INTRODUCTION

I. History of the Inscription.

Suetonius in his Life of Augustus tells us that that Emperor had placed in charge of the Vestal virgins his will and three other sealed documents; and the four papers were produced and read in the senate immediately after his death. One of these additional documents gave directions as to his funeral; another gave a concise account of the state of the empire; the third contained a list of “his achievements which he desired should be inscribed on brazen tablets and placed before his mausoleum.” These tablets perished in the decline of Rome. Centuries passed; men had ceased to ask about them, and there was no idea that they would ever be brought to light. Nor were the original tablets ever found. But in 1555 Buysbecche, a Dutch scholar, was sent on an embassy from the Emperor Ferdinand II. to the Sultan Soliman at Amasia in Asia Minor; and a letter of his, published among others at Frankfort in 1595, tells the story of the discovery of a copy of this epitaph of Augustus. He writes: “On our nineteenth day from Constantinople we reached Ancyra. Here we found a most beautiful inscription, and a copy of those tablets on which Augustus had placed the story of his achievements.” From this situation of the copy comes the common title, Monumentum Ancyranum. Buysbecche made some attempt to copy the Latin inscription, but his work was very hasty and incomplete. What he had discovered was of extreme importance, and his report stimulated such interest that European scholars never rested till as complete a copy as possible was finally made in our own time. The temple on whose walls the inscription was found was one dedicated to Augustus and Rome, as was a common custom during the lifetime of that Emperor. It was a hexastyle of white marble, with joints of such exquisite workmanship that even in this century it was difficult to trace some of them. This temple had served as a Christian church till the fifteenth century, and from that time has been part of a Turkish mosque, some sections of its enclosure being used as a cemetery. The great inscription was cut on the two side walls of the pronaos, or vestibule. It was in six pages, three on the left as one entered, and three on the right. Each page contained from forty-two to fifty-four lines, and each line an average of sixty letters. The pages cover six courses of the masonry in height, about 2.70 metres, and the length of the inscription on each wall is about 4 metres. On one of the outer walls of the temple was a Greek translation of the Latin. This measures 1.38 metres in height by 21 metres in length. Several Turkish houses had been built against the wall containing this Greek version, and this made the reading of it, and still more the copying, an extremely difficult task. The priceless value of the Greek version lies in the fact that it supplements in many cases the breaks in the Latin. For it is needless to say that an inscription so old and so exposed has suffered much from time and violence. Various travelers have described the temple and its treasure: Tournefort in his Voyage du Levant, Lyons, 1717; Kinneir, Journey Through Asia Minor, 1818; Texier, Description de l’Asie mineure, Paris, 1839; William Hamilton, Researches in Asia Minor, London, 1842; and most completely, Guillaume, Perrot and Delbet, in their Exploration archéologique de la Galatie, etc., in 1861, Paris, 1872.

Numerous attempts were made at transcribing the inscription, and a number of editions were published. Buysbecche’s fragments found several editors in the century of their discovery. About a hundred years after him Daniel Cosson, a merchant from Leyden, who had lived many years at Smyrna, dying there in 1689, caused an attempt to be made to secure a copy, and with somewhat better results. His copy was edited at Leyden in 1695. In 1701 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, under direction of Louis XIV, visited Ancyra, and attempted to secure a facsimile of the text. In 1705 Paul Lucas, also sent by Louis XIV, spent twenty days in copying the Latin, and his work was the last of its kind till the present century. While these early copies are far from being as perfect as more recent ones, they have this value: that in a number of cases they show parts of the inscription which progressive disintegration has now rendered illegible.

The Greek text, owing to the buildings reared against it, was much harder to transcribe. In 1745 Richard Pococke published a few fragments, and in 1832 Hamilton copied pages 10, 11, 12 and 13 of the nineteen into which the Greek is divided.

Within recent years all has been done that can possibly be done to secure perfect copies of both Greek and Latin. In 1859 the Royal Academy of Berlin commissioned a scholar named Mordtmann to secure a papier maché cast of the Latin, and to transcribe the Greek. He failed in both attempts, and declared that the casts would ruin the original.

