Università Roma Tre

This course is devoted to the earliest epigraphic evidence in Latin, from the earliest 8th-century attestations up to the finds of the early Republican age. These inscriptions convey invaluable information about many aspects related to language, private life and political culture in the early centuries of Rome, enabling us to grasp fragments of otherwise obscure processes and phenomena. Only rarely and with much effort is it possible to compare the information conveyed by archaic epigraphy with clues handed down by sources of a different nature: for this reason, the study of the oldest Latin inscriptions confronts the historian with the need to make every minute detail worth it in order to gather clues useful for reconstructing the sociocultural context within which the inscriptions were produced. This means that although the techniques and methodologies are the same as those used in the study of more recent inscriptions, archaic epigraphy requires a different and specific application of them - greater weight is given, for example, to linguistic aspects - to which students will be introduced in the course of the lectures.