993. 16 Squire 2014. 17 Cicero De Oratore 3.59.221, De Legibus 1.9.27, Ad Pisonem 1.1; Squire 2014: n.30 and also Hallett 2005: 281–95. 18 Keyser 1988. 19 Alföldi-Rosenbaum 1971 for collection of examples from 1 to 15; alsoAlföldi-Rosenbaum 1976 and 1980. 20 Williams and Williams 1995; Hilton Turner 1951; Menninger 1969: 201; Ifrah 1985: 55–80. 21 Williams and Williams 1995: 594. 22 Quintilian Institutes.1.10.35; Suetonius Claudius 21.5; Dio 72.32; Augustine has his congregation count on their hands to numbers as high as 157 – Sermones 248.5, 249.3, 250.3, 251.7, 270.7. 23 See discussion in Menninger 1969: 210. 24 Cicero Ad Atticum 5.21.13; Ovid Fasti 3.123, Ex Ponto 2.3.17–18; Plautus. Miles Gloriosus 203–4; Pliny Epistulae 2.20.3. 25 Augustine Tractatus in Iohannis Evangelium 122.7; Juvenal 10.248–49; Joannes Cassianus Collationes 24.26.7; Cassiodorum Expositio in Psalmum 100 concl. 26 Menninger 1969: 305–6 on the abacus; 315–8 on the counting board.

Birthdays, Numbers and Centenarians 83 27 CIL 9. 2689; Diebner 1979: 174–75. For other inscriptions listing prices in this way, see Mrozek 1975; Rieche 1986. Compare on Catullus 5 discussed by Pack 1956. 28 Williams and Williams 1995: 604–8 provide an appendix of sources including the Romana computation. 29 Jerome Adversus Iovianum 1.3, Epistulae 48.2. 30 Cassiodorus Expositio in Psalmum 60 concl. 31 Jerome Epistulae 123.9; Menninger 1969: 209–10. 32 Martial 6.70. 33 Apuleius. Apologia 89.21–27; Hunink 1997: volume 2: 218–20; Harlow 2007; Fantham 1995. 34 Hunink 1998 pulls out the ‘facts’ from the speech by Apuleius and observes the flexibility of age associated with her identity from 30 to 60 years. 35 Apuleius Apologia 69–70, 80. Hunink 1998: II, 182–3. 36 Bradley 1997; Taylor 2011. 37 Censorinus De die natali 3.1–4. 38 Work on mobility and migration is developing in Roman studies, but much is focused on Italy over other regions of the Mediterranean (but note Gatto et al. 2019 below), and much of the focus is onto the period prior to the first century CE: Scheidel 2004, 2005, Handley 2011, Tacoma and De Ligt 2016; Laurence 2012: 113–38; Lo Cascio et al. 2016; de Ligt and Tacoma 2016; Isayev 2017; Gatto et al. 2019. 39 Mueller 2002. 40 Mueller 2002: 269–72 inevitably the number of inscriptions is small, she also suggests that the papyri from Egypt point to a substantial percentage of widows from the age of 40. 41 Saller 1999. 42 Beck 2000. 43 Barton 1994a; Green 2014. 44 Panchenko 2006. 45 Ridley 2014; Cerutti 1993. 46 On witnessing of documents, see Meyer 2007. 47 Bruun 2010 especially p. 761 for discussion of inclusive counting citing Hanson 1987. 48 Freidin 2020 for the structure of the text. 49 Censorinus 14.9–12; Pliny Naturalis Historiae 7.161 points to climacteric at 56; Macrobius Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis 6.74: highlights 42 years and 49 years as points at which ageing begins. 50 Harlow and Laurence 2008; Bradley 2005. 51 Kalvesmaki 2013. 52 Kos 2006. 53 Katariina Mustakallio of Tampere University (Finland) made this argument to us and we wish to thank her both for this and her kind hospitality at the Finnish Institute in Rome. 54 Pliny the Elder Naturalis Historia 7.162 55 Beagon 2005: 374 compares this listing to that of Phlegron’s list of centenarians in Macrobius Saturnalia 1–94 and finds similarities in ages reported. 56 Examples include: CIL 8.26386 Uchi Maius, 8. 25557 Bulla Regia, 8. 5129 Khamissa; ILAlg 2.1.2238 & 2446 Celtianis, 2.1.1121 Cirta. 57 Brogan 1962. 58 Censorinus De die natali 21.6 59 Velleius Paterculus. Book 1. 60 e.g. Tacitus Annals 2.4, for further references to ageing structures, see Laurence 2020. 61 IRT 869, 896, ILAfr 551; CIL 8.25521, 12.5438 – provides examples, for fuller list of examples search on www.manfredclauss.de for the word form vetustate. 62 Vitruvius 2.8.8; Seneca. Quaestiones Naturales 6.10.2 on ageing of buildings. 63 Frontinus De Aquae Ductu 7, 18, 120–21; Res Gestae 20.5.

84  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities 64 Florus 1.8; CIL 6.40520. 65 Lactantius Divinae Institutiones 7.15.4. 66 For examples of vetustas used to denote long-established families see Cicero Pro Flacco 106; Velleius Pateruculus 2.120.6. Examples in relation to roads and other infrastructure are discussed by Laurence 2020. 67 Ovid Ex Ponto 4.8.49–51; Tacitus Historiae 1.27 age affecting the value of property. 68 Livy 27.8, 3.71. 69 Censorinus De die natali 14.6.

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86  Age-at-Death in Epitaphs – Issues and Possibilities Meyer, E.A., 2007. ‘Diplomatics, Law and Romanisation in the Documents of the Judaean Desert’, In J.W. Cairns and P.J. du Plesis (eds) Beyond Dogmatics: Law and Society in the Roman World, Edinburgh, 53–84. Mrozek, S., 1975. Prix et Rémunération dans l’Occident Romain, Gdansk. Mueller, I., 2002. ‘Lower Class Widows and their Social Relationships: A Comparative Study of Roman Tombstone Inscriptions and Papyri from Roman Egypt’, In H. Melaerts and L. Mooren (eds) Le Rôle et le Statut de la Femme en Égypte Hellénistique Romaine et Byzantine, Amsterdam, 265–281. Nodelman, S., 1993. ‘How to Read a Roman Portrait’, In E. D’Ambra (ed) Roman Art in Context: An Anthology, Englewood Cliffs, 10–26. Pack, R., 1956. ‘Catullus, Carmen V: Abacus or Finger-Counting?’, American Journal of Philology 77: 47–51. Panchenko, D., 2006. ‘Solar Light and the Symbolism of the Number Seven’, Hyperboreus 12: 21–35. Ridley, R.T., 2014. ‘The Arch of Scipio Africanus’, Classical Philology 109: 11–25. Rieche, A., 1986. ‘Computatio Romana: Fingerzählen auf provinzialrömischen Reliefs’, Bonner Jahrbücher 186: 165–192. Saller, R.P., 1999. ‘Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household’, Classical Philology 94: 182–197. Scheidel, W., 2004. ‘Human Mobility in Roman Italy, I: The Free Population’, Journal of Roman Studies 94: 1–26. Scheidel, W., 2005. ‘Human Mobility in Roman Italy, II: The Slave Population’, Journal of Roman Studies 95: 64–79. Sivan, H., 1993. Ausonius of Bordeaux. Genesis of a Gallic Aristocracy, London. Squire, M., 2014. ‘Roman Portraiture and the Semantics of Extraction’, In G. Boehm (ed) Gesicht und Identität/Face and Identity, Munich, 79–106. Tacoma, L E., and Ligt, L. de., 2016. Migration and Mobility in the Early Roman Empire. London. Taylor, T., 2011. ‘Magic and Property: The Legal Context of Apuleius’ Apologia’, Antichthon 45: 149–166. Turner, J.H., 1951. ‘Roman Elementary Mathematics: The Operations’, The Classical Journal 47: 63–74 and 106–108. Williams, B.P., and Williams, R.S., 1995. ‘Finger Numbers in the Greco-Roman World and Early Middle Ages, Isis 86: 587–608.

