As many readers are aware, we’re dedicating this week to an examination of Text & the Eternal City. From the Romantic writers who lived and died in Rome in the 18th and 19th centuries to contemporary novels that bring the ancient gods back to life, we’re reading Rome.
Thus, it seems only appropriate that we turn our attention today to the oldest form of public communication known in the Eternal City - the inscription. Wandering the streets of Rome, one sees them everywhere, from the SPQRs emblazoned on monuments city-wide to the more wordy inscriptions that commemorate great achievements of Roman Emperors. Among the most studied and best known of these inscriptions is that found on the base of the Column of Trajan, commemorating the Emperor’s achievements:
With abbreviations expanded, the inscription reads:
SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS
IMPERATORI CAESARI DIVI NERVAE FILIO NERVAE
TRAIANO AUGUSTO GERMANICO DACICO PONTIFICI
MAXIMO TRIBUNICIA POTESTATE XVII IMPERATORI VI CONSULI VI PATRI PATRIAE
AD DECLARANDUM QUANTAE ALTITUDINIS
MONS ET LOCUS TAN<TIS OPE>RIBUS SIT EGESTUS
Which translates to:
The Senate and People of Rome. To the Divine Emperor Caesar Nerva Trajan Augustus Germanicus Dacicus, son of Nerva, Pontifex Maximus, invested with the Tribunican Power for the 17th time, Consul for the 6th time, Father of the Fatherland, to testify, this place and tower of such height was carried out.
The column below which this inscription is found is part of a large and splendid complex of buildings created by Trajan in the early second century AD. Comprising a public gathering space, a basilica or law court, Greek and Roman libraries, and (perhaps) a temple dedicated to Trajan after his death, this huge urban space was recognized as being among the most beautiful place in all of Rome. In fact, when the Roman Emperor Constantius II visited Rome for the first time in the year 357 AD (by that point in time Constantinople was the capital of the Roman Empire), the wonderment and awe he experienced when seeing the Forum of Trajan was recorded by the writer Ammianus Marcellinus:
But when he came to the Forum of Trajan, a creation which in my view has no like under the cope of heaven and which even the gods themselves must agree to admire, he stood transfixed with astonishment, surveying the giant fabric around him; its grandeur defies description and can never again be approached by mortal men.
Yet, despite the fame of the Forum of Trajan in antiquity, the inscription below the Column of Trajan is probably more celebrated by typographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, than it was by ancient Romans for it provides the best example of classic Roman letterforms and thereby has influenced the many serif fonts that we use today.
Among those who have studied the inscription and its impact on modern typography is Father Edward Catich - a 20th-century scholar at St. Ambrose University in Iowa - who used the inscription to reconstruct how the Romans made their capital letter shapes. In his hand-lettered book, The Trajan Inscription in Rome, he hypothesized that the letter forms first were sketched using a flat square-tipped brush, using only three or four quick strokes to form each letter, and that the characteristic variations in line thickness were formed by the changing cant of the brush. The letters then were cut in the stone by the same person (and not, Catich contended, separately by scribe and stone mason), the illusion of form being created by shadow.
The symmetry and balance of the Trajanic inscription convinced Catich that “the Trajan alphabet is the best Roman letter designed in the Western world, and the one which most nearly approaches an alphabetic ideal.” And, indeed, the inscription is often credited with being the inspiration for all subsequent Roman capital letter forms.
