ISic003420: Fragment of an imperial honorific

I.Sicily with the permission of the Assessorato Regionale dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana - Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana; photo J. Prag 2024-03-19

ID: ISic003420
Language: Latin
Text type: honorific
Object type: plaque
Status: No data
Links: View in current site

Edition

Apparatus criticus

Text from autopsy;
1: Korhonen: div(i) [--- filio (or nepoti, etc.)---]

Physical description

Support

Description: A thick white marble plaque, broken in half vertically, preserving left edge with two clamp holes (with rust staining), at 16 and 54.5 cm from the top edge. Top and bottom edges appear intact; nature of break across the right edge unclear as buried in the ground. The stone is also cracked across the middle. The stone is preserved in re-use in the front of the scaenae frons, as part of the facing to an access staircase from the floor of the orchestra to the stage.
Object type: plaque
Material: marble
Condition: fragment
Dimensions: height: 72.5 cm, width: 35.5 cm, depth: 5 cm

Inscription

Layout

The beginning of two lines of monumental letters are preserved on the stone. A substantial left margin is preserved at the start of each line. Unless the lines below were substantially further indented, there was no text below; the preserved vacat above line 1 (90mm) is significantly greater than that between lines 1 and 2 (57mm), so it is unclear if another line originally stood above (the top of the stone appears intact) - if it did, it was either significantly above the preserved first line and/or indented several letters to the right.

Text condition

incomplete

Lettering

Letter heights

Line 1: 68 (I = 87)mm

Line 2: 58mm

Interlinear heights

Interlineation line 1 to 2: 57mm

Provenance

Place of origin: Catina
Provenance found: The stone is in situ in ancient re-use in the facing of a staircase leading from the orchestra to the stage

Current location

Place: Catania, Italy
Repository: Teatro Romano di Catania
Autopsy: in situ
Map

Date

First or second century (AD 1 – AD 200)

Evidence: lettering

Text type

honorific

commentary

Korhonen offered the first publication, based upon observation from a distance after the theatre re-opened to the public. His edition assumes at least one line is missing from before the preserved text, containing the name of an emperor, with DIV[---] being part of 'divi filio' or 'divi nepoti'. However, for reasons noted above, this seems less easy to sustain from observation of the stone, and a dedication to a deified emperor as Divus, seems more likely. This does little to limit the possibilities, since such dedications range from Augustus (together with Tiberius, to explain the presence of tribunicia potestate), through to various of the Antonine and Severan emperors. The form of the lettering perhaps favours an earlier rather than later date, perhaps either Julio-Claudian or Trajan/Hadrian, and the re-use of the stone means that it could originally have come from e.g. the forum, rather than the theatre.

Bibliography

Digital editions

TM: 644815
EDR: -
EDH: -
EDCS: -
PHI: -

Printed editions

Kalle Korhonen, «La cultura epigrafica della colonia di Catina nell’alto impero», in Colonie romane nel mondo greco, a c. di G. Salmeri, A. Raggi, e A. Baroni, Minima Epigraphica et Papyrologica separata 3 (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2004), 233–54, at 241

Citation and editorial status

Editor

Jonathan Prag

Principal contributor

Jonathan Prag

Contributors

Last revision

9/8/2024