Part II

Age and Society

6 Towards a Geography of Age and Gender in the Western Mediterranean

Our expectation might be that there should be a very significant difference in the way men and women were commemorated in the Roman Empire. We have been brought up within a frame of thinking derived from the study of literary texts written by men that the Romans had a decidedly patriarchal approach to everything from child exposure of girls to arranged marriages.1 In contrast, studies of inscriptions can produce quite a different picture with evidence for female agency in financial transactions and as priests being but two examples.2 It also needs to be remembered that perspectives on the power of the paterfamilias have shifted from one of an all-powerful-tyrannical-patriarch to a head of a family, whose actions were driven by pietas (piety or family duty).3 Epitaphs, due to their sheer numbers, can provide a new quantitative perspective on these debates driven by qualitative analysis of the role of women in the Roman Empire. Table 6.1 sets out the percentage of males and females commemorated in Italy and 11 provinces: Africa Proconsularis, Aquitania, Baetica, Dacia, Gallia Narbonensis, Hispania (Citerior), Lusitania, the provinces of Mauretania, Moesia and Pannonia. Some inscriptions could not be easily attributed to the male or female category. The overall pattern shows 58 per cent males and 39 per cent females across the entire data set of 23,473 epitaphs. It is a pattern that is broadly replicated in all provinces as well as in Italy allowing for a variation of plus or minus 5 per cent. Higher percentages in male representation in Moesia (69 per cent) and Aquitania (67 per cent) do appear. The latter, it has to be said, had fewer than 50 epitaphs and thus constitutes a sample too small to produce robust data; whereas the former is associated with more than 600 epitaphs and is of some significance. Age-at-death is found to be present in epitaphs from hundreds of sites across the Western Mediterranean. However, the pattern is far from even in relationship to gender. More sites include epitaphs that mention the age of males than those referring to the age of females in all cases (Table 6.2) with the exception of Aquitania. The variation in the number of sites from province to province is of interest as well. Females with a recorded age-at-death are found at 295 places in Italy; whereas males with an age-at-death recorded are found at 355 places. Italy is, thus, the region with the most places with the use of age-at-death evidenced. After Italy, we find that Africa Proconsularis provides us with 122 places in which females DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708-8

90  Age and Society Table 6.1  Male and female epitaphs that include age-at-death Province

Total

Male

Female

% Male

% Female

% uncertain

Proconsularis Mauretaniae Numidia Narbonensis Aquitania Italia Baetica Dacia Hispania Citerior Lusitania Moesia Pannonia Total

5,747 1,392 9,019 232 36 4,652 244 398 337 341 629 446 23,473

3,239 824 5,100 132 24 2,819 140 247 187 180 433 268 13,593

2,230 514 3,729 94 11 1,793 90 130 124 147 182 169 9,213

56 59 57 57 67 61 57 62 55 53 69 60 58

39 37 41 41 31 39 37 33 37 43 29 38 39

5 4 2 2 2 6 5 8 4 2 2 3

Table 6.2 Number of places associated with the commemoration of females and males with age in epitaphs Province

Places with Places with Male Number of Number of Male Female Epitaphs Epitaphs Female Epitaphs Epitaphs

Africa Proconsularis Aquitania Baetica Dacia Gallia Narbonensis Hispania Citerior Italy Lusitania Mauretaniae Moesia Numidia Pannonia

122

152

2,230

3,239

11 12 15 19

11 31 23 26

11 90 130 94

24 140 247 132

33

31

124

187

295 23 40 30 65 41

355 29 43 51 67 49

1,839 147 514 182 3,729 169

2,783 180 824 433 5,100 268

were commemorated with an indication of an age-at-death and 152 places for males with age-at-death indicated. Interestingly, Africa Proconsularis though produces considerably more inscriptions from a smaller number of places than Italy. Numidia provides us with far more examples of inscriptions with age-at-death (3,729 females and 5,100 males) from a total of 67 places, in other words from less than half the number of sites at which age-at-death was found in Africa Proconsularis. These numbers tend to cause our attention to focus on these three areas, but we need to remember that we have evidence for the uptake of the use of age-at-death to commemorate males and females at a significant number sites in all provinces of the Western Mediterranean. In terms of gender, the dynamic

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender 91 is clear: females were commemorated with age-at-death at fewer sites and fewer numbers in all provinces. Almost half of all the inscriptions, 11,576, that contain information about age-at-death come from 31 places with more than 100 epitaphs that contain the formula referring to the age of these 4,822 commemorate females, whereas 6,754 were set up to males. Overall female representation was 42 per cent; whereas that of males was 58 per cent. Across the 31 cities (Table 6.3), there was little variation in these female and male percentages except Misenum, where only 15 per cent of epitaphs with age-at-death were set up for females. This may be attributed Table 6.3  Male and female epitaphs – places with more than 100 epitaphs with age-at-death statement Place

Female %

Male %

Female Total

Male Total

Male and Female Total

Thibilis Thugga Castellum Celtianum Cirta Lambaesis Carthago Thubursicu Numidiarum Castellum Elefantum Sigus Ostia Antica Madauros Brundisium Puteoli Theveste Castellum Tidditanorum Ammaedara Castellum Arsacalitanum Sila Sicca Veneria Aquileia Mactaris Sitifis Rusicade Misenum Auzia Caesarea Calama Carales Uzelis Cuicul Milev

45 41 44

55 59 56

481 393 421

582 564 517

1,063 957 938

44 39 39 41

56 61 61 59

399 342 244 238

506 541 386 339

905 883 630 577

41

59

220

321

541

44 41 43 43 41 43 44

56 59 57 57 59 57 56

176 159 163 126 118 120 114

223 228 213 169 170 159 144

399 387 376 295 288 279 258

42 38

58 62

104 89

142 145

246 234

40 43 46 40 40 42 15 35 38 42 41 41 45 44

60 57 54 60 60 58 85 65 62 58 59 59 55 56

87 92 95 79 77 73 24 54 56 61 58 59 53 47

129 121 112 117 114 102 141 100 92 83 85 84 64 61

216 213 207 196 191 175 165 154 148 144 143 143 117 108

92  Age and Society to the role of the fleet – 119 of the 165 epitaphs with age-at-death were set up for military personnel or veterans. These are exceptions or outliers to the pattern, and we should regard the representation of females to be c. 40 per cent to that of males at 60 per cent in epitaphs that include age-at-death (the mean and the median are both 41 per cent female to 59 per cent male). The list of places in Table 6.3 is notable for a strong bias towards the cities in Africa with only a few Mediterranean port cities in Italy appearing (Ostia, Puteoli, Misenum, Brundisium and Aquileia) with the Sardinia port city of Carales represented as well. Most of the African cities in Table 6.3 are inland with the notable exceptions of Carthage and Rusicade. This distribution should cause us to pause for thought about how Latin epitaphs are characterized and analysed. Much of the focus in the literature on Latin epigraphy is on Italy with case studies from African sites. However, as an archaeological phenomenon, certainly in the case of the vixit annos/annis formula, the evidence is predominantly from African sites. Latin epitaphs that include age are more an African phenomenon than a European phenomenon. Given the prominence of African sites, it makes sense to focus more on the evidence from outside Italy, than to begin a study with Italy at its centre. As we will see, time and time again, the relationship between the epigraphic evidence for the use of vixit annis/annos about stated chronological age is quite different from Italy to that of the provinces in general and to that of African sites in particular.

