Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Squeezes

Res Gestae Divi Augusti

Augustus requested in his will that his achievements (Res Gestae) be inscribed on bronze tablets and displayed in front of his Mausoleum (Suet. Aug. 101.4). There are no physical remains of the Res Gestae in Rome, but the text is know through four copies set up in Asia Minor: Ancyra, Antioch of Pisidia, Apollonia, and Sardis.

The inscription from Ancyra, known as Monumentum Ancyranum, is the one from which the Cornell Expedition secured a squeeze. The Latin text was inscribed in two parts inside the temple of Rome and Augustus, on the anteae. A Greek translation was inscribed on the outside, on the southern wall of the cella.

The Cornell Expedition made 92 squeezes to cover the inscription, 36 for the Latin and 56 for the Greek.

For the Latin text, the Expedition used five to six squeezes per column. One squeeze of the Latin text is currently missing (column 1, lines 39-46). Otherwise the text is complete with the exception of one or two lines in the middle of columns 1, 2, and 3 and of two lines at the end of column 3. A collation of the Latin portion of the Cornell Squeeze was submitted in 1912 as a Master of Arts Thesis by Mariana McCaulley. The author reports: “No positive results have been reached in the way of discovering any entire words that were hitherto unknown. The chief positive results of the examination thus far undertaken, are in connection particularly with the apices, paragraph-marks and word-division.”

For the Greek text, the Expedition used three squeezes per column, with the exception of column 9, for which four squeezes were necessary, and of column 19, much shorter, for which only one squeeze was used. The Greek text is complete with the exception of line 7 of column 3. To date, no collation of the Greek portion of the Cornell Squeeze has been made.