Ekkehard Weber

Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the

Case of Wolfgang Lazius (1514–1565)
Abstract: Roman inscriptions have been forged ever since Antiquity. This article
mentions some examples from Carnuntum near Vienna, where a considerable
number of counterfeit inscriptions were produced on stone, most of them, as it
seems, to earn money. In the period of humanism, learned people in Italy and
other parts of Europe took a particular interest in inscriptions as important testi-
monials to the past. Generally, they did not collect original inscriptions on stone,
though – a privilege left to emperors and noblemen – but rather news about
them, the purpose being to show their peers how many important inscriptions
they knew and/or to use them as documentary sources in their own scholarly
books and manuscripts. Vienna, the residence of the Holy Roman Emperor, was
an important centre of epigraphic research from the fifteenth century onwards.
Wolfgang Lazius (1514–1565), an epigraphic scholar who worked in this city, in-
serted genuine Roman inscriptions in his numerous works, but mixed them up
with fake inscriptions of his own as well.

1 Forgeries from Carnuntum

Thousands of Roman inscriptions were forged in the past and, as it seems, in the
present as well. In this article, I shall present a few examples of such forgeries
found in Carnuntum near Vienna in Austria, which was the capital of the prov-
ince of Pannonia in Roman times.1 As most of these fakes are ‘altars’, as we call
them, it is necessary to explain the typical Roman custom of erecting monuments
of this type for the reader to appreciate their significance. If a Roman man or a
Roman woman ever felt they needed the help of one of the Roman gods to resolve
an issue, they made a vow, promising the god or goddess a sacrifice. In order to

||
1 Or Pannonia superior when the province was divided at the beginning of the second
century CE. See Scherrer 2008 for an overview of forgeries in Carnuntum, albeit a rather
exaggerated one sometimes.

Open Access. © 2020 Ekkehard Weber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714333-006
102 | Ekkehard Weber

be successful, the person was bound to fulfil their vow. They generally set up an
‘altar’ made of stone, as large as they could afford, which was dedicated to the
god or the goddess in question. I suspect that canny Romans sometimes erected
their altars ahead of time to oblige the gods to fulfil their part of the contract,
according to the principle of do ut des, as it is called (‘I give so that you may
give’).2
Roman altars have a particular form: they usually have a rectangular base, a
vertical shaft and an upper part consisting of a cornice and top. The largest altars
are over 1.5 metres high and the smallest ones just a few centimetres in size, with
the vast majority lying somewhere in between. The inscriptions they bear also
follow a certain pattern containing the name of a Roman god or goddess, the
name of the dedicator, and a formula of dedication at the end. There are slight
modifications in some cases, such as the name of the dedicator being inscribed
first or even being missing, but as a rule this one pattern was generally used.
Roman names always have a definite form, even the names of indigenous
people in the provinces. Roman citizens always had a gentilicium, which corre-
sponds to a person’s family name or second name in modern European society,
and the praenomen or first name preceding it was mostly abbreviated. The cogno-
men, a third component, was originally an attribute of the upper classes, but from
the first century BCE onwards, it became the actual proper name. People in the
provinces without Roman citizenship had their individual name, and indicated
their father’s name in official documents and on their gravestones as well.3 An
example of a genuine altar is shown in Fig. 1:

I(ovi) o(ptimo) m(aximo) / diis de/abusqu^e / L(ucius) Comi^n^ius /5 Aph^ro^d^is^ius /

v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito).
‘To Jove, the best and greatest, (and all) gods and goddesses, Lucius Cominius Aphrodisius
fulfilled his vow eagerly as (the gods) deserved.’

This altar made of local calcareous sandstone is about 90 × 59 × 44 cm in size and

was found in 1891 in the ‘Tiergarten’ near Petronell Castle in the area where the
ancient city of Carnuntum used to be. The inscription on it has the same pattern
as the common one described above: the name of a particular god or goddess – in
this case, the supreme god of the Roman pantheon and all the other gods and

||
2 Rüpke 2006, 148–150.
3 The scholarly literature on Roman names is quite extensive, so I shall only include a few key
references here: Sandys 1969, 207–221; Salway 1994; Dondin-Payre 2011; Cooley 2012, passim
and 409–421; Weber 2016. The custom of having the individual name followed by the father's
name is preserved in some cultures until now, even in Europe: Iceland, Russia.
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 103

