Javier Andreu Pintado Livres

Inscriptions were one of the trademarks of Romanization. Used as a real mass media, they covered almost all facets of Roman public and private life. Following common patterns, however, this habit of engraving inscriptions, the so-called “epigraphic habit”, took shape in different manifestations in each region, in each province, configuring diverse and attractive epigraphic cultures. This volume, the result of a Creative Europe project coordinated by the University of Navarra and with the participation of the University of Coimbra, the one at Bordeaux and La Sapienza in Roma and, also, of the Museo Nazionale Romano and different research centers in Portugal, France, Spain and Italy, reviews not only the functions of some of these inscriptions with new approaches to well-known repertoires but also the new tools that -from the rise of the Internet to the use of digital photogrammetry, from digital epigraphy to 3d epigraphy- are being implemented for their study, their understanding and, above all, the social dissemination of their values, builders, in large part, of European identity.

At the end of the 2nd century AD the urban network of the Roman Empire was subject to weakness and crisis. We know this on one hand through decrees from the Flavian era, comments of Pliny the Younger on the financial problems of some cities and on the other hand through notices in the Historia Augusta reporting the existence of oppida labentia – „cities in decline“. In this volume, we discuss some of these issues with the following questions: was the municipal system, at least in the Roman West and, particularly in Roman Spain, a useful and sustainable model of managing local autonomy? Was it a durable system? Were new cities more fragile than others in terms of financial sustainability? What were the causes and the indicators signalling the lack of strength of many urban centres from the 2nd century AD onwards?