From Epitaph to Life Trajectory Categorization by gender ratio of 40 per cent female and 60 per cent male is not an end in itself, but the starting point to consider how age was utilized to commemorate males and females. We wish to create broad forms of comparison of gender that span the full range of the human life span for each province of the Roman Empire. Bearing in mind, that any commemoration is produced by the cultural priorities of a society, the cumulative pattern will reflect those priorities and allow for a comparison with patterns that were produced in other regions of the empire. Concerning the ages of the deceased recorded in an epitaph, we can begin to map the differences in the priorities associated with the societies that utilized age to commemorate the dead. This shifts the perspective of analysis from the epitaph as a signifier of a particular act of commemoration to a view of all epitaphs as being related to broader perspectives on what may be described as a ‘life trajectory’ associated with a region of the Roman Empire that relates to a wider regional timescape. The term, life trajectory, needs some explanation. Work by the pioneers of the study of the life course utilized longitudinal data in the mid-to-late twentieth century to establish the experiences of the children of the Great Depression in the United States. These studies have sought to resist the categorization of life into stages that are separated and to focus on a ‘life trajectory’ as a ‘pathway defined by the aging process or by movement across the age structure’ and frame it as the analytical category that gives ‘transitions’ and ‘events’ ‘distinctive form and meaning’.4 By ‘events’ and ‘transitions’, like the ancient climacterics, punctuates

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender 93 the long chronological frame of the human life span that can be associated with periods of change and stability.5 Life trajectory takes us into the realm of the social something akin to the professional concept of a ‘career’ because both are punctuated by change over time expressed in terms of chronological age.6 For the Roman Empire, we do not have longitudinal evidence – instead we consider the cumulative pattern of commemorating age-at-death in epitaphs as providing proxy data for the construction of life trajectories. In setting out this proxy data, we cross-reference to stages of life found in antiquity. This generates a series of regional comparisons that can define quite different commemorative patterns across the western Mediterranean, which we would argue are related to differing priorities of societies concerning time. To relate our data set of ages to a structure of ageing, we need to plot the ages recorded against concepts of ageing. In Chapter 3, we set out the various ancient topoi associated with an explanation of the stages of life in antiquity. Although we agree with Tim Parkin’s article on the ‘life cycle’ identifying these schemas as not being descriptions of ageing in antiquity,7 we nevertheless would suggest that these representations of ageing contain essential information on the subject of age that was produced in antiquity. We have chosen to utilize the age divisions attributed to Varro and preserved in the third-century text by Censorinus on birthdays (De die natali liber).8 This schema has the advantage of being created with 15-year periods from birth through to the age of 60 that had a clear linkage to agerelated concepts in the Roman census. The subdivisions reported by Censorinus were as follows: 0–15 years 15–30 years 30–45 years 45–60 years 60+ years

puer – sexually immature adulescens – growing up iuvenis – help the state in military matters senior – the body begins to grow old senex – the body labours under senility (senium).9

The linkage here to ideas about age prevalent in literary sources is most apparent. Within the discussion of paediatric medicine in antiquity,10 we find the age of 14 as a transition point. The age of 30 appears as an age at which office holding could begin within municipal charters and the constitution of the Roman Republic.11 Finally, the reference to seniores and the age of 60 can be traced back to recruitment priorities in the army of the Roman Republic.12 The survival of this system of ages into the third century CE, alongside others, shows that these were considered meaningful and, as Censorinus stresses, the shift from one stage to the next was a climacteric year that could affect one’s health or result in death. The latter links this form of evidence to the action of setting up a tombstone for the dead. The stage of life categorized the living but also categorized the dead as a child, youth, mature adult or a person becoming old or in old age. The stages of life attributed to Varro by Censorinus provides us with a means to categorize or sort the thousands of inscriptions that mention an age-at-death. It needs to be stated here that we do not divide adulthood into two separate stages and see adulthood

94  Age and Society as undifferentiated in the ways suggested by Varro. Although this creates a longer adult stage of life, numerically defined by the peaks in commemoration at 30 years and 60 years, it is justified because culturally the adult stage of life is less easy to differentiate and our data does not justify a disjuncture at the age of 45.

Life Trajectories in the Roman Empire The thinking behind this structuring of the data is derived from current studies on the life course developed in the field of sociology. In particular, we should emphasize the concepts of life trajectory, transitions and events, considered central to the contemporary study of the human life course.13 Developing from this consideration is the realization: ‘The individual life course is composed of multiple interdependent trajectories (for example work, family, and educational trajectories)’.14 In the context of the Roman Empire, one of the events recorded within an epitaph was the death of others. Their commemoration depended, in part at least, on their position within a life trajectory that was produced locally, yet, intersected with global concepts of age (e.g. legal age of marriage). The latter regulated life events, including those of marriage, office holding, entry into military service and so on. These can be seen as a quite abrupt changes in circumstances; whereas a transition can be seen as much more gradual and less regulated. Thus, we might see the transition from one stage of life to another, for example, into old age as less easily defined and resulting in numerous different definitions. The same, to some extent, is true of other systems of stages of life in antiquity – underlying these is a simple fact that transitions within the life course cannot be plotted easily and were/are difficult to define or to map with the mechanisms associated with chronological age. After all, events have their time frame of occurring in a particular year – whereas transitions evolve over more than a single year and need not occur at the same chronological velocity in all people. Our view is that epitaphs record an event, the death of a person and that the cumulative pattern of the recording of similar events, measured via the age-at-death statement in the epitaph, provide us with a means to understand the trajectory and the transitions embedded within it across the human life span in different parts of the Roman Empire. To allow for comparison of these trajectories, we will present a series of line graphs based on a division of the human life span into five phases: childhood (0 to 15  years); young adulthood (16 to 30  years); adulthood (31 to 60 years); later life (61 to 80 years); old age (over 81 years). We will return to this data in greater depth in subsequent chapters to set out a more detailed variation in the trajectories of life, the intention here is to set out, for the reader, the overall variation across the western Mediterranean in a clear easy to read set of visualizations. Beginning with the province of Africa Proconsularis, there are 2,230 epitaphs set up for females and 3,239 set up for males in our data set. Remember that to allow for comparison of the patterns across these categories, we focus on the percentage of females and the percentage of males falling into each age category. As can see in Figure 6.2, adulthood (ages 31 to 60) has the highest representation – 32

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender

95

35%

30%

Male

Female

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%

0-15

16-30

31-60

61-80

81+

Figure 6.1 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Africa Proconsularis.

per cent of females and 29 per cent for males. Although this category is longer than all others in terms of time (except over 81 years), its representation is not double that of young adults – 20 per cent of females and 21 per cent of males. However, it is more than double that of children – 14 per cent of both females and males. Many children were not commemorated with a tombstone that contained a statement of their age – at-death; whereas we find a much stronger representation of adults, whether young or old. Moving to Numidia, Figure 6.2, we see both genders following a very similar trajectory to that found for Africa Proconsularis, but there are some divergent elements in the data set of 3,729 epitaphs set up for females and the 5,100 epitaphs commemorating males. The percentage of children represented in Numidia is lower at just 9 per cent compared to 14 per cent in Africa Proconsularis. The percentage of young adults is pretty much the same in Numidia as Africa Porconsularis – 19 per cent for males and 21 per cent for females. Whereas as the percentage of adults from 31 to 60 varied by gender in Africa Proconsularis, we find 35 per cent of females and males represented in this category in Numidia. Of the old, in Numida, we see a higher percentage over the age of 81, but a slighter lower percentage of the previous category (61 to 80) with 22 per cent of males and 20 per cent of females commemorated in this age – group. The two provinces of Mauretania (Figure 6.3) provide us with 824 epitaphs set up for males and 514 dedicated to females. Unlike the other provinces in Africa, we can see the variation in the female and male trend lines in Figure 6.3. A higher percentage of females were recorded in early adulthood (26 per cent), when compared to males (21 per cent) and more males were commemorated with

96 Age and Society

40% 35%

Male

Female

30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0-15

16-30

31-60

61-80

81+

Figure 6.2 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Numidia.

40% 35% Male

30%

Female 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0-15

16-30

31-60

61-80

Figure 6.3 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Mauretania.

