On Thursdays I am a man of my word

[venta]

Spot question for the day:

Without googling, does the following phrase mean anything to anybody ?

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

*astonished myself*

Now that I see the full text, I can see my deductions were more-or-less bang on, although I missed out Trajan's own adoption of the name 'Nerva'.

I can now date the inscription to precisely AD 112, and tell you that the last two lines of it (the bits I couldn't guess were there from your icon) say 'to show how high a mountain, and the site for such great works, had been cleared away'. It is probably a claim that the height of the column represents the height of a hill cleared away to build Trajan's forum, but scholars are a bit dubious about whether this is really true...

Guessing what I guessed from the section of the inscription I could see initially is actually a lot less hard than you might think, since imperial titles were very standardised, and most inscriptions start in very much the same way. But still, I'm proud of my deductions!

I also agree that the script here is absolutely beautiful: official inscriptions in this period are pretty much the apogee of ancient epigraphic technique.