On 4 July 1995 the Caesarea Maritima Vault Project discovered an inscribed column of gray marble, split in half and reused as a paving stone in one of the late antique floors of the vault. The column survives to its entire height, 1.44 m, and has a diameter of 0.45 m. The top and bottom have the rough finish left by pointwork, with no cuttings for attachments. The surface of the column has a smooth finish. The column, registered as CV/3074.103, now stands in the courtyard of the Caesarea Museum.
The column bears two Latin inscriptions. The earlier has nine lines, but almost nothing of it survives because of its complete erasure with a claw chisel, presumably at the time of the cutting of the second. The splitting of the column, moreover, removed the end of each line. The beginning of each defaced line survives to a length of six to eight letters. The surviving inscribed area measures 0.90 m high, beginning 7 cm from the top. The few legible letters measure 5-8 cm high. I do not offer a text of this badly mutilated inscription, but I can restore the praenomen Aurelius in line one and the office of procurator in line two.
The second inscription appears in a panel 0.76 high, beginning 7 cm from the top and therefore aligned with the top of the earlier text, which begins immediately to the right of the panel. A single incised line about 1 cm wide defines the panel. Above it a broad, deep gouge might constitute another erasure. The inscribed area, positioned toward the top of the much larger panel, measures only 0.33 high. Again, the splitting of the column removed the left side of the panel and the beginning of each line of the text. The inscription has five lines of well-cut but somewhat irregular letters with serifs in the narrow alphabet distinctive to Latin inscriptions of the second and third centuries at Caesarea.1 Dots divide words. Letters are 4.7-4.9 cm high in line 1, 4.4-4.9 in line 2, 4.2-4.9 in line 3, 2.8 in line 4, and 3.5-4.4 in line 5.
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[- - - - - - - - - - -]ianum v(iro) e(gregio) [proc(uratori) Augusti] nostri [- - - - - (centurio)] ex corniculo [- - - - - - - - - - -]s [- - - - - - - - - - -] incomparabilem. |
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In honor of . . . -ianus, of the rank egregius, procurator of our Augustus. . . . , centurion and former cornicularius, to an incomparable . . . .
The habit of inscribing honorifics on non-structural columns, many of them carrying multiple inscriptions, seems distinctive to Caesarea within the Roman Empire. This monument raises the number of published columns to nine, carrying eighteen inscriptions, two of them Greek, the rest Latin.2 All of the dated texts on these columns belong in the third or very early fourth century. Unlike some of the others, the new column lacks cuttings in the top for fastening decorative elements. Remarkably, however, the dedication appears in the nominative, normally used for inscriptions associated with statues, instead of the dative.
The indication of rank at the end of line 1 shows that the person named held the procuratorship. The discovery of the inscription at Caesarea, capital of the province, suggests that the dedicatee held his post in Syria Palaestina, as did his predecessor, whose name was chiseled off the other side of the column. Palestine's procurators held the rank egregius until the time of Diocletian, who elevated the office to the perfectissimate (GLICM 7; cf ibid, introduction: "Local and Provincial Administration"). Several of the procurators based at Caesarea are known, some with cognomina ending with the very common suffix -ianus: L Valerius Valerianus (GLICM 5), Aurelius Maro (GLICM 6), Clemes (GLICM 7), Timesitheus (GLICM 8), and Aelius Julianus (GLICM 12), all of the third or very early fourth centuries. One can neither identify the procurator in this dedication with one of the known procurators nor restore his name. I therefore restore only the office of the dedicatee in line 2. Cf GLICM 12: Aelio Iulian[o] / proc(uratori) Aug(usti) n(ostri). The letter forms and parallels with the other columns from Caesarea indicate a date in the third or very early fourth century for both inscriptions on this column, although a date in the second century cannot be excluded.
The name of the dedicator is lost in line 3, but the surviving end of the line indicates that by the time of the dedication he had received promotion from a post on the procurator's staff.3 He had held the corniculus, the office of cornicularius (normally the inscriptions use the formula ex corniculario). The cornicularius, the highest ranking of the principales, headed the staff of the commander or governor--here the procurator--to whom he was detached from a nearby legion. Cornicularii serving with governors normally received promotion to the centurionate--hence my restoration of line 3.4 Incomparabilem at the end of the text implies a restoration of some such phrase as virem incomparabilem (cf GLICM 5) or patronum incomparabilem. This ex-cornicularius likely owed his promotion to the recommendation of the procurator and here acknowledges the beneficium.
I thank W J Bennet, Jr, director of the Caesarea Maritima Vault Project, for inviting me to publish this monument. Brent Froberg and Gretchen Ludwig read and improved the text. Three of my friends in the University of South Dakota School of Law gave me technical assistance as I learned html-composition: Robert J Williams, who initially prepared the images, Candice Spurlin, and Jarrett Leesch. Aaron Levin of the Combined Caesarea Expeditions took the black and white photographs. My fieldwork at Caesarea in 1995 received the support of the University of South Dakota Office of Research.
1Clayton Miles Lehmann and Kenneth G Holum, The
Greek and Latin Inscriptions of Caesarea Maritima (Atlanta: American Schools of
Oriental Research, forthcoming), introduction: "Palaeography," with letter-chart
(hereafter GLICM).
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2GLICM, introduction: "Local and
Provincial Administration" and documents 5-23. A tenth column, really a structural
pier, carries an honorific similar to the others: GLICM 21. The new
excavations of the Antiquities Authority south of the Crusader City have uncovered another
column with a Latin honorific, this one also structural. In Late Antiquity the Caesareans
continued to inscribe columns, but with honorific epigrams (GLICM 26-27). I
study the cultural setting of these monuments in "Observations on the Latin
Dedicatory Inscriptions from Caesarea Maritima," in Biblical Archaeology Today
1990, Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology,
Jerusalem, June 1990 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 679-86, and "The
City and the Text: Caesarea's Inscriptions in Their Urban Context," in Caesarea
Maritima: Retrospective after Two Millennia, ed Kenneth G Holum and Avner Raban,
Proceedings of the International Symposium on a Monument of Religion and Culture,
Caesarea, 3-11 January 1995 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
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3For the use of ex with an office to mean a
promotion or transfer see M A Speidel, "Miles ex cohorte: Zur Bedeutung der mit ex
eingeleiteten Truppenangaben auf Soldateninschriften," Zeitschrift für
Papyrologie und Epigraphik 95 (1993): 190-96.
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4See Alfred von Domaszewski, Die Rangordnung des
römischen Heeres, 2d ed by Brian Dobson, Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbücher, vol 14
(Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1967), 30-31, 73-74, 82; A H M Jones, "The Roman Civil
Service (Clerical and Sub-Clerical Grades)," Journal of Roman Studies 39
(1949): 38-55 at 44-46; David J Breeze, "The Organisation of the Career Structure of
the Immunes and Principales of the Roman Army," Bonner Jahrbücher 174
(1974): 245-92, esp 270-73, on the regular promotion of senior staff officers to the
centurionate in the third century.
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This article © C M Lehmann, 1995, posted 28 Sept 1995.
Contact him at clehmann@charlie.usd.edu