Napoleon III. commissioned George Perrot and Edmund Guillaume to explore Asia Minor. In their work above mentioned they give a facsimile copy of the whole of the Latin, and of as much of the Greek as they could get at. Their plates were the basis of an edition of the text by Mommsen in 1865, and another by Bergk in 1873, and of the text given in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

But Mommsen and the Berlin Academy were not satisfied. Carl Humann had distinguished himself by his researches at Pergamos, and to him they committed the task of securing casts of the whole of both texts. The story of his achievement is extremely interesting. Difficulty after difficulty was met and surmounted. And finally he succeeded in his plan. With materials dug near-by he made plaster casts. The owners of the Turkish houses he succeeded in inducing to allow their walls to be so far torn away as to permit him to get at the entire Greek text. And finally twenty great cases containing the whole series of casts were sent away on pack mules to the coast and thence to Berlin. The Royal Academy now counts these casts among its chief treasures. This was in 1882. In 1883 Mommsen published his great critical edition of the text, on which this edition is based. His work is almost final on the subject, but especially in the matter of conjectural fillings of the lacunæ is subject to revision. But an inspection of the text as given in this volume will show that we have the words of Augustus almost in their entirety.

At Apollonia, on the borders of Phrygia and Pisidia, has been found another ruined temple, with remnants of the Greek version of this inscription. At Apollonia the inscription originally covered seven pages. Of these there are still legible the upper portions of pages two, three, four and five. The correspondence between the text at Ancyra and that at Apollonia is almost exact, and where there is a divergence, it has been indicated.

II. Character and Purpose of the Inscription.

German scholars have waged a fierce warfare over the question of the literary character of the Res Gestæ, as Mommsen commonly calls it. He himself refrains from assigning it decidedly to any class of composition. Is it epitaph, or a “statement of account,” or “political statement”? Otto Hirschfeld contends strongly it is not an epitaph because it contains no dates of birth or death, and is in the first person. Wölfflin calls it a statement of account. Geppert sides with Hirschfeld. Bormann, Schmidt and Nissen all hold it to be an epitaph. And this appears to be the final agreement. The latest word is the discussion by Bormann, in 1895, in which he still maintains the epitaph view. For these discussions, cf. the bibliography at the end of this volume.

Of course it is an epitaph of unique character. It has certain striking peculiarities, and specially of omission. There is no mention of domestic affairs. The wife of the Emperor is unnamed. Although in enumerating his honors and offices it was necessary to date events by the names of consuls, yet aside from this he mentions no person outside the imperial household, not even such favorites as Mæcenas and Agrippa. His foes, Brutus, Cassius and Antony, are several times alluded to, but never named. The same is true of Lepidus and Sextus Pompeius. Unfortunate events are not noticed. His omission of the disaster to the Roman arms under Varus has been severely criticised as an attempt to deceive; but if the inscription is really an epitaph one cannot wonder at such silence. The omission of the dates of birth and death has been variously explained. Some have thought that he meant his heirs to fill in any such gaps after his death, and to recast the whole into the third person. Or, it has been suggested that it was the desire of Augustus to be counted a divinity, and that therefore he wished to pose as one “without beginning of years, or end of days.” It certainly would be incongruous to record the death of a god. With regard to his general purpose Mommsen says: “No one would look for the arcana of empire in such a document, but for such things as an imperator of mind shrewd rather than lofty, and who skillfully bore the character of a great man while he himself was not great, wished the whole people, and especially the rabble, to believe about him.” Two purposes are manifest throughout the document. One is to pose as a saviour of the state from its foes, and not at all as a seeker after personal aggrandizement; another is to represent his whole authority as having been exercised under constitutional forms. These two ideas appear again and again.

III. Divisions of the Text.

The text may be roughly divided into three sections. Chapters one to fourteen give the various offices held by Augustus, and the honors bestowed upon him; chapters fifteen to twenty-four recount his expenditures for the good of the state and the people; and the remaining chapters, twenty-five to thirty-five, give the statement of his various achievements in war, and his works of a more peaceful character. This classification will not hold rigorously, but is true in the main.

The division into chapters or paragraphs is marked in the Latin text by making the first line of each chapter project a little to the left of the remaining lines. Each such paragraph is relatively complete. And the use of such a topical method marks a new manner of composition quite different from the old annalistic style of Roman historiography.

