The Greek Inscriptions at Trinity College Dublin Part I: The Seminar Room
Fig. 1: Professor Peter Liddel with Dr Shane Wallace, examining one of the TCD inscriptions
From the eighth century BC onwards, Greek communities right across the Mediterranean, Asia Minor and beyond habitually adorned hard surfaces (such as pottery, metal, marble and other stone) as well as softer ones (e.g. lead) with alphabetic writing. They did so in the knowledge that these materials (unlike, for instance, wood, papyrus and parchment) would preserve writing for a very long time, setting their words, as it were, in stone. Inscriptions on stone take the form of marble or limestone slabs, gifts to the gods, statue bases and reliefs bearing other representations. They were often set up at religious sanctuaries and in urban centres, but sometimes in domestic spaces or the countryside.
Hundreds of thousands of inscriptions on stone survive from the ancient Greek world. The vast majority of these are held in museums and archaeological sites across Greece, Italy and Asia Minor. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, travellers and collectors from western Europe, many of them embarking on the Grand Tour of European and Mediterranean lands, acquired stone inscriptions and brought them to their home countries where they would adorn their homes or take centre stage in collections of antiquities.
Ireland has a very rich heritage of collectors of the remains of antiquity, and one can read about them in books like W.B. Stanford’s Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1976) and J.V. Luce, Christine Morris and Christina Souyoudzoglou-Haywood’s The Lure of Greece. Irish Involvement in Greek Culture, Literature, History and Politics (2007). One of my current research interests is in tracking the histories of the ancient Greek inscriptions in collections in Britain and Ireland. The results of a bigger project to study and publish all the Athenian inscriptions can be seen here, on the Attic Inscriptions in UK Collections website, hosted by Attic Inscriptions Online. This year (2021-22) I have visited Greek inscriptions at University College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast and Clandeboye House in Co. Down. And I have discussed Greek inscriptions with museum curators in the Heritage Collections of University College, Cork and the National Museum of Ireland. In May 2022 I had the opportunity to think about the Greek inscriptions at Trinity College Dublin and to see some of them (Fig. 1 above)
Fig. 2: Portrait of a Woman, the larger of the TCD medallion busts
The first two of these inscriptions will be very well-known to anyone who has taken classes or attended a seminar in the department of Classics at Trinity College, where they are kept in the seminar room. They are both medallion reliefs of grey-white marble each depicting a woman. They appear to be styled after the fashion of imagines clipeatae, originally shield portraits, which were one of the traditional ways of depicting deceased ancestors in the Roman house; combining high and low relief they may have been mounted in prominent places, or in the spandrels between arches, perhaps to demonstrate family lineage in an atrium.
The larger of the two depicts a young woman with a very elaborate hairstyle (Fig. 2), her hair gathered in plaits which are twisted into spirals at the front of her head. This may be an indication that she was a woman of distinction or high status. Beneath the relief is an inscription (the letter forms of which allow us to date it to the 2nd or 3rd century AD), only the right-hand side of which survives:
[—] τὴν νέαν Μυησίων πόλιν
[—]τιας Ἀττικός
The first five letters published in modern times of the inscription are now lost but were recorded in the notebooks of William Sherard (1659-1728), the first scholar known to have seen the relief. Sherard made copies of many Greek inscriptions while he was British Consul at Smyrna on the west coast of Asia Minor from 1703. The fragmentary inscription can be translated as follows:
‘… the new city of the Myesians
… -ia Attikos.’
The relevance of the common male name ‘Attikos’ in line 2 is unclear, but the reference to the ‘new city of the Myesians’ alludes to the Ionian city of Myous (Μυοῦς; the ethnic was Μυήσιος), 16 kms to the north-east of Miletos, which took part in the 499 BC Ionian revolt (Herodotos 6.8) and functioned as an independent state in the early fourth century. It lost its political independence in the Hellenistic period and before the time of Pausanias (2nd c. AD) its citizens physically transferred to Miletos after an infestation of gnats (Pausanias 7.2.10-11). The reference perhaps invites reflection on imperial-era thought about polis identity and nostalgia for lost cities.
Fig. 3: Klaudia Lysimache, the smaller of the TCD medallion busts
The smaller of the two medallion busts depicts a young adult female with medium-length hair which conceals the ears, with centre-parting; her hairstyle is relatively low-key compared to the larger example (Fig. 3). Beneath the relief is an inscription (the letter forms of which allow us to date it to the 2nd or 3rd century AD):
Κλ. Λυσιμάχην τὴν φίλανδρον
ὁ θρέψας Θηλυμίτρης.
The writing is very clear and can be translated as follows:
‘Her foster-father Thelymitres, for Klaudia Lysimache, the lover of a man.’
Perhaps Klaudia Lysimache died spouseless or as a widow and received the commemoration from her foster-father. The description of her as φίλανδρον is here translated as ‘lover of a man’, and it might be understood as ‘lover of her man’. Such a phrase refers sometimes to loyalty to a husband but in this case it may refer to attachment for her foster-father. The name Thelymitres is a name attested previously only in Miletos in the second century AD and so it is quite possible that the inscription was originally from Miletos. The name Klaudia/Claudia suggests that she would have been a Roman citizen, taking the female form of her father’s gens name, Klaudius/Claudius.
The inscriptions were reported in the early eighteenth century by Sherard as being in the city of Smyrna (now Izmir). For this reason both portrait busts are thought to have derived from Smyrna, and that association was followed by August Boeckh and other early editors of the inscription (CIG 3346); besides, they were included in the latest publication of inscriptions from Smyrna (G. Petzl, Die Inschriften von Smyrna 428 and 859). Like many inscriptions discovered at Smyrna in modern times, they are, however, likely to have originally have been set up in another place, perhaps Miletos. What is more odd, however, is that some of the inscriptions’ early reporters, including Herman Van der Horst (1692-1765), who had made an account of inscriptions while Protestant Minister to the Dutch Community in Smyrna (1717-27) and the Dutch travellers J. Ægidius van Egmond and J. Heyman in 1757/58 claimed that they were ‘in the house of a Greek called Zacharia’ (Fig. 4). But these claims appear to contradict what we know about the inscriptions’ appearance in Dublin by 1707 and we may wonder how many of these reports were based on actual autopsy.
Fig. 4: The report of Dutch travellers J. Ægidius van Egmond and J. Heyman on the TCD medallion busts in 1757/58
How did they get to Dublin? It has often been assumed that they were brought to Trinity by Richard Pococke (1704-1765), the traveller and travel-writer who was Bishop in the Church of Ireland from 1756. But correspondence preserved in the Bodleian Library between Dr Thomas Smith (1638-1710), Fellow of Magdalen College and Dr Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713), then Lord Primate of Ireland and later Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, reveals that they had been in Dublin since 1707, having been imported via the Italian port of Livorno. Accordingly, these remarkable inscriptions are probably the earliest non-indigenous Greek inscriptions to come to the island of Ireland.
Peter Liddel
Peter is Professor of Greek History and Epigraphy at the University of Manchester.
Academic Profile | Attic Inscriptions Online (Co-Editor)
Peter was the Walsh Family Lecturer in Ancient History in the Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin from 2002 to 2004