An Empire of Letters: The Vindolanda Tablets, Epistolarity, and Roman Governance

Around 800 Roman tilia—writing tablets made from folded slivers of wood veneer and a little over postcard size—have been found in archaeological investigations at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England. Dated to the period 85 CE to 130 CE, their existence is helping revise knowledge of the Roman letter and the part it played in how military governance was organized, the ways in which personal, public, and military aspects were interrelated, as well as informing other relationships existing between the occupying imperial legions and local Britons. Discussion focuses on four connected areas of inquiry. Firstly, it explores the relationship of the several hundred letters to the many other kinds of Vindolanda writings, for this gives perspective on the boundaries of these different genres and the uses to which they were put. Secondly, it analyzes the many overlaps that exist between what are one-to-one letters and what are public documents, and it considers the significance of this for understanding the legion as a form of familia. Thirdly, it discusses the role that letters and their cognates, and writing and records generally, played in Roman military occupation and rule. The Vindolanda letters had a particular import because their characteristic mode of expression facilitated and enhanced connections between members of the auxiliary cohorts, in ensuring that the performance of military duties occurred in the context of familia-like bonds, and for this to permeate beyond the letters, to the life-and-death activities of soldiering involved. And fourthly, it discusses the importance for epistolary studies of these matters.

The Serif-Less Letters of John Soane

This chapter examines the evidence for the architect John Soane as an early pioneer of serif-less lettering in Britain and the progenitor of the sans serif typefaces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It considers the events that led to Soane’s application of serif-less typography and the reasons he became the principal executor of this radical departure from the roman letter. It also proffers suggestions for why Soane promoted this primitivist letter as desirable for inscriptions on buildings as well as for plans, and elevation and perspective drawings in the neoclassical style. The chapter traces Soane’s early career use of sans serif titling on drawings and importantly documents the earliest known extant sans serif inscriptions still in situ on his architecture.

The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems

A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus the iconic ox’s head of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinear and unidirectional progression. According to this progressivist formula, pictorial scripts will tend to become more schematic while their systems will target smaller linguistic units. Objections to this theory point to absent, fragmentary or contrary paleographic evidence, especially for predicted transitions in the underlying grammatical systems of writing. However, the forms of individual signs, such as the letter A, are nonetheless observed to change incrementally over time. We claim that such changes are predictable and that scripts will, in fact, become visually simpler in the course of their use, a hypothesis regularly confirmed in transmission chain experiments that use graphic stimuli. To test the wider validity of this finding we turn to the Vai script of Liberia, a syllabic writing system invented in relative isolation by non-literates in ca. 1833. Unlike the earliest systems of the ancient world, Vai has the advantage of having been systematically documented from its earliest beginnings until the present day. Using established methods for quantifying visual complexity we find that the Vai script has become increasingly compressed over the first 171 years of its history, complementing earlier claims and partial evidence that similar processes were at work in early writing systems. As predicted, letters simplified to a greater extent when their initial complexity was higher.

Sensorial Intermedialities in Roman Letters: Cicero, Horace, and Ovid

In recent years, much progress has been made towards elucidating the function of ekphrasis in Roman epistolography, especially with relation to the writings of Seneca and Pliny. Following on from these precedents, this article mines the epistles of three prominent Roman letter-writers, Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, for their intermedial elements. The motifs of oral quotations, handwriting, and human tear stains, which interweave the sources analysed, are shown not only to straddle the borders between distinct media, but also to engage with multiple senses as a result of their multiple medialities. Oral quotations integrate speech into written texts and thus necessitate both sight and hearing. Handwriting likewise consists of both a ‘basic mediality’ – the visual – and a ‘qualified mediality’ of chirographic distinctiveness, and thus necessitates not only perception via sight but also recognition. Tear stains, which range from the actual smudges in Cicero’s missives to metaphorical ones in Tears don’t feature in Horace’s letters. Ovid’s epistles, are in turn geared both towards sight and touch, since they simultaneously alter the letter’s appearance and surface. However, these intermedial connections have different effects in prose and poetry epistles: they enable the former to transcend the very category of ‘letter’, but confine the latter within the epistolary genre by characterising them in material terms.

Legal Protection for Human Trafficking Victim, Especially Women and Children in West Kalimantan

<p><em>West Kalimantan Province, as one of provinces in Indonesia which has specific geographical condition is bordering with East Malaysia through official Cross-Border Post between Entikong and Tebedu, Badau and Lubuk Antu, Aruk and Biawak, and no less than fifty path ways (not official) can be passed to get in and get out to and from East Malaysia region. This geographical encouraged trafficking improvement to abroad with various modes. In fact, trafficking was affected by many factors, including stigma, poverty, lack of education, family resilience, and other factors, where women and children are the victim. The aim of this research to reveal how is the legal protection for the victim. Although there were many studies had been done about it, but the focus of this research is the obstacles face to give legal protection for the victims of trafficking in West Kalimantan border, where the top of the problem is victims role, sometimes they don’t realize that they are the victims, so legal protection effort as stipulated in Trafficking Rules was not optimal. Through socio-legal research found an interesting thing, the lack of victim realized they were victims who have to get legal protection, so complicated a legal assistant for legal effort. Beside of that, trafficking as transnational crime and organized, it is complicated for legal enforcement, because of trafficking perpetrators are in the state border cross.</em><em> </em><em>The abstract contains: research objectives, implementation methods, analysis techniques and activity results. Typed with font Times New Roman letter 11, single space, and italicized.</em><em></em></p>

On roman letters and other stories

This essay questions the assumption that the roman alphabet is more purely phonetic than any other, and that other scripts and writing-systems are less efficient, whether for the production of texts or for their comprehension. Those who habitually use roman letters are asked to consider their competence to understand other writing systems. The work of Stanley Morison emphasizes the ideological significance of alphabets and of particular letter-forms. M.B. Parkes and Paul B. Saenger are cited to indicate how punctuation and spacing are aspects of the roman-letter writing system that cannot be treated as purely phonetic. Beyond the world of roman letters there is a focus on Syriac and the Xi’an stele, which was printed by Athanasius Kircher in 1667 and marks the first publication in the west of a substantial text in Chinese.

‘In both our languages’: Greek–Latin code-switching in Roman literature

After a short introduction to code-switching and Classics, this article offers an overview of the phenomenon of code-switching in Roman literature with some comments on possible generic restrictions, followed by a survey of Roman attitudes to the practice. The analysis then focuses on Roman letter writing and investigates code-switching in the second-century correspondence of Fronto (mainly letters between Marcus Aurelius, who became Emperor in AD 161, and his tutor Fronto). This discussion uses part of a new detailed database of Greek code-switches in Roman epistolography and is largely sociolinguistic in approach. It makes comparisons with other ancient and modern corpora where possible and highlights the value of code-switching research in responding to a range of (socio)linguistic, literary and historical questions.

On the Nature of Ancient Letter Collections

There exists a strong link in modern thinking between letter collections and biographical or historical narration. Many ancient letter collections have been rearranged by modern editors along chronological lines, apparently with the aim of realizing the biographical and historiographical potential of these ancient collections. In their original format, however, non-fictional Greco-Roman letter collections were arranged predominantly by addressee or by theme (often without the preservation of chronology within addressee or thematic groupings), or they might be arranged on the principle of artful variety and significant juxtaposition. Consequently, some purpose or purposes other than biographical or historical narration must be attributed to ancient letter collections. This paper asks what those purposes might be.