Strange the things you think of when the memory is jogged while talking to a friend from the University days. The study of language and history is the study of colorful life. What human on earth isn't fascinated by the nutty things that others do? I think it's in our nature to be curious about our confreres. And when they do it in another language, their undertakings seem even more remote, mysterious, and secretive. At the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, tucked along a back wall of one of the upper floors of the Mullins Library (this is all before the renovations. I have no idea where to find these items now) was a bank of gigantic hardbound tomes. Each was about 36"X24" or so. Big. And heavy. This was the Mullins set of the CIL -- the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. So priceless these things were to us classicists and historians, and of course they could only be consulted in the library. For one, they're just too massive to tote back to the digs, and for two, if even one volume went missing, someone in the Latin philology brood would know, since that would be the one volume they'd need this Wednesday. Now and then a professor would borrow a volume, someone might play a prank, or purposefully misplace one for private viewing. "Ok, who hid Rome II in the French stacks?" "I went up there and Pompeii was missing." "Stop hiding Germania. Don't you know I'm writing on Tacitus?" The CIL contains printed editions of all known Latin inscriptions throughout the world: "The Body of Latin Inscriptions" it's called. If you want to learn more about the in's and out's of the CIL, the German philologist and archaeologist Theodor Mommsen who started the compilations back in 1853, follow this link to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities:
The CIL is something an interested party could loose himself in quite quickly. And it's mostly because we all enjoy reading about the crazy messes people get themselves into. One thing we learn from it, even if it's just because we have a few hours to kill on a Sunday afternoon: Desperate Housewives and Peyton Place are nothing more than modern re-tellings of the same crap humans have been embroiled in since an angel with a flaming sword was made to play the bad guy and expelled two fig-leafed protoparents from Paradise after they were told that sex was a sin and that discussing one's hoo-hoo publicly or someone else's is not polite. So what's in the CIL? Everything. You name it. The standard official stuff: building inscriptions, landmarks, and such. Tombstones, lots and lots of tombstones, and best of all graffiti and curse tablets. The political messages on buildings is what the school boys read in Latin III. Not until they hit the Hallowed Halls are most introduced to the good stuff. The Moet, the Grey Goose. These are the strange death grave markers, the "I hate you so much, that I wish for you..." curses, and best of all, the motherload: scribbles from the walls of perhaps the raciest of all Roman cities: Pompeii. The old prudes who scramble around after church services handing off the "white ribbons against porn" have no idea that all the stuff that the "men of today are engaging in" is really old hat for humans. Homo Sapiens: been there, done that. Human kinkiness came about perhaps around the same time that the first thong was sewn in Eden. Some people suffered weird deaths then like some folks do today: "Poor Claudius, decapitated by an ox cart. No one really liked him anyway." They cursed their neighbors: "If she so much as looks at my husband in that way again, may her hair fall out and may her tits shrivel to the size of grapes." And they warned about the floozies who offered good times at bargain prices: "Don't choose Scintilla. You might be burning after." No surprise that Scintilla means "spark". Romans were literary too, even while they sinned.
The CIL continues to grow. There are some 20 or so volumes at the moment, and more and more material for the collection is found almost everyday. Reading the CIL might seem a nerdy student's passion, but really, it appeals to something more than just that. It's the discovery how we connect to other people. That they aren't so much different from us. The dude who took out a stylus in the first century and scraped a warning onto a brick wall about a sparky hooker who gave him crabs more than likely had no idea that his admonishment would become the focus of academics 2000 years later. But, who hasn't overheard similar words in any number of social situations? The CIL gives us a chance to eavesdrop on the ancients. There's plenty of time to read about the big names and their scandals, but the ordinary, everyday folks are far more interesting (and their stories are found in the CIL). Mainly because we can so easily relate to them. "Tertullia's hair is so out of style. That's what she gets for buying a slave from Gaul." Good stuff.
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