goddesses as well – followed by the dedicator with his tria nomina (the three
names of a Roman citizen). Since the person did not indicate his father’s name,
and because his cognomen is of Greek origin, he was probably a freedman. Roman
slaves of a higher level and therefore freedmen often had individual Greek
names, a custom dating back to the second century BCE when Greek slaves were
taken to Rome as prisoners of war during the Eastern Mediterranean wars, and
were often highly respected because of their superior culture. The Cominii family,
which included numerous merchants from Italy, is attested at Carnuntum in the
middle of the first century CE.4 Note the practice of sticking letters together, evi-
dently done on purpose here to give the inscription a more sophisticated appear-
ance. The wording ends with the common formula of dedication.

Fig. 1: Genuine Roman altar from Carnuntum (CIL 3, 11125; Kremer 2012, 171, n. 334, plate 98);
© Project CIL III2 Pannonia, directed by the author.

||
4 AE 2008, 1099.
104 | Ekkehard Weber

Let us now have a closer look at our first suspected forgeries. These are small al-
tars, which were easier to forge than large ones. They are said to come from
Carnuntum, but owing to the black market, some of them ended up in private
collections and even museums in Germany. Sometimes it is hard to prove that a
specimen is fake because there is no clear evidence from which one can deduce
that the inscription on it is not genuine. But if one is familiar with the genuine
article, then even inconspicuous peculiarities can be found that make one sus-
pect that something is wrong with the object in question. I shall demonstrate
some of these points in this article.
The inscription on the altar to the Roman god Mars (Fig. 2), the most im-
portant Roman god of war, reads as follows:

To Mars / C(aius) I(ulius) Ver(us) / fulfilled his votum, his vow, willingly and happily.

The last letter M in this formula – m(erito), meaning ‘(as the god) deserves’ – is
missing, surprisingly enough. There are other examples, admittedly.5 The first M
in this inscription provides us with almost incontrovertible evidence of a fake: in
Roman inscriptions, the central angle of the letter nearly always touches the
ground. The R has a strange bow or loop, and the horizontal bar of the T has the
two serifs coming down. The name Caius is abbreviated the usual way, but the
dedicator’s nomen gentile, i.e. his family or second name, is only abbreviated with
one letter, which is surprising.6 The person’s last name (the proper name by
which they were known) was hardly ever abbreviated.
In the next example (Fig. 3), there is a dedication to Iuppiter optimus maximus
again: ‘to Jove, the best and greatest’, the chief of the Roman pantheon. The poor
writing does not seem to be of ancient origin at all. The S has a larger upper cur-
vature than usual. Again, the cognomen, the third component of the dedicator’s
name, is abbreviated, and the Q of Quint(us) is written without a ‘U’, according
to the German custom, where this letter is always pronounced ‘KW’. Furthermore,
the final M of the dedicatory formula is missing.

||
5 Sometimes even in genuine inscriptions, albeit rarely; take CIL 3, 4435; AE 1929 226; and
AE 1979, 461, for example, all of which are from Carnuntum.
6 Very common names or names used by the imperial family are abbreviated, but never using
just one letter. Iulius is the family name of the emperor, Augustus, and his successors Tiberius
and Gaius (Caligula).
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 105

Fig. 2: Altar to Mars, the Roman god; Kremer Fig. 3: Altar to Jove; Kremer 2012, 161,
2012, 173, n. 339, tab. 100 (Trier, private collec- n. 311, tab. 89 (Trier, private collection);
tion); © IKAnt, ÖAW (Photo G. Kremer). © IKAnt, ÖAW (Photo G. Kremer).

Here are some further examples (Fig. 4):

Genio / centur(iae) / sacrum.

‘To the genius of the platoon consecrated’.

