Читать книгу Monumentum Ancyranum: The Deeds of Augustus - Emperor of Rome Augustus - Страница 5

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Suetonius in his Life of Augustus tells us that that Emperor had placed in charge of the Vestal virgins his will and three other sealed documents; and the four papers were produced and read in the senate immediately after his death. One of these additional documents gave directions as to his funeral; another gave a concise account of the state of the empire; the third contained a list of “his achievements which he desired should be inscribed on brazen tablets and placed before his mausoleum.” These tablets perished in the decline of Rome. Centuries passed; men had ceased to ask about them, and there was no idea that they would ever be brought to light. Nor were the original tablets ever found. But in 1555 Buysbecche, a Dutch scholar, was sent on an embassy from the Emperor Ferdinand II. to the Sultan Soliman at Amasia in Asia Minor; and a letter of his, published among others at Frankfort in 1595, tells the story of the discovery of a copy of this epitaph of Augustus. He writes: “On our nineteenth day from Constantinople we reached Ancyra. Here we found a most beautiful inscription, and a copy of those tablets on which Augustus had placed the story of his achievements.” From this situation of the copy comes the common title, Monumentum Ancyranum. Buysbecche made some attempt to copy the Latin inscription, but his work was very hasty and incomplete. What he had discovered was of extreme importance, and his report stimulated such interest that European scholars never rested till as complete a copy as possible was finally made in our own time. The temple on whose walls the inscription was found was one dedicated to Augustus and Rome, as was a common custom during the lifetime of that Emperor. It was a hexastyle of white marble, with joints of such exquisite workmanship that even in this century it was difficult to trace some of them. This temple had served as a Christian church till the fifteenth century, and from that time has been part of a Turkish mosque, some sections of its enclosure being used as a cemetery. The great inscription was cut on the two side walls of the pronaos, or vestibule. It was in six pages, three on the left as one entered, and three on the right. Each page contained from forty-two to fifty-four lines, and each line an average of sixty letters. The pages cover six courses of the masonry in height, about 2.70 metres, and the length of the inscription on each wall is about 4 metres. On one of the outer walls of the temple was a Greek translation of the Latin. This measures 1.38 metres in height by 21 metres in length. Several Turkish houses had been built against the wall containing this Greek version, and this made the reading of it, and still more the copying, an extremely difficult task. The priceless value of the Greek version lies in the fact that it supplements in many cases the breaks in the Latin. For it is needless to say that an inscription so old and so exposed has suffered much from time and violence. Various travelers have described the temple and its treasure: Tournefort in his Voyage du Levant, Lyons, 1717; Kinneir, Journey Through Asia Minor, 1818; Texier, Description de l’Asie mineure, Paris, 1839; William Hamilton, Researches in Asia Minor, London, 1842; and most completely, Guillaume, Perrot and Delbet, in their Exploration archéologique de la Galatie, etc., in 1861, Paris, 1872.

Numerous attempts were made at transcribing the inscription, and a number of editions were published. Buysbecche’s fragments found several editors in the century of their discovery. About a hundred years after him Daniel Cosson, a merchant from Leyden, who had lived many years at Smyrna, dying there in 1689, caused an attempt to be made to secure a copy, and with somewhat better results. His copy was edited at Leyden in 1695. In 1701 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, under direction of Louis XIV, visited Ancyra, and attempted to secure a facsimile of the text. In 1705 Paul Lucas, also sent by Louis XIV, spent twenty days in copying the Latin, and his work was the last of its kind till the present century. While these early copies are far from being as perfect as more recent ones, they have this value: that in a number of cases they show parts of the inscription which progressive disintegration has now rendered illegible.

The Greek text, owing to the buildings reared against it, was much harder to transcribe. In 1745 Richard Pococke published a few fragments, and in 1832 Hamilton copied pages 10, 11, 12 and 13 of the nineteen into which the Greek is divided.

Within recent years all has been done that can possibly be done to secure perfect copies of both Greek and Latin. In 1859 the Royal Academy of Berlin commissioned a scholar named Mordtmann to secure a papier maché cast of the Latin, and to transcribe the Greek. He failed in both attempts, and declared that the casts would ruin the original.

Napoleon III. commissioned George Perrot and Edmund Guillaume to explore Asia Minor. In their work above mentioned they give a facsimile copy of the whole of the Latin, and of as much of the Greek as they could get at. Their plates were the basis of an edition of the text by Mommsen in 1865, and another by Bergk in 1873, and of the text given in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

But Mommsen and the Berlin Academy were not satisfied. Carl Humann had distinguished himself by his researches at Pergamos, and to him they committed the task of securing casts of the whole of both texts. The story of his achievement is extremely interesting. Difficulty after difficulty was met and surmounted. And finally he succeeded in his plan. With materials dug near-by he made plaster casts. The owners of the Turkish houses he succeeded in inducing to allow their walls to be so far torn away as to permit him to get at the entire Greek text. And finally twenty great cases containing the whole series of casts were sent away on pack mules to the coast and thence to Berlin. The Royal Academy now counts these casts among its chief treasures. This was in 1882. In 1883 Mommsen published his great critical edition of the text, on which this edition is based. His work is almost final on the subject, but especially in the matter of conjectural fillings of the lacunæ is subject to revision. But an inspection of the text as given in this volume will show that we have the words of Augustus almost in their entirety.

At Apollonia, on the borders of Phrygia and Pisidia, has been found another ruined temple, with remnants of the Greek version of this inscription. At Apollonia the inscription originally covered seven pages. Of these there are still legible the upper portions of pages two, three, four and five. The correspondence between the text at Ancyra and that at Apollonia is almost exact, and where there is a divergence, it has been indicated.