Epigraphic Networks of Office and Faith
Digital Perspectives on the Fourth-Century Palatine Elite
Abstract
This paper presents a digital epigraphy initiative, withing the framework of the MSCA project Mapping the Central Administration in the Later Roman Empire: The Epigraphic Representation and Elite Networks of the Palatine Bureaucracy, dedicated to the epigraphic documentation and analysis of fourth-century CE senatorial aristocrats serving in the central administration of the late Roman Empire. Situated at the intersection of elite self-representation, political authority, and the landscape of religions, the project proposes the creation of an open-access database cataloguing the building/dedicatory, votive, and funerary inscriptions of high-ranking palatine officials in Rome, Constantinople, and other urban centers. These monuments, often situated in or related to sanctified contexts— temples, churches, mausolea and hypogea—constitute a key medium through which the late Roman elite articulated religious, social, and political identities. Using EpiDoc encoding standards and online mapping tools, the database will integrate inscriptional, prosopographical, and spatial data to visualize networks of patronage and devotion within and beyond the capital(s). The paper explores how digital methods can illuminate the sacred dimensions of late Roman epigraphy, revealing patterns of aristocratic piety, commemoration, and urban euergetism and investment. By combining epigraphic scholarship with interactive visualization of the spatial elite networks, the project contributes both to the digital documentation of the material traces of imperial governance and to the study of the changing religious landscape in late antiquity. Ultimately, it argues that digital approaches allow us to reconstruct and map also the lived, performative environments of writing—where sacred words, monumental spaces, and political presence converged to shape the late Roman experience of the imperial and the divine.