81+

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender

97

40% 35%

Male

Female

30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0-15

16-30

31-60

61-80

81+

Figure 6.4 The commemoration of age-at-death in Italy.

an epitaph in the 31 to 60 age group (36 per cent males and 32 per cent females). The percentage of the very old (over 81) commemorated was lower than in the other provinces of Roman Africa. This would suggest that there was a greater focus on commemorating younger females in the provinces of Mauretaniae than in Numidia or Africa Proconsularis. Crossing the Mediterranean to Italy (excluding Rome), we find a very different pattern of commemoration (Figure 6.4). Fifty-nine per cent of the males recorded were under the age of 31, which is a number exceeded for females with 69 per cent under the age of 31. A further difference is that persons over 60 constitute 10 per cent of all males and 7 per cent of all females. There is also a considerable discrepancy between the female and male trendlines in Figure 6.4. There is a clear peak in female commemoration in early adulthood, whereas the commemoration of males may be seen to have a less pronounced peak at this age. Bearing in mind, that adulthood from 31 to 60 is the chronologically longest age group, Figure 6.4 under-represents the very sharp focus on the commemoration of children and young adults in Italy. This is different from the patterns of commemoration found in North Africa. Interestingly, the Italian trendline in Figure 6.4 comes closest to an expected pattern of death derived from model life tables for antiquity with the proviso that children are still under-represented. The pattern found in Italy can to some extent be seen to be present in other provinces in the Western Mediterranean, notably in Narbonensis, Hispania Citerior and Baetica. Figure 6.5 shows the pattern for Narbonensis derived from just over 200 epitaphs (132 for males and 94 for females). Fifty-seven per cent of all female epitaphs were dedicated to those under the age of 31 and 51 per cent of

98 Age and Society 45% 40% Male

35%

Female

30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0-15

16-30

31-60

81+

61-80

Figure 6.5 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Gallia Narbonensis. 50% 45%

Male

Female

40%

35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0-15

16-30

31-60

61-80

81+

Figure 6.6 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Hispania Citerior.

males were also under this age-at-death. Small numbers of the elderly over the age of 61 were recorded for females (2 per cent) with relatively small numbers of males at this age as well (13 per cent). In terms of the male and female trendline (Figure 6.6), we see both peaking in adulthood, but quite a divergent male and female trends before this age-group. The pattern of divergent male and female trendlines is also apparent in the Spanish Provinces (Figures 6.7 and 6.8) with an earlier peak in the female trendline; whereas the trend line for males tends to be similar to that found in the North African provinces. The early commemoration of females would seem to be

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender

99

Baetica 45% Male

40%

Female

35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

0-15

16-30

31-60

61-80

81+

Figure 6.7 The commemoration of age-at-death in the province of Baetica.

0-14

50

15-29

30-44

45-60

60+

45 40 35 30 25 20

15 10 5 0

Carthage

Lambaesis

Ostia

Cirta

Thugga

Thubursicu Numidarum

Figure 6.8 Age in epitaphs to females: Carthage, Lambaesis, Ostia, Cirta, Thugga and Thubursicu Numidiarum.

100 Age and Society mirroring commemorative patterns found in Italy that simply do not appear in the evidence from Spain for males. The broad trends found in these provinces that show gender differentiation with an earlier peak in female commemoration can also be found in the provinces of Lusitania, Aquitania, Pannonia, Moesia and Dacia (Table 6.4). In particular, there is a pronounced emphasis on the setting of epitaphs for females in young adulthood – not just in the provinces but also in Italy (Table 6.5). This feature is simply absent from the North African provinces (Table 6.6). Our analysis at the macro-level has defined some major changes in the commemorative patterns by gender across the western Mediterranean from Africa to Italy and the Western Provinces. These patterns suggest that there was no single life trajectory for the Roman Empire and in studying Latin epitaphs, there needs to be a realization that although the commemorative practice of inscribing on stone Table 6.4 Epitaphs from Lusitania, Aquitania, Pannonia, Moesia and Dacia Age

0–15 16–30 31–60 61–80 81+

Lusitania

Aquitania

Pannonia

Moesia

Dacia

M

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

17% 21% 38% 18% 6%

14% 38% 38% 9% 1%

8% 17% 46% 25% 4%

27% 45% 27%

18% 27% 41% 11% 2%

23% 38% 33% 5% 1%

12% 22% 45% 18% 3%

18% 33% 41% 5% 2%

15% 24% 43% 13% 4%

18% 39% 35% 6% 2%

Table 6.5 Epitaphs from Italy, Narbonensis, Hispania and Baetica Age

0–15 16–30 31–60 61–80 81+

Italy

Narbonensis

Hispania

Baetica

M

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

28% 31% 30% 8% 2%

30% 39% 24% 5% 2%

31% 20% 36% 10% 3%

20% 37% 40% 1% 1%

16% 25% 36% 14% 7%

19% 46% 26% 7% 2%

11% 25% 42% 16% 6%

19% 34% 33% 10% 3%

Table 6.6 Epitaphs from the North African provinces Age

0–15 16–30 31–60 61–80 81+

Africa Proconsularis

Numidia

Mauretaniae

M

F

M

F

M

F

14% 21% 29% 24% 12%

14% 20% 32% 21% 12%

9% 19% 35% 22% 15%

9% 21% 35% 20% 15%

17% 21% 36% 17% 9%

16% 26% 32% 19% 7%

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender 101 is common across the provinces; variation is high in terms of choice of ages to commemorate in this way. This data points to very distinct life trajectories that reveal variation across the Mediterranean. The major difference is that: there is a general commemoration of younger female adults (16–30 years) in the provinces that now form a part of Europe that is simply not present in the provinces in Africa. This aspect of gender cannot be identified in Africa. It is in Africa that we find the least variation by gender in the patterns of commemoration. Within Italy, we see a much more gendered pattern to a commemoration with a greater concentration on female commemoration in the age bracket from 16 to 30 years; whereas the male pattern of commemoration has a greater preference for adults over 30. It is worth raising here the data from Dacia, a province that existed only in the second and third centuries CE, which shows a very similar pattern of younger adult female (16–30 years) commemoration as the other western provinces. It has less in common with the pattern of commemoration in Italy that is strongly focused on younger children, but it is worth noting that the commemoration of younger female adults (16–30 years) is most strongly represented in Italy, Spain, to some extent, in Narbonensis. This would coincide with the ages that would have been associated with first marriage and, importantly, the ages of adulthood in which it was more likely for a parent or parents, as well as a husband, to have been available to commemorate the deceased. This aspect of familial commemoration will be discussed in the next chapter.

Local Variation in the Gendering of Life Transitions So far, we have examined the life trajectory at a global scale. We wish now to turn our attention to the local evidence and to re-formulate our data set to match more precisely onto the age-divisions of Varro: under 15 years; 15 to 29 years; 30 to 44 years; 45 to 59 years and over 60 years. There are advantages and disadvantages to this division of human life. Firstly, those over 60 become more prominent in North Africa. Second, the division allows us to see adulthood as a continuum from age 15 through to age 60 with a view to picking apart the longest chronological phase of the life course. Taking six cities with some of the largest numbers of epitaphs (Figures 6.8 and 6.9), Carthage, Lambaesis, Ostia, Cirta, Thugga and Thubursicu Numidiarum. The first four of these cities were large urban formations; whereas the final two have been described as minor settlements or even villages.15 This allows us to explore the difference in settlement type to understand how population size or integration via sea connections with Italy may have affected the patterns found within the data set of epitaphs first for females (Figure 6.8) and then for males (Figure 6.9). The female pattern of commemoration shows considerable variation between these cities with the commemoration of children far more prominent at Ostia than at any other site and, at the same site, we also see that age groups over 30 years are represented by just 5 per cent of all epitaphs (Figure 6.8). The elderly were commemorated most strongly in the smaller cities, but we can also identify this phenomenon present in Lambaesis and at Carthage. This might imply a close

102 Age and Society

0-14

15-29

30-44

45-60

60+

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

Carthage

Lambaesis

Ostia

Cirta

Thugga

Thubursicu Numidarum

Figure 6.9 Age in epitaphs to males: Carthage, Lambaesis, Ostia, Cirta, Thugga and Thubursicu Numidiarum.

