Abstract
Roman soldiers had set ideas about their gravestones. For instance, it mattered very much where their funerary monuments stood. As a general rule, their gravestones were expected to address either the soldier’s native community at home or the community of his fellow soldiers from near and far. A remote battle field or a road through the countryside may have been a place to die (and get buried), but not one to set up a funerary monument. For the design of their epitaphs, soldiers also had a set of iconographic choices and standard formulations in Latin and Greek at their disposal that were popular with the military throughout the Empire. At the same time, however, young men at the age of recruitment are likely to have joined the Roman army with a fully developed cultural imprint from their various native regions. Moreover, Roman soldiers were always (if to varying degrees) embedded in the local society and culture of their garrison places. The paper therefore addresses three questions: how did the many different cultural influences combine to impact on the development of soldiers’ gravestones in Roman Syria? Did soldiers’ gravestones influence the local production of funerary sculpture and funerary traditions? Or was the opposite true: were local funerary customs and iconographic traditions responsible for significant traits of Roman soldiers’ gravestones in the Roman Near East?
Speidel, Michael Alexander