Librarium
'No man understands Livy and Caesar like him who hath made exactly the Grand Tour of France and the Giro of Italy.'
- Richard Lassels, Voyage of Italy, 1679.
The library of any modern epigraphist owes a great debt of gratitude to the Grand Tour. The study of Greek and Latin inscriptions has a long history, and the publication of inscriptional material, in various genres, has been critical for its growth.
From the 17th century onwards, the increasing numbers of British tourists journeying to Europe for the Grand Tour resulted in a rapid increase in the availability of inscriptional texts. These Grand Tourists, wealthy British aristocrats with a taste for antiquity, were keen to explore the Italy they had read about as schoolboys.
Armed with copies of Livy, Cicero, and Virgil, they relived the glory days of the Republic, or, in some cases, the perceived ‘debauches’ of the Imperial Period. The narratives of their journeys, published upon their triumphant homecomings, show the development in attitude towards the inscriptional material they encountered, from fragmentary curios to artefacts of intense academic interest.