Inscriptions in their variety and profusion are an important means of gauging everyday life in Classical Greece, especially such more formal aspects as were deserving of recording. This qualification, however, does not prevent some obscene pederastic rock-carvings on the island of Thera from being the earliest epigraphic texts from the Classical period (c. 8th century bce), in a form of the alphabet still strongly marked by its Phoenician source.

In a formal vein there is ample documentation of a business, financial, and legal type, such as regulations for building projects, contracts for medical services (e.g., the Cypriot bronze tablet of Idalium, in a peculiar syllabaric script reminiscent of the Cretan and Cypro-Minoan types, used to write both Greek and the uninterpreted Eteocypriot language), collection agreements for defaulted notes, manumission decrees, records of bank deposits (frequently in a temple), and reports of land commissions (especially the Heraclean Tables from southern Italy).

Even in these formal documents it is impossible to keep out reference to religious establishments. Religion was, in fact, big business in Classical Greece, and overlap in the records is frequent. Temples were often of the order of corporations, with extensive holdings of real estate and banking operations. The epigraphs of their transactions are coupled with minute records of dedicatory offerings, priest lists, administrative regulations, and ritualistic and liturgical instructions. So much of social life was centred around institutionalized religion that most of its documentation may be included under the latter heading. Dedicatory texts in the widest sense are common, often in verse, such as that by Nikandre of Naxos on a 7th-century-bce statue of Artemis at Delos, a kind of propitiatory offering to the maiden goddess on the occasion of marriage. Similar hexametric or elegiac texts are found as epitaphs, especially for those who perished in war or at sea.

Tomb inscriptions generally are the most numerous of all but tend to be laconic in style and lacking even in purely statistical data. Those from ancillary areas of the Greek-speaking world, such as the non-Greek ones from Lycia, Lydia, and Phrygia in Asia Minor, are sometimes more revealing to the extent that they are interpreted. Thus the Lycian stela of Xanthus, a tomb monument from the 5th century bce, runs to many hundreds of words, including a dozen lines of Greek. The peculiar Lycian system of matrilinear descent is clearly evident in the texts. The Lydian ones include a marble stela from the necropolis of Sardis with a Lydian-Aramaic bilingual epitaph that typically calls down the curse of Artemis of Ephesus on potential violators. Such imprecations are also standard in Phrygian sepulchral epigraphs.

Some kinds of death-related inscriptions were intentionally buried, such as the curses that consigned the object to the infernal avengers. Another type is seen in the Orphic tablets—texts on thin gold found interred with the remains of devotees of the Orphic salvation religion near Sybaris in southern Italy, near Rome, and at Eleutherna in Crete. They are apparently meant as instructions to the deceased—exhortations to the soul on its progress in the beyond, enjoining the shunning of the spring of Lethe (“Oblivion”) and the drinking from that of Mnemosyne (“Memory”), thus securing the end of transmigration of the soul and the attainment of perpetual higher consciousness.

The Orphic texts provide the popular parallel to the Platonic myth of Er in the 10th book of The Republic, where Plato somewhat recast Lethe and Mnemosyne into Ameles (“Unmindfulness”) and Anamnesis (“Recollection”). Thus, epigraphy not merely supplements the literary record of Greek civilization but also complements it in important aspects. If papyrology is included, important additions to the preserved portion of Classical Greek literature have come from Egypt, especially in the papyri from Oxyrhynchus; these include such otherwise lost treatises as Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens and entire dramatic works (e.g., the Dyscolus of Menander).

Ancient Rome

The frequency of Roman inscriptions increased dramatically in direct proportion to the rise of Roman power; but that same rise brought centralization, stereotyping, and a certain sterility of the more formal parts of the epigraphic record. Much of the bulk is official, unidirectional, and from the top outward. The Greek-speaking parts of the empire continued in many of their ancient ways, and other annexed regions (such as Spain or Gaul) developed their own locally coloured practices. The spread of a variety of exotic religious cults all over the empire, among them Mithraism and Christianity, added a kind of epigraphic underground initially devoid of official sanction and largely unmatched by alternative avenues of preserved written transmission. Popular epigraphy, including such matter as graffiti at Pompeii and other Vulgar Latin inscriptions, provides further counterpoise to the official stereotypes.

From early republican days the Roman written record is very spotty. The earliest text of any length, the Forum inscription from the early 5th century bce, seems to refer to an augural rite (referred to by Cicero and Festus as the juge auspicium) which enjoins the immediate unyoking of beasts of burden that produce excrement. A 4th-century vase (the “Quirinal vase”) is apparently a wedding present with an inscribed guarantee by the bride’s guardian to use his good offices to further marital concord. Later texts of religious import include the “Song of the Arval Brethren” on a marble tablet found in the Vatican in 1778 (a chant largely reduced to gibberish by age-old ritualistic repetition), records of various other cultic “colleges” (augures; fetiales, or priestly diplomatic representatives; salii, or priests of Mars and Quirinus et al.), and outside of the Latin-speech area especially the seven Umbrian-language bronze tables found at Iguvium (modern Gubbio) in 1444, recording in more than 4,000 words the ritualistic details of a brotherhood (the Fratres Atiedii) that flourished in republican days.

Official religion is further seen in many dedications, such as one found on Caelian Hill in Rome in the 18th century, which records the offering of a temple and statue to Hercules by Lucius Mummius in 146 bce in fulfillment of a vow he had made during his conquest of Greece and sack of Corinth. “Unofficial” cults, especially those of Mithra and Jupiter Dolichenus, can be traced and mapped throughout the empire chiefly with the help of dedicatory epigraphs. Sepulchral inscriptions are recorded in overwhelming numbers, not only in Latin but notably also in Etruscan; among the latter is the mummy wrap, a lengthy funeral liturgy inscribed on an apparently Etruscan mummy entombed in Egypt (now in Zagreb). The earliest notable Roman examples are the epitaphs in Saturnian verse on the sarcophagi of the Scipios from the 3rd century bce.

There are many texts of deep sentiment and poetic feeling. Yet the bulk itself is the main source of information because it affords what may be called demographic statistics, including population distribution, occupations, public health, and longevity. The frequent inclusion of the cursus honorum, or career summary of the departed, has similar informational value. Tombs were usually placed under the divine tutelage of the powers of the beyond. Imprecations against violation were common, as were buried curse tablets in Latin and in Oscan (the defixiones). Many of the unofficial inscriptions exhibit substandard degrees of literacy and colloquial features, being thus an important adjunct to the study of the totality of Classical Latin and its subsequent developments.