Color photograph of a light skinned woman wearing a black and tan dress and smiling at the camera

Mary-Evelyn Farrior

Emeline Hill Richardson/Jesse Howard Jr. Rome Prize
September 1, 2023–July 5, 2024
Profession
PhD Candidate, Department of Classical Studies, Columbia University
Project title
Inscribing Community: Mapping Greek Inscriptions in Imperial Rome
Project description

My project examines the foreign communities of Rome through the Greek inscriptions they produced. Analyzing inscriptions as both texts and archaeological objects, I demonstrate how inscribed Greek acted as a means of both communication and community-building among foreign groups throughout the Latin-filled landscape of the city. Inscribing Community brings together epigraphic corpora that have previously been studied in isolation, enabling a comparative study of foreign communities and cultures within ancient Rome. I have recontextualized the inscriptions topographically by mapping their known provenience within ArcGIS; the resulting maps have revealed epigraphic clusters in the neighborhoods of the Esquiline, Fora, and Trastevere that show the presence of foreign communities organized around athletics, commerce, and religion respectively. Through their content and archaeological provenience, Greek inscriptions not only demonstrate the existence of these unattested communities, but they also reveal their organization, their continuation over multiple generations, and the physical spaces they occupied in Rome. Each of the three areas, moreover, represents a distinct relationship between Greek script and urban landscape, reflecting the separate epigraphic habits of these communities.