Roman Military Diplomas - A Starter Kit!

[Spedius]

Ave

For those of you who have been following my amaturish efforts to decode three diplomas, please see these topics:

http://www.romanarmy.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=6606
http://www.romanarmy.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=6638
http://www.romanarmy.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=6572

If you've been inspired by what you've seen and would like to try something similar here is how to go about it.

What are diplomas?

The most complete answers can be found here.

http://www.romancoins.info/MilitaryDiploma1a.html

There are five (soon to be six) main collections of diplomas and they are:-

CIL XVI (189), RMD I (78), RMD II (57), RMD III (66), RMD IV (121) and RMD V (154). That is a total of 665 diplomas.

This is an extract from a post I received from Jasper Oorthuys.

"Just got an email from Paul Holder.
RMD V has just gone to the publisher and will hopefully be published this year. It contains 154 diplomas, published until 2003.
Since then another 100-200 have been published or will be this year. The future of RMD VI is still insecure."

The first item on your list could be the basic Latin texts of the diplomas.

You will find them in numerous places however there are three FREE sources as below.

http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~clauss/index-e.html
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/adw/edh/
http://www.romancoins.info

The Frankfurt university website contains the complete Latin texts for CIL XVI, RMD I - III. It also contains 69 diplomas from RMD IV, these were unique to RMD IV and hadn't been published elsewhere. The remaining 52 had been previously published in various archaeology journals.

In addition Frankfurt's list gives the full publishing history (concordance) of each diploma ie. CIL 16, 00003 = AE 1930, 00072 = AE 1931, 00111. Romancoins doesn't have this facility and I'm unsure of Heidelbeg, not having used it.

The next item on your list could be the RMD books and they can be bought here:

http://www.oxbowbooks.com

If you put roman military diplomas in as a search criteria you will get the following:-

Roman Military Diplomas IV
by Margaret Roxan and Paul Holder
This fourth volume presents transcripts, translations and detailed commentary of 121 diplomas, half of which are published here for the first time, dating from AD 61 to 245. The study includes a revised chronology of ...
Paperback. Price GB £75.00

Roman Military Diplomas 1985-1993
by Margaret M. Roxan
The collection of 66 diplomas presented in this volume bring the total of diplomas known to 390. They continue to present new information upon Roman military and civil history, not merely through prosopographic details, ...
Paperback. Price GB £25.00

Roman Military Diplomas 1978-1984
by Margaret M Roxan
This volume publishes records 57 diplomas or fragments which provide vital evidence for the Roman military and legal world. 231p (Institute of Archaeology Occasional Publication 9, 1985)
Paperback. Publisher's Price GB £15.00, Our Price GB £4.95

Roman Military Diplomas 1954-1977
Roxan, Margaret M
This volume publishes records 78 diplomas or fragments which provide vital evidence for the Roman military and legal world. 118p (Institute of Archaeology Occasional Publication 2, 1978)
Paperback. Price GB £17.50

CIL XVI (Corpus Inscriptions Latinum) can only be viewed in either public or university libraries. It consists of diplomas previously published in the other collections of the CIL series, subsequently amalgamated into a separate Corpus of their own in the 1950s, or so I'm lead to believe.

If, like me, you have caught the diploma bug now and would like to find even more examples for your collection, here's how to get started.

The convention would seem to be to publish the details of new diplomas in the archaeology journals in the country of discovery. It would also seem that many of the leading experts on diplomas are German. It therefore follows that they will publish their findings in German. One of the most prolific people currently publishing new diploma details is Dr. Werner Eck, his website is here:

http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifa/al ... index.html

The most popular journal for the publication of new diplomas is Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik (ZPE). ZPE is the only relevant archaeology journal offering download facilities (all articles from 1990 to 2000 are FREE, however 2001 to 2004 will cost you) and is here:

http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifa/zp ... index.html

Finally, I would advise you to take a long, hard look at Andreas Pengerl's website, it contains many, many items of interest and can be found here:

http://www.romancoins.info

I hope to welcome you to the ranks of those of us with a major interest in the fascinating world of Roman Military Diplomas. Perhaps you may even wish to follow my lead and begin decoding diplomas for yourself?

Vale

M. Spedius Corbulo