IV. The Greek Version.

George Kaibel has made a special study of the Greek version, and is led to the opinion that it was made by a Roman rather than by a Greek. It is a grammar and dictionary rendering, rather than the idiomatic work of one quite at home in the use of Greek. This conclusion is based upon linguistic grounds. A further question remains as to where this translation was made, whether at Rome or in the provinces. The fact of the identity of the two copies at Apollonia and at Ancyra would seem to indicate a common Roman source.

V. The Supplement.

This is poorly written both in the Latin and in the Greek; and it is also a very imperfect summary of the document, summing up only what was spent upon games, donations and buildings. The fact that it is in the third person also proves that it is not the work of Augustus. The reckoning by denarii rather than by sesterces points to a Greek origin, and the mention of favors shown by Augustus to provincial towns (cf. c. 4 and notes) would indicate one outside of Rome.

VI. Trustworthiness of the Inscription.

The corroborations of the inscription by other inscriptions, coins and later historians, as well as by allusions in contemporary literature, form an interesting study. And the trustworthiness of the record becomes more manifest the more one compares its statements with those of other writers. Only one point has been found where Augustus makes what might be challenged as a perversion of fact. (Cf. c. 2, note 16.)

VII. Masons’ Blunders.

A number of apparent errors in the text are to be attributed in all probability to the stone-cutters at Ancyra. Such are the superfluous et of Latin ii, 2; aede for aedem, iv, 22; quinquens for quinquiens, iv, 31; ducenti for ducentos, iv, 45; provicias for provincias, v, 11; Tigrane for Tigranem, v, 31. εὔξησα for ἠύξησα, Gr. iv, 8; Ῥωμάοις for Ῥωμαίοις, vii, 6; ὑπατον for ὑπάτων, vii, 15; ἄνδρας μυριάδων for ἀνδρῶν μυριάδας, viii, 8; omission of τρὶς before χειλίας, ix, 13; ἐπεσκευσα for ἐπεσκευάσα, x, 18; omission of ναὸν before ἀγοράν, xi, 10; επεύξησα for ἐπηύξησα, xiv, 4; omission of Ἀρτάξου, xv, 3; μείσζονος for μείζονος, xv, 15; προκατηλειμένας for κατειλημένας, xv, 17; ἐπειταδε for ἐπίταδε, xvi, 11; βασιλεες for βασιλεῖς, xvi, 22; βασιλεις for βασιλεὺς, xvii, 4; ἐπείκειαν for ἐπιείκειαν, xviii, 5; ἀγορᾷ Σεβαστῇ for ἀγορὰ Σεβαστή, xix, 1.

VIII. Signs and Abbreviations.

The Latin and Greek texts are printed in such a way as to give the best idea practicable of their actual condition. Roman numerals denote the pages of the inscription, and the Arabic figures the lines. These numerals and the chapter headings are no part of the inscription. The projection of the first line of each chapter in the Latin is the only method of marking the divisions in the original.

Parts of the Greek and Latin text included within brackets, [], are conjectural restorations of the portions of the inscription which have perished. The Greek generally is a guide to the Latin and vice versa, for the instances are rare where both versions have been lost. The textual notes show that not all scholars have reckoned the same number of missing letters. These variations are quite allowable, for it is impossible to say that just so many letters are missing in any given case, owing to the various sizes of different letters, and varying degrees of closeness of writing.

Where dots (...) occur, it signifies that Mommsen reckons as many letters unrestored as there are dots.

The sign § indicates a mark in the original resembling a figure 7, or a very open 3.

The same sign in brackets [§] indicates an unfilled interval in the stone.

The apices over vowels in the Latin indicate similar marks in the original in the case of a, e, o and u, and in the case of i a prolongation of that letter above the line.

Where certain letters of the Latin text are italicized it indicates that while they do not appear in the plaster casts, yet they were traced by Alfred Domaszewski (a fellow-worker with Humann) on the stone itself, by means of certain discolorations from paint, or gilding, or weather, which marked the bottom of the incisions of the letters in several cases where the surface of the stone had been worn away.

In the textual notes, B. stands for Bormann, G. for Geppert, S. for J. Schmidt, Sk. for Seeck, W. for Wölfflin, Apoll. for the inscription at Apollonia, and Anc. for that at Ancyra.

The abbreviations of the names of authors and their works in the historical notes are indicated in the bibliography at the close of the book.