The letter I in Genio is smaller, evidently inserted afterwards in the cavity, where
the stone is damaged.
The name of the dedicator is missing, which sometimes occurs on small
stones, even genuine ones, especially if the dedicators were a group, but a pious
lady or gentleman or even a single soldier who dedicated such an inscription
would first and foremost have wanted the gods to know who did it in order to get
his or her reward in due time. Ligatures of letters are not uncommon in Roman
106 | Ekkehard Weber

inscriptions (see Fig. 1), but the ones at the end of lines two and three are strange.
What’s more, no Roman stonecutter would ever have formed an R like this.
The next inscription (Fig. 5) is a dedication to Silvanus silvest(ris), i.e. ‘Silva-
nus from the woods’. It seems Silvanus was the most popular god in Carnuntum
and its neighbourhood, and a great many forged inscriptions are dedicated to
him, too. The name of the dedicator of this particular exemplar is not indicated,
and some of the letters do not resemble their paradigms in the ancient Roman
alphabet either: the S with its slightly larger upper curvature (a phenomenon al-
ready observed) along with the C and the R. The central angle of the M, even if it
was unfinished, was evidently not intended to touch the baseline, as usually with
Roman inscriptions. Both stones seem to come from the same workshop because
the lettering on them is so similar (cf. Figs. 4 and 5).

Fig. 4: Altar to a Genius; Kremer 2012, 307, Fig. 5: Altar to the god Silvanus; Kremer
n. 751, tab. 209 (Trier, private collection); 2012, 310, n. 766, tab. 211 (Trier, private
© IKAnt, ÖAW (Photo G. Kremer). collection); © IKAnt, ÖAW (Photo G. Kremer).
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 107

Another type of forgery can be seen in some other inscriptions (Fig. 6): apart from
the shape of the letters being unusual, the words dii nocturni, ‘gods of the night’,
are used, an expression which is not attested in Roman times. One of the inscrip-
tions (6d) was evidently copied from a third one (6c)7, i.e. it is a fake made from a
fake.

Fig. 6a: Scherrer 2008, 219, Fig. 31.2: Kremer Fig. 6b: Kremer 2012, 306, n. 749, tab. 209
2012, 306, n. 748, tab. 209 (private collection (Trier, private collection); © IKAnt, ÖAW (Photo
in Austria?); © IKAnt, ÖAW (Archiv Scherrer). G. Kremer).

||
7 Both are said to have been found during an excavation at Carnuntum in 1892 and came into
the museum’s possession after being acquired from the landowner. There is a slightly different
photograph of them in the archive of the Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut in Kremer
2012, 307, n. 750, tab. 209 (left), so obviously more than one picture of them was taken (evidently
from a forged original).
108 | Ekkehard Weber

Fig. 6c: CIL 3, 13461; Kremer 2012, 135, n. 255, Fig. 6d: CIL 3, 13462; Kremer 2012, 306–307,
tab. 70 (Carnuntum Museum); © IKAnt, ÖAW n. 750, tab. 209 (Carnuntum Museum);
(Photo G. Kremer). © IKAnt, ÖAW (Photo G. Kremer).

Why exactly were these forgeries made? Mainly to make money, I suspect. I was
told by local people that Roman inscriptions sell for about ten euros a letter these
days. Sometimes the forgers take original ancient artefacts – altars without an
inscription – and carve some letters on them to earn more money when they are
sold. These stones are sold on the black market, mostly to private collectors, and
rarely come to our notice,8 but sometimes museums acquire them, even in
Carnuntum itself. Some years ago, the front page of a local newspaper showed
some small altars that had recently been bought by the trustees of Carnuntum
Museum, but it turned out that all of them were fakes (Fig. 7).

||
8 In addition, see Noelke 1991, which contains five more examples (the author seems to believe
they are all genuine). It also contains further references.
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 109

Fig. 7: Front page of an illustrated Austrian newspaper (in colour) showing a girl with two small
altars; ‘Krone Bunt’, Sunday edition from 3 March 2002. The two altars are also pictured in
Kremer 2012, 308, n. 758 and 309, n. 760, both tab. 210; © Project CIL III2 Pannonia, directed
by the author.
110 | Ekkehard Weber

There is at least one example of a forged tombstone from Carnuntum (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8: Tombstone (unpublished, Carnuntum Museum, CAR-S-604). © Project CIL III2 Pannonia,
directed by the author.