relationship between these settlements, perhaps due to migration. There is a peak in commemoration in all cases in the 30 to 44 years age group with the exception of Ostia with an earlier peak associated with the young adult group (15 to 29 years). Significantly, in all of these six cities, there is a dip in commemoration of the 45-to-59-year-olds. This might be accounted for by the transitional nature of this stage of life, described simply as becoming old; as opposed to the subsequent stage post 60 years of being old. More than 50 per cent of the epitaphs at Carthage and Lambaesis commemorated females between the ages of 15 and 45; whereas at Cirta, we find that the percentage was lower at 44 per cent, and at Thugga, it was lower at 32 per cent. The overall pattern in these cities is adult focused on children and those at an age of becoming old and marginalized. Thus, active female adults were the focus of commemoration alongside those whose lifespans were exceptionally long. The male pattern of commemoration from these cities (Figure 6.10) is rather different to that for females. At Ostia, the peak in commemoration is associated with children under 15 years of age for males, whereas for females, it was associated with young women from 15 to 29 years of age. For all cities, as with the female pattern, we find a dip in commemoration for the 45 to 59 age group. All five North African cities displayed a focus on the commemoration of the elderly or those with exceptionally long life spans. With the exception of Lambaesis,

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender 103 North African cities show a preference for the commemoration of young adults (between the ages of 15 to 29 years). The figures for the commemoration of adults between the ages of 15 and 45 in all of these cities were very similar between 36 and 44 per cent.16 Compared to female commemoration of these two ‘active’ adult age-groups, this is somewhat lower.17

Cemeteries, Epitaphs and the Production of Age and Gender The discussion in this chapter has pointed to patterns of commemoration of males and females according to age that are broadly similar within a province or even within a single city. The variable is not so much gender, but the place at which a person was commemorated. This takes us back to what has become known as the epigraphic habit, but the ‘habit’ needs to be explained and delineated. The first delineation has to be that there is a consistency of commemorative patterns regardless of gender. Equally, we can also say that the pattern found in Italy is totally dissimilar to that found in the provinces of North Africa, in spite of the proximity created by sea travel.18 There may be some convergence between the use of age in epitaphs in Italy and the Western provinces – however, the samples are rather small. It would be difficult to create a persuasive argument that the epigraphic practices found in Italy were adopted in some form of Romanization or osmosis from the empire’s centre. Thus, we see in this data a variation. Its explanation is rather tricky. It is simple to say that the elderly were less frequently commemorated with a statement of age-at-death in Italy, but can we go beyond this and the explanation that ‘it is the epigraphic habit’. We think we can and draw on the work of Glenn Elder to shape our conclusions.19 The use of Latin epitaphs in the North African provinces emerged in quite a different context to that of Italy from the first centuries BC and AD. Rather than producing a pattern that broadly corresponds to modern expectations of pre-modern mortality, as found in Italy, in North Africa, we can identify the epitaph with the older age cohorts and can suggest that longevity was to be commemorated. This does not mean that children were not commemorated. Instead, we suggest that just as there was an appropriate time in the life course at which to get married, have children etcetera, we would suggest that there was also an appropriate time of life (or age-at-death) to commemorate the deceased with an epitaph that stated the number of years lived. This created a narrative moment or endpoint of the life course with which viewers of the tombstone might imagine the course of their own lives and in North Africa that endpoint was frequently later in life.20 The imagined futures built on age-at-death found on epitaphs in cemeteries could have suggested in Italy a loss of children predominantly, whereas the possibilities of longevity were placed at the forefront in North Africa. The inscribing on the stone of age-at-death should not be seen as a neutral facet of the ‘epigraphic habit’ and can be considered as a means to institutionalize age and expectations associated with age.21 The inscribing age in cemeteries by one generation created a legacy of epigraphic practice for future generations. This created, perhaps, within the cemetery concepts of norms and expectations for the future. It needs to be remembered,

104  Age and Society when reading off graphs and other presentations of epigraphic data that we are neither dealing with a living population nor a deceased population and, instead, are looking at the commemoration of age of a sample of the deceased population – a sample that provides little or no evidence for gender differentiation, whether in Italy or the provinces. This situates age in relation to both genders locally, so that we see the epitaph with age-at-death as a means of recording personal time lived, whilst transmitting the conception of personal time into the future via visitors to the tomb. Thus, allowing the viewer to imagine a time in the future and a life that could be lived to a similar longevity. The repetition of epigraphic patterns of age commemoration across a cemetery may be seen both as a reflection of temporal priorities or a timescape, and a constituted part of a process of institutionalizing age and that timescape.

Notes 1 Saller 1986 questioned these fundamental assumptions within the literature more than 40 years ago. 2 Hemelrijk 2015 finds 24 per cent of the contracts of the Sulpicii are with women; see also Jakab 2013 and papers in Hemelrijk and Woolf 2013. 3 Saller 1999. 4 Elder 1985: 31. 5 Hutchinson 2010: 15. 6 Settersten and Mayer 1997: 252. 7 Parkin 2010. 8 Freidin 2020 for a full discussion of the nature of Censorinus’ text and the place of time in that celebration of a birthday or gifting of a birthday present. 9 Censorinus, De die natali, 14.2 ‘Varro quinque gradus aetatis aequabiliter putat esse divisos, unumquemque scilicet praeter extremum in annos XV. Itaque primo gradu usque annum XV pueros dictos, quod sint puri, id est inpubes. Secundo ad tricensimum annum adulescentes, ab alescendo sic nominatos. In tertio gradu qui erant usque quinque et quadraginta annos, iuvenis annos appellatos eo quod rem publicam in re militari possent iuvare. In quarto autem adusque sexagensimum annum seniores vocitatos, quod tunc primum senescere corpus inciperet. Inde usque finem vitae uniuscuiusque quintum gradum factum, in quo qui essent, senes appellatos, quod ea aetate corpus iam senio laboraret’. 10 Harlow and Laurence 2008. 11 Tabula Heracleensis 83–6 and 98–107, Crawford 1995 for text, translation and commentary. 12 Harlow and Laurence 2002: 16. 13 Elder 1985; Mayer 2009. 14 Settersten and Mayer 1997: 252. 15 Saller and Shaw 1984. 16 Carthage – 52 per cent; Ostia – 54 per cent; Lambaesis – 55 per cent; Cirta – 44 per cent; Thugga – 32 per cent; Thubursicu Numidiarum – 45 per cent. 17 For comparison females aged 15 to 44: Carthage – 44 per cent; Lambaesis – 43 per cent; Ostia – 40 per cent; Cirta – 36 per cent; Thugga – 39 per cent; Thubursicu Numidiarum – 41 per cent. 18 See Chapters 12 and 13. 19 Elder 1985; Giele and Elder 1998; Elder 1995. 20 Schiff 2014. 21 Mayer 2009.

