Submitted for award of PhD September 2006. - King's College London

Pompeianorum. Oscan inscriptions of Pompeii potentially date from a period of over
300 years, although most of the inscriptions are probably from a late date. We have
archaeological contexts for most of them, but in cases of public inscriptions found in
private houses, the location cannot help us establish the time when the inscription was
originally set up. Most of the inscriptions are broadly dated to the second century BC,
when a large part of the city's public buildings were reconstructed and numerous private
houses built.
Conway created a system of dating the inscriptions of Pompeii. He divided the
Oscan inscriptions into three chronological groups 'according to the degree of finish with
which they are written, and the forms of f and d, whose loops are open in earlier and
closed in later inscriptions'. 709 This system, however, needs to be handled with extreme
care. 710
In this section I follow that a dating based on the archaeological contexts wherever
available:
Dating Refence number Archaeological
reference
Office
second part of third ST Po 15 Antonini (1983) 204. aedilis
century BC Caratelli (1979) 454
ST Po 16 Carratelli (1979) 473 aedilis
ST Po 4 quaestor
709
Conway (1897) 56.
710 Rix reconstructed the ST Po 2 road-maker inscription out of two, Ve 9 and 10 (= Conway 40 and 41).
Conway attributed inscription 40 to the second chronological group, but not 41, since that fragment does
not contain the f not d letters which are his criteria of dating. ST Po 91 has the same as ST Po 5 and 6
therefore must have been made around the same time.
205