Writing an Audience, Part 3: The Pantheon

I want you to just look at the following picture for a few seconds. This is the Pantheon. What you see was built around 125 CE by the emperor Hadrian after fire destroyed the previous iteration. In its day the building was in the heart of a high traffic area; porticoes, basilicas, baths and other temples surrounded it. While its own function as a atypical temple is up for debate, its grandeur tells us it was an important site. Look up at the inscription. The letters are the same height as the people walking below. These words were meant to be read.

The Pantheon in Rome. Photo by Jack Hase.

Here, in part 3 of this series, we will look at the the readability of the inscription adorning the front of the Pantheon. As with the previous post, three aspects of this inscription made it easily readable to a broad 'less-literate' audience. The inscription reads:

M. AGRIPPA. L. F. COS. TERTIVM. FECIT

(Marcus Agrippa, Son of Lucius, Built This in his Third Consulship)

[Translation Mine]

1) Simply, the letters on this temple are huge, clear, and consistent. The capital font is consistent with other monuments. The inscription is not obstructed or ambiguous. At a very basic level the Pantheon's inscription is very legible. 

2) Each of the words and abbreviations in this text were very common in Roman inscriptions and would have appeared everywhere across the urban landscape. The names in this text, for example, can be represented by a single initial because this type of abbreviation was ubiquitous and part of the language. M=Marcus, D=Decimus, P=Publius. For a Roman, this was as easy as 'Cows go Moo' and 'Cats go Meow'. Likewise, the word Consul was hardly ever written out in full in inscriptions or on coins, but instead written as COS. Finally, the word FECIT was one of the most common and simple verbs in Latin, roughly equivalent to the English 'make' or 'do'. By using this easy word, as opposed to more complicated Latin words equivalent to 'construct' or 'erect', this text was easier for people with limited reading abilities to understand.

The Pantheon in Rome. Photo by Jack Hase.

3) This inscription also follows a simple order with common pieces. The name of the patron comes first, followed by a reference to who his father was. This was a very standard way of writing names on monuments and would have been an expected piece of information to Roman readers. Following this, Roman audiences were used to seeing political positions listed after names with numbers attached. The fact that FECIT comes at the end of the sentence also adds to the readability of the text. In English, simple sentences put a verb between two nouns: Joe hugs John, Jill likes cats, et cetera. In Latin this sort of easy sentence places the verb at the very end.

In sum, the Pantheon's inscription includes the above elements that made it readable to a broad and sub-literate audience. This brings our discussion of the readability of Roman public writing to a close.

It is my hope that this series of posts has been able to help answer the question posed at the beginning of this blog: why did Romans place such importance in public writings in cities where the majority of people were not fully literate? The answer: Romans made inscriptions as easy to read as possible for those with limited literacy by using a variety of techniques.

Until next time, Valete.

Bibliography:

Claridge, Amanda. Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Corbier, Mirelle. "Writing in Roman Public Space." In Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300, edited by Gareth Sears, Peter Keegan, and Ray Laurence. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

Woolf, Greg. "Literacy or Literacies in Rome?" In Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, edited by William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.