Towards a Geography of Age and Gender 105

Bibliography Crawford, M., 1995. Roman Statutes, London. Elder, G.H., 1985. ‘Perspectives on the Life Course’, In G.H. Elder Jr. (ed) Life Course Dynamics. Trajectories and Transitions, 1968–1980, Ithaca and London, 23–49. Elder, G.H., 1995. ‘The Life Course Paradigm: Social Change and Individual Development’, In P. Moen, G.H. Elder, and K. Lüscher (eds) Examining Lives in Context: Perspectives on the Ecology of Human Development, Washington, DC, 101–139. Freidin, A., 2020. ‘The Birthday Present: Censorinus’ De die natali’. Journal of Roman Studies 110: 141–166. Giele, J.Z., and Elder, G.H., 1998. Methods of Life Course Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, Thousand Oaks, CA. Harlow, M., and Laurence, R., 2002. Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome: A Life Course Approach, London. Harlow, M., and Laurence, R., 2008. ‘The Representation of Age in the Roman Empire: Towards a Life Course Approach’, In P.P. Funari, R.S. Garraffoni, and B. Letalien (eds) New Perspectives on the Ancient World (British Archaeological Reports International Series 1782), Oxford, 205–221. Hemelrijk, E.A., 2015. Hidden Lives, Public Personae: Women and Civic Life in the Latin West, Oxford. Hemelrijk, E.A., and Woolf, G., 2013, Women and the Roman City in the Latin West, Leiden. Hitlin, S., and Johnson, M.K., 2015. ‘Reconceptualising Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking’, American Journal Ahead, of Sociology 120: 1429–1472. Hutchinson, E.D., 2010. Dimensions of Human Behaviour. Person and Environment (4th edition), Los Angeles. Jakab, É., 2013. ‘Financial Transactions by Women in Puteoli’, In P.J. du Plesis (ed) New Frontiers. Law and Society in the Roman World, Edinburgh, 123–150. Mayer, K.U., 2009. ‘New Directions in Life Course Research’, Annual Review of Sociology 35: 413–433. Parkin, T., 2010. ‘Life Cycle’, In M. Harlow and R. Laurence (eds) A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in Antiquity, Oxford, 97–114. Saller, R.P., 1986. ‘Patria Potestas and the Stereotype of the Roman Family’, Continuity and Change 1: 7–22. Saller, R.P., 1999. ‘Pater Familias, Mater Familias and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household’, Classical Philology 94: 182–197. Saller, R.P., and Shaw, B., 1984. ‘Tombstones and Roman Family Relations in the Principate’, Journal of Roman Studies 74: 124–156. Schiff, B., 2014. Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course, Chichester. Settersten, R.A., and Mayer, K.U., 1997. ‘The Measurement of Age, Age Structuring, and the Life Course’, Annual Review of Sociology 23: 233–261.

7 The Family, Age and the Commemoration of the Dead

The inclusion of a named dedicator and their relationship to the deceased in an epitaph is less common than we might think.1 In our study, 5,466 of the 23,473 epitaphs in our sample include this information. This illustrates the limits of the evidence with just 23 per cent of all tombstones from our study region include a reference to family relations.2 Interest in these inscriptions that mention family members has been intense, but perhaps is somewhat misplaced because the phenomenon of not mentioning a commemorator is far more common – 77 per cent of cases. This does not cause inscriptions with a mention of family members to be inconsequential or irrelevant but to have its limits. Those persons announced in inscriptions as having a familial relationship with the deceased had a reason to have the additional letters carved on the stone and were far from universal.

The Study of the Roman Family The Roman Family was an area of research-driven forward by the work of Beryl Rawson and other prominent scholars, such as Keith Bradley, Suzanne Dixon, Judith Hallett and Paul Weaver, in a string of publications through the 1980s and 1990s.3 The focus of this work tended to place a strong emphasis on the use of literature and law ahead of inscriptions.4 Even the more recent crop of books on children and childhood tend to utilize epitaphs as a means to say that there are thousands of them, children are under-represented and subsequently make generalizations from selected examples to suggest the overall pattern.5 The early work in the 1980s and 1990s sought to define the Roman family and acted as a counterpoint to that of deMause’s interpretation.6 Fundamental to their work was a focus on Roman law that was combined with the deployment of inscriptions to challenge or set out a dynamic of parenting that although patriarchal was filled with sentiment and care.7 Tombstones of dead children could be deployed to confirm this, or ‘to leave little doubt of their attitude’ with the reader interpreting the text: Her most happy parents, Faenomenus and Helpis, set up the dedication to Anteis Chrysostom – sweet prattler and chatterbox – who lived three years, five months and three days, daughter, with her piping voice. Porcius Maximus DOI: 10.4324/9781315267708-9

The Family, Age and the Commemoration of the Dead 107 and Porcia Charita and Porcia Helias and Sardonyx and Menophilus who tended her to the day of her death also commemorate her.8 The epitaph of this particular three-year-old girl seems to speak volumes of caring parents and five others who undertook childcare. This raises questions about: how other sisters were commemorated, or what should we think about all those three-year-olds, who were not commemorated with an inscribed tombstone. Were they loved any less? The problem, here, is that the inscription acts as a text to guide us, just as a text of Cicero might or a passage from a legal writer quoted in the Digest of Justinian. Variation in tombstones also allows for the possibility of locating a range of relationships children could have.9 However, in a way, the use of tombstones remained as a supplement to literary and legal sources. Thousands could have been cited, but examples are chosen to reveal the presence of nurses, grandmothers and other figures.10 We should not be too critical of those who were pioneers of the subject, but need to realize that an epitaph was designed to express loss or the absence of a child. Reading real-life family expectations from single inscriptions, let alone making generalizations is far from straightforward. Thus, in reading a sourcebook on the Roman family, we are presented with texts that take us into a context of commemorative practice and decisions to include or exclude certain words or lines that define a single death. Often, it is the remarkable and, certainly, the more elaborate inscriptions from tombstones that appear quoted in books and sourcebooks. Alarmingly, the vast majority of tombstones simply omit any of this interesting information and simply give a dedication (e.g. Dis Manibus), the name of the deceased, their age quite often and a statement (e.g. Hic sita est).

Setting the Terms of Analysis For more than 30 years, the discussion of the Roman family has been dominated by the innovative analysis of epitaphs undertaken by Richard Saller and Brent Shaw. Their work focused on the commemorators’ familial relations with the dead has supported the presence of nuclear family within the Roman Empire.11 The work has been subject to some critique but seems to have justifiable longevity and ongoing influence resists critique in many ways. Yet, it needs to be recognized, as Walter Scheidel has stressed, that the choice of epitaphs in Saller and Shaw’s surveys inherently will result in the recognition of a nuclear family, because within such a family structure, these types of relationships would result in epitaphs that emblematically display that relationship.12 Richard Saller and Brent Shaw recognized this limitation and in the determination of men’s age at marriage took the Theveste region or Lambaesis and Tébessa in Numidia as proxy data for this North African province, alongside a sample from Mauretania Caesarensis in delineating age at first marriage.13 Our approach has been to include all inscriptions that refer to family relations from both Numidia and Africa Proconsularis to reveal a larger data set and a contrast to patterns elsewhere in the Roman Empire. The results do not as such challenge their findings

108  Age and Society on the age-at-first-marriage but do shed light on the differences in commemorative practices within the Roman family in North Africa. It is worth noting that there are a total of 19 inscriptions from outside Italy that refer to length of marriage and age-at-death, which precludes their use as evidence.14 Inscriptions were varied and the familial element was just one of many that might be included, but its intersection with a variation in age-at-death provides a key indicator for revealing a difference in commemorative practice.15 Putting such a critique to one side to focus on the nature of kinship found in epitaphs allows us to consider the intersection between time as expressed in age-at-death and biologically based kinship. We utilize Richard Saller’s determination of the ordering principle of kinship in Roman society (set out in Table 7.1).16 There are those members of a family closest to a person biologically with the strongest bonds from birth: parents and siblings and by extension grandparents, as well as aunts and uncles (with associated nieces and nephews); whereas through marriage formation children and grandchildren were created. The structure of generations can be seen at work here underwritten by basic biological reproduction and the need for human development to adulthood, which creates temporalities of proximity and distance. An important issue, as well, was early female marriage causing the husband’s family to be older than the wife’s family.17 We should add the important provision for death rates higher than within societies that do not benefit from modern healthcare or dietary regimes, which included a provision for guardianship if the father was to cease to figure through re-marriage following the death of a parent or through a divorce. This suggests that over time, a Roman family was reconfigured through death and we should regard epitaphs as part of the process of reconfiguration or emblematic statements about the reconfiguration of the family. For our purposes to allow for comparisons across the provinces of the Roman Empire, we need to ensure that there are sufficient numbers of inscriptions in each category to prevent anomalies occurring. In consequence, we will be adapting Saller’s categories to just: child, parent, sibling, wife/husband or other kin, which will be cross-referenced to gender (Table 7.2). In understanding the inclusion of a familial commemorator and the relation to the deceased, it needs to be understood that the Roman tria nomina (name) usually contained a reference to a person’s father or the person who had set them free in the case of slaves. Thus, the name of the deceased anchored their identity within a family structure with a paterfamilias or patron without a particular need to highlight these people elsewhere in the epitaph.18 The reader of a person’s name Table 7.1  Hierarchies of kin relations Nuclear Family Parent Extended Grandparent Family Source: Based on Saller 1994:43–73.

