Fragment of an honorary inscription? Jonathan Prag Jonathan Prag John Fell OUP Research Fund ERC Advanced Grant no.885040 Jonathan Prag original data collection and editing Marta Fogagnolo editing, translation and commentary James Cummings conversion to EpiDoc James Chartrand site construction and encoding Valeria Vitale editing of geo data Michael Metcalfe museum data collection Alex Antoniou EpiDoc editing Simona Stoyanova standardisation of template and tidying up encoding system automated or batch processes I.Sicily ISic003208 645531 316202 http://sicily.classics.ox.ac.uk/inscription/ISic003208 10.5281/zenodo.4357238 Licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution 4.0 licence. Italy Sicily Catania Museo Civico di Catania Ancient Greek

Fragment of a marble plaque, broken on all sides, smooth on the reverse.

marble plaque 10 10 2 chiselled

Relatively tall letters with modest serfis/terminations to the strokes. Rho is open; Sigma is four-bar, with very shallow middle strokes; Mu has all four strokes oblique, with the middle strokes only half-height.

Lines 1-2 25-28 Interlineation line 1 to 2 not recorded Catina Catania 37.49223, 15.07041 1st — 2nd century CE Original discovery not recorded, but probably from Catania. Observed by Korhonen in Magazzino superiore, Museo Civico, and photographed there by Prag 2016-05-13. None

Encoded following the latest EpiDoc guidelines

Taxonomies for ISicily controlled values

ISicily glyphs authority list

Julian Calendar

 English Italian Ancient Greek Latin Hebrew Phoenician Punic Oscan Elymian Sikel Sikan honorific; decree James Cummings autogenerated EpiDoc output from database Alex Antoniou Epidoc editing Simona Stoyanova normalised Unicode Simona Stoyanova updated list of languages Simona Stoyanova restructured bibliography Updated Zenodo DOI renumbered files, uris and references Marta Fogagnolo revised the text encoding, added dimensions, translations and commentary Jonathan Prag revised draft edition from photograph Jonathan Prag added images I.Sicily with the permission of the Assessorato Regionale dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana - Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana; photo J. Prag 2016-05-13. I.Sicily with the permission of the Assessorato Regionale dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana - Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana; photo J. Prag 2016-05-13. I.Sicily with the permission of the Assessorato Regionale dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana - Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana; photo J. Prag 2016-05-13. I.Sicily with the permission of the Assessorato Regionale dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana - Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana; photo J. Prag 2016-05-13.
ΙΑ · Ι · ΡΗ ψηφίσμα πα ρὰ
Text based on photograph and on Korhonen's edition A Α, Δ, Λ or Μ is possible before ΙΑ, after ΡΗ there could be a space or a Θ, Ο, Τ, Υ, Φ or Ψ Korhonen: [---ψηφί]σματι [βουλῆς(?) ---]

Korhonen's reading in line 2 of ΣΜΑΤΙ is clearly contradicted by the stone, where Π followed by an oblique stroke (beginning lower left) is clearly visible. However, the essential reading of the word ψήφισμα remains the most plausible from the combination of letters, with the prepositions παρὰ and πρὸς the most common words to follow (the former obviously compatible with the following trace of alpha, lambda or mu on the stone). As such, the text is an important instance of an apparently public document from the early imperial period in Greek. It remains unclear what the significance of the interpuncts in line 1 may be (most commonly highlighting a numeral in such a use), but these do seem to be clear on the stone.

According to Korhonen, this is an inscription that must have accompanied a statue built by resolution of the council: on this view, it is likely that the preceding line contained not a numeral (the interpuncts isolating Ι could be ornamental), but a personal name (---]ία Ἰρή[νη) of the woman to whom the statue was dedicated, like the statue for Grattia Paulla erected in Catania d(ecurionum) d(ecreto) around the 1st cent. CE (Manganaro 1989, 172 nr. 43 = ISic000710). There are no parallels of Greek inscriptions from Catania that record the council’s resolutions.

54.0896 https://biblio.inscriptiones.org/epig10000796 43 https://biblio.inscriptiones.org/epig10000028 Korhonen 2004 240 https://biblio.inscriptiones.org/epig10001897