ABSTRACT
Let us begin with statues.3 We know of thousands of inscriptions chiselled on their bases. ese inscriptions are of a dedicatory, laudatory or moralising nature but almost none of them qualies as a label in the sense that we imply today. A line such as ‘Township X or citizen Y erected this statue to emperor Z’, a very common type of inscription, is a reference to the town or citizen, not to the statue; most
1 Sacral names get much more attention, cf. H. Maguire, ‘Eufrasius and Friends. On Names and eir Absence in Byzantine Art’, L. James, ed., Art and Text in Byzantine Culture (Cambridge, 2007), 139-60.
