Exhortation in Greek and Latin Honorific Inscriptions:
a tale of difference

Jinyu Liu (DePauw University)

Various scholars have shown that several aspects of the honorific practices of Rome experienced Hellenization in the Late Republic and the Augustan Era. Wallace-Hadrill, for example, states that ¡°the Romans absorbed the Greek honorific idiom gradually, almost without realising it¡± (1990, 166). The Hellenization of the formulation of honorific inscriptions in Latin, however, also has its limits. There was, for example, a much stronger tradition to enumerate the career of the honorand in Latin epigraphy. This paper will focus on another significant difference between Greek and Latin honorific inscriptions, that is, the rarity of explicit hortatory expressions in Latin epigraphy.

Widely attested in Greek epigraphy in the late Classical, Hellenistic and Roman times, hortatory expressions have not escaped scholarly notice. An example of such exhortations goes ¡°¡­so that all may know that the demos knows how to honor its benefactors and more people may compete to provide benefits to the city when they see worthy men being honored¡±. Such hortatory formulae, however, did not seem to have been adopted by Latin epigraphy, or perhaps were intentionally left out. The few examples of hortatory expressions that I was able to find in Latin honorific inscriptions do not seem to derive from their Greek counterparts. Based on a focused investigation of the phraseologies and implications of ¡°exhortations¡± in Greek and Latin honorary inscriptions, I suggest that the Greek and Roman cities developed different mechanisms or strategies to harness ¡°the love of honor¡± and turn it into positive energy. The nuanced ways of constructing and representing honor would advance our understanding of the euergetic politics in the Greek and Roman cities.