Sibling Aunt/uncle

Wife/Husband Niece/Nephew

Child Grandchild

The Family, Age and the Commemoration of the Dead 109 Table 7.2  Numbers of epitaphs with the gender of the commemorator defined Total

Italia Narbonensis Hispania Mauretaniae Proconsularis Numidia

Female 1,780 732 Male 3,386 1,164 Total 5,166 1,896 Sample 23,723 4,662 Percentage Values Female 34% Male 66% Total 22%

25 30 55 230

39% 45% 61% 55% 41% 24%

44 70 114 328

158 289 447 1,334

115 316 431 5,688

340 810 1,150 8,952

39% 61% 35%

35% 65% 34%

27% 73% 8%

30% 70% 13%

in antiquity would have brought to bear on the simple insertion of the abbreviated format knowledge of whether the father was dead or alive. This was a part of the process of creating continuity between life and death, in which the name of the deceased continued to exist.19 The responsibility for domestic religion of a paterfamilias may have extended to the commemoration of the deceased with the opening line or abbreviation DMS – Dis Manibus Sacrum (‘To the Sacred Shades’).20 This combined with the naming of the dead and continual referral to the dead by name was a feature of commemoration with an epitaph and we might say that this naming of the dead was the primary purpose of an epitaph. It created an identity for the dead in the afterlife and continuing bond between the dead and the living. Commemoration with a tombstone created a location of the deceased family member and a place of remembrance and, even, religious practice for the family.21 Hence, any additional statement about who set up the tombstone is a particular form of commemoration asserting the role of another family member that was to be recalled or remembered and should be seen as an assertion of the familial role of that individual.22 In this case, the tombstone created a memory for the future.23 We might suggest that it indicates that the statement was needed to provide clarity to the viewer of the tombstone. It was a depiction of the dedicator’s position within the family and agency in the creation of the memorial to the deceased. This would have acted as a means to remember or recall that relationship in the future, but perhaps it need not point to a closeness of the relationship – since the need to set it out on the tombstone would suggest a need to assert the relationship or at least to make it explicit.24 The inclusion of a mention of the living in an epitaph creates an interface with the dead and a point in time for the relatives in the future. In most cases, not more than one or maybe two members of the family are mentioned in such inscriptions. They are picked out as the most prominent members of the family involved in the commemoration of the deceased. Thus, the statement of a specific family member as a commemorator asserted the bond between that person and the deceased. That bond was preserved for the future within the epitaph and could, subsequently – even after the lapse of a considerable amount of time – be read and recalled. The tombstone created, what would today be called, a continuing bond after death.25

110  Age and Society Given that the specific mention of a commemorator is not common, we would also suggest that there was an assertion of agency within the familial structure by that person, whether they be a parent, sibling, wife or husband that could be seen to have been shaping or reflecting the transition occurring within the family. Hence, a wife commemorating a deceased husband records also the termination of the marriage through death and disconnection with her in-laws; whilst at the same time creating a record of her marriage to the deceased that might have been otherwise lost through re-marriage in the future.26

Gender and Commemoration in the Roman Family Of the 23,723 epitaphs in our sample, just 5,166, or 22 per cent indicate a family relationship between the commemorator and the deceased. Of these inscriptions, 66 per cent are dedicated to males and just 34 per cent to females (compare c. 60:40 male-female ratio found across all inscriptions). This contrasts with the gender distribution of those commemorated in epitaphs set out in the previous chapter. We would not wish to identify these numbers as proxy data that could be utilized to suggest that all other inscriptions, which omit to mention a commemorator, were set up to males in 66 per cent of cases. There is a clear difference in gender ratio in terms of familial commemorations which have a greater focus on males. The regional pattern is more subtle. We need to view the figures as a means of characterizing cultural differences across the Roman Mediterranean to reveal how chronological age was utilized in the context of the commemoration of family members. An obvious conclusion is that frequently chronological age was omitted when details of a family relationship between commemorator and deceased were included. Seventy-eight per cent of the 23,723 epitaphs studied did not include any familial indication. Thus, although a minority of epitaphs included an indication of a familial relationship, this still constitutes a substantial number that needs further investigation. The overall pattern though is created from regionally distinct patterns. This can be seen from an examination of the percentage of epitaphs in the sample that includes a mention of a family relationship to the deceased. In Italy, this is at the highest level with 41 per cent of epitaphs including this relationship – far off a majority of all epitaphs. This is in stark contrast to Africa Proconsularis and Numidia with just 8 per cent and 13 per cent of our sample of epitaphs including mention of a familial relationship. It should be stated that these figures are drawn from substantial numbers of epitaphs – more than those in the sample from Italy even. Hence, these figures are robust and provide a clear indication, that in Italy and Africa, the inclusion of a mention of a family member is thus far from standard and reflects the regional development of the cultural usage of inscriptions. There would appear to have been a fundamental cultural distance between Italian and African epitaphs concerning mentions of familial commemoration of the dead. The provinces of Spain and the two provinces of Mauretania show a pattern that is much closer to that of Italy. It is worth pointing out here that the small

The Family, Age and the Commemoration of the Dead 111 number of inscriptions from Gallia Narbonensis with just 55 out of 230 mentioning a commemorator is probably too small a number to be free from statistical anomalies associated with small samples. The figures should not be used to suggest some form of ‘Romanization’ emanating from Italy, that was subject to greater or lesser ‘resistance’ in the provinces.27 Instead, what it provides is an index of the ability of one person in a family to take responsibility for a commemoration ahead of all other members of that family; and to ensure that they are also named in the epitaph itself. Thus, these epitaphs that mention commemorators are indicative of families, in which an individual takes on responsibilities and was named as doing so with their familial relationship indicated. The need for the naming of a commemorator or commemorator within a familial context is unusual when compared to the majority of epitaphs that were set out without any mention of a family member as the commemorator. Where commemoration by a family member does occur, it is necessary to consider why it was important for the commemorator to assert the familial bond. The disjuncture between Italy and the provinces of North Africa is also defined by the representation of male and female commemoration by family members.28 Yet, we also see greater convergence between the Spanish provinces and Italy – each with 61 per cent males and 39 per cent females identified as commemorators. This contrasts with a greater emphasis on identifying male commemorators in Numidia (70 per cent males to 30 per cent females) and in Africa Proconsularis (73 per cent males to 27 per cent females). This underlying pattern needs further investigation concerning family relations indicated within epitaphs from each of these provinces.

