Chapter 6 - Roman tablets in Italy (AD 15–79)

Summary

As a result of the eruption of Vesuvius, over four hundred legal and financial tabulae dating between AD 15 and AD 79 have been preserved in the Campanian region of Italy. Over these sixty-four years, several important changes in both the physical form and the internal formulation of these tablets can be observed, changes that are part of the larger transformation of the tabula from the authoritative embodiment of a ceremonial act into the embodiment of an act that drew its authority not only from the process of its making but also from the people who made it. These changes fall along three interrelated trajectories. First, there was a change in physical form, from diptych to triptych, that occurred at a different time and a different rate for documents of different types of act, reflecting not only the traditional linkage of type of legal act, style of writing, and physical form but also the conservative qualities of tabulae distantly or closely associated with ceremonial, unitary acts. Second, as physical forms changed so too did at least some of the acts themselves, the traditional association of act and form reinforced by the way change in both form and content took place: as a third tablet was hinged to the original two, so too were different acts added to but not coalesced with the original one, creating a multi-part combinational act on a triptych.