As the early ones are rather large, tombstones of this size were/are rarely forged
because of all the effort involved. The one shown here is relatively small, approx-
imately 50 centimetres in height and with an odd representation of the deceased,
supposedly an early product made by a local Celtic stonecutter. The inscription
is doubtless a fake. The letters D M, standing for D(is) m(anibus), which dedicates
the tomb to the gods of the netherworld, only became common in the second cen-
tury CE. Thus the inscription and the picture of the deceased do not match chron-
ologically.
When the Iron Curtain fell thirty years ago, the black market was flooded with
genuine antiquities from the Balkans, but forgeries were soon among them as
well. The cunning manufacturers quickly found out that small bronze objects
were much more easily forged and sold than large, heavy monuments made of
marble or limestone.9 However, they also had to produce a natural-looking patina

||
9 Bronze artefacts known as ‘military diplomas’ became very popular with forgers. These are
tablets documenting Roman citizenship awarded to soldiers after twenty-five years of service (or
even more). See Pangerl 2006, 929–933, for instance. Years ago, I published a small bronze tablet
from former Yugoslavia, the inscription of which was copied, remarkably enough, from a late-
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 111

on them to deceive naive buyers, which they achieved with the aid of modern
chemistry.
Most of these forgeries were, as we said, made to make money, but some of
them – a remarkable number, in fact – were made just ‘for fun’ by students who
wanted to deceive professors or directors of museums, for example. We know of
various famous incidents in the past where sensational finds were shown to be
fakes later on (sometimes many years later), especially in archaeology.10 There
are plenty of fakes that were made for no other purpose than to become famous
and/or deceive the scientific community.

2 Early collections of Roman inscriptions

From the fifteenth century onwards, learned people north and south of the Alps
became enamoured of Antiquity. They often studied at universities in Italy and
brought the ideas and ideals of the Italian Renaissance back with them after-
wards. North of the Alps, the remains of Roman art, occasionally found, once
made by local artisans were not always produced with great skill, though, and so
did not always fulfil the ideals and satisfy the taste the admirers had developed
during their sojourns in Italy. The individuals therefore concentrated on Roman
inscriptions, which were to be found here and there; the texts were written in
Latin, contained abbreviations and were sometimes incomplete, which meant
that considerable knowledge and skill was needed to read them correctly. Apart
from being valuable as texts about an idealised past, inscriptions of this kind
were regarded as an intellectual challenge and consequently proof of and train-
ing for one’s intelligence. Princes and noblemen collected ancient inscriptions.
The first person to do so, it seems, was Maximilian I (1459–1519), the Holy Roman
Emperor in Vienna, who inherited a passion for collecting objets d’art from his
father and acquired ancient coins and inscriptions mainly from Roman Antiquity.
Most of his counsellors had the task of drawing his attention to potential new
acquisitions. They were in touch with learned people all over Europe and even

||
antique tombstone from Treves / Trier in Germany; Weber 2001, 471–472. The original in Trier is
CIL 13, 3683 = CLE 792.
10 Brein 1980, 6–14 provides a remarkably good overview of them that is still useful today,
among other things referring to the famous ‘Tiara of Saitaphernes’ and the sensational finds
made in Glozel near Vichy, France (see the article by C. Breniquet in this volume). The typical
behaviour of the scientific community in such cases was depicted satirically by Charles Dickens
in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (see chapter 11).
112 | Ekkehard Weber

collected Roman inscriptions themselves – not as much original texts written on

stone, but information about them, and copies of the texts. They were delighted
by every new message from the past and added information about them to man-
uscripts of their own. Thus the first comprehensive collection of Roman inscrip-
tions was published in those days: Petrus Apianus and Bartholomeus Amantius,
Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis, non illae quidem Romanae, sed totius fere
orbis summo studio ac maximis impensis terra mariq[ue] conquisitae, Ingolstadii,
in aedibus P. Apiani, 1534.
Page 401 of this book contains two dubious Roman inscriptions which are
shown in Fig. 9. As it is said, these were found by treasure-hunters in Vienna in
1493 under remarkable circumstances.11 They are probably fakes. One of the
problems with the first one – there are several issues with it, actually – is that
the Roman legion garrisoning at Vindobona (Vienna) is mistakenly called
‘Germanica’ instead of ‘Gemina’, a wrong spelling that subsequently lived on in
popular and even scholarly books. The first of the inscriptions reads as follows:12
‘To Jove Sarapis, the best and greatest, for the welfare of Emperor Lucius
Septimius Severus Pius Pertinax Augustus [the official name of