Commemorating Family Members from Italy to North Africa To gain greater depth in our understanding of the nature of the commemoration of the dead mentioned in epitaphs, we look at the make-up of relationships that can be defined in each region: Italy, Numidia, the two provinces of Mauretania Hispania Citerior and Baetica. To allow for comparison, we will present a series of graphs showing the nature of the kin relationship of the deceased to the commemorator: child, parent, sibling, wife/husband and other kin divided by gender. Each percentage given in Figures 7.1–7.4 refers to either male or female or male and female (total) numbers and identifies fluctuations within the pattern associated with that category. This is undertaken to allow for comparison and to remove the noise associated with the variation in total numbers (already set out in Table 7.2). These graphs allow us to flesh out who was taking the lead in the act of commemoration and of all the relations of the deceased with bereaved family members – one is chosen over others. To begin with, it is useful to focus on the total sample of inscriptions to establish a general picture from which to derive the analysis of single provinces and a meaningful cultural profile for each one of them (Figure 7.1). The graph shows two fundamental aspects connecting the commemoration of age-at-death

112 Age and Society and kinship in Roman society. The first is the centrality of the nuclear family underlined by the strong prevalence of dedications to a wife/husband, a child, or a parent. The second is the confirmation of the centrality of the agency of gender in shaping the Roman family. Male children are more prominent (43 per cent against 34 per cent of females). Male siblings are preferred; however, we do see gender parity in the commemoration of parents. Whereas wives are more prominent than husbands (45 to 26 per cent). In the context of a society associated with serial remarriage, which was promoted via legislation from the age of 20 to 50 for females and from 25 to 60 for males, we should expect to see this emphasis.29 The male commemorator was setting out the fact of the existence of this marriage terminated by death. It needs to be acknowledged that death in the act of or subsequently giving birth is likely to have been a factor in the higher rate of commemoration of wives. Yet, due to the early age of marriage, it is likely that wives became widows and remarriage was a possibility. It is worth noting here that the census returns from Roman Egypt do not identify the phenomenon of remarriage.30 In terms of the temporalities of biology, the overall pattern set out in Figure 7.1 points to parents and children with a record of their age, and wives and husbands having specific knowledge of the chronological age of each other. Once removed from this nexus of relationships, the inclusion of familial relations in the commemoration of other kin of a specific age is far less common.31 Moving on to examining the patterns within single regions that constitute the overall pattern, we will be able to isolate variations in the pattern of including family relations with the deceased on the part of commemorators. In Italy, 50% % Total

45% 40%

Male

Female

45%

43% 39%

35%

34%

34%

30% 26%

25% 20%

17% 18%

16%

15% 10%

10%

8%

5% 0%

3%

Child

3%

4%

2%

Other Kin

Parent

Sibling

Figure 7.1 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 1: whole sample.

Wife/Husband

The Family, Age and the Commemoration of the Dead 113

70% % Total

63%

60%

Male

Female

56%

50% 45%

40%

38%

30%

28%

21%

20%

10%

6% 1%

0%

Child

2%

7%

8%

8%

6%

9%

1%

Other Kin

Parent

Sibling

Wife/Husband

Figure 7.2 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 2: Italy.

within the Italian regiones, in Figure 7.2, we find a far greater emphasis on naming relationships with deceased children (63 per cent of males and 45 per cent of females). At the same time, commemorations of those specified as parents are much lower at 6 per cent; whereas commemoration of a wife/husband remains slightly lower than that in the overall pattern (38 per cent for females and 21 per cent for males). Taken together, we might suggest that the effect of death on family formation through marriage and the procreation of children was commemorated more strongly than any other aspect of the family. This can be concluded from the fact that 83 per cent of female commemorations were of wives or children and 84 per cent of male commemorations were of deceased children or a dead spouse. The disjuncture between the evidence from Italy (Figure 7.2) and that found in the Roman provinces of Africa Proconsularis (Figure 7.3) and Numidia (Figure 7.4) is striking for two reasons mainly. Firstly, the patterns found in these two provinces are convergent. Second, the relationships found in epitaphs are arranged in a quite different fashion from those found in Italy. The representation of relations with children is reduced to less than 30 per cent in both cases for either gender. The commemoration of wives/husbands is broadly the same across the two provinces and has much in common with the pattern found in Italy with the important difference that wives are more prominent accounting for more than 50 per cent of commemorations with an explicit familial relationship mentioned.

114 Age and Society

60% % Total

Male

Female

50%

50%

40%

38%

30%

30%

32% 28%

27%

25% 23% 20%

20%

13%

10%

7% 3%

3%

2% 0%

0%

Child

Other Kin

Parent

Sibling

Wife/Husband

Figure 7.3 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 3: Africa Proconsularis.

60% % Total

Male

Female

51%

50%

40%

38%

30%

28% 22%

29%

29%

26%

24% 20%

20%

14%

10%

8% 3%

0%

4%

3% 0%

Child

Other Kin

Parent

Sibling

Figure 7.4 Commemorators mentioned in Epitaphs 4: Numidia.

Wife/Husband

The Family, Age and the Commemoration of the Dead 115 Unlike in Italy, the relationship of children to deceased parents is much more prominent as is the mention of a brother. Thus, the pattern is substantially different with a focus as in Italy on marriage being terminated by the death of a wife, but also a wider range of biological relations are represented that may have had a longer timeframe from birth with parents and brothers. Notably, the ages of wives commemorated in these two provinces of North Africa are predominantly over the age of 30 years, Africa Proconsularis 76 per cent over 30 and Numidia 71 per cent over 30; whereas in Italy – for example in Latium and Campania – 53 per cent of wives commemorated were under the age of 30. Hence, rather than seeing this as a fundamental difference in the family in Roman North Africa, we should see this difference generated at least in part by a greater emphasis on the commemoration of higher ages at death than was common in Italy. As a consequence, where noted, family relations in African Proconsularis and Numidia point to a greater value given to the death of a spouse at an older age with 25 per cent of wives commemorated in Africa Proconsularis being over the age of 50. It would seem tempting to suggest that the variation in the use of family relations in epitaphs observed between Italy and Africa Proconsularis or Numidia might reveal information about the nature of family structures in these very different regions connected by the Mediterranean. To do so, though, we do need to consider how the patterns of familial commemoration occurred in other regions including the far West of the Mediterranean in Spain and Mauretania and also for comparison the provinces of Dacia and Moesia. Table 7.3 sets out the information and allows us to establish that the pattern of familial commemoration in Italy is quite distinct from that of all other regions in the Roman West. The key features of the Italian pattern are a focus on the commemoration of children (56 per cent of all forms of familial commemoration). Interestingly, the commemoration of spouses seems to appear to a very similar degree across the provinces. What is distinctive though is the commemoration of parents, which is present in all provinces but is much more prevalent in the provinces of North Africa accounting for 25 to 30 per cent of all familial commemorations. The designation of each family relationship set out in Table 7.3 identifies a regional variation that has been recognized before,32 but this requires further exploration concerning the actual ages associated with the familial relationships

Table 7.3  Commemoration of family members in Italy and in seven provinces Kin Italy Hispania Baetica Dacia Moesia Mauretaniae Numidia Africa Commemorated Proconsularis Child Other kin Parent Sibling Wife/husband

56% 1% 6% 8% 28%

34% 6% 18% 7% 35%

33% 11% 11% 44%

31% 4% 20% 4% 41%

31% 3% 21% 6% 39%

32% 3% 25% 8% 32%

22% 3% 28% 7% 38%

23% 3% 30% 7% 38%

116 Age and Society recorded. To elucidate the variation further, we will focus on a core region of Italy, Latium and Campania, that has abundant examples of the main relationships recorded: 448 children, 139 wives and 116 husbands commemorated; and compare this data set with those from Numidia with commemorations of 203 children, 262 wives and 193 husbands; as well as data sets from Africa Proconsularis (106 children, 109 wives and 65 husbands) and the provinces of Mauretania (143 children, 75 wives and 70 husbands). Only inscriptions that include both age-atdeath and a familial relationship have been selected and will be grouped thus: under 15, 15 to 29, 30 to 44, 45 to 59 and over 60. All data has been converted to percentages to allow for cross-comparison between provinces. The analysis is undertaken to fulfil our interest in defining the timescape of families via a study of inscriptions – rather than simply to define the family relations that have already been covered in the literature from the 1980s and 1990s, but note our inclusion of a wider sample from Italy, Numidia and Africa than in these studies. Beginning with children (Figure 7.5), the first thing to recognize is that the ages recorded do not conform to our notion of the chronology of a child (under 18) but point to a familial relationship that endured into adulthood or may have been created in adulthood via adoption.33 For Latium and Campania, we find very few commemorations with the relationship of parenting expressed after the age of 30; whereas in Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, a significant percentage of all such relationships appear between the ages of 30 and 45. The peak in commemoration of the

60

Latium & Campania

Africa Proconsularis

Numidia

Mauretaniae

50

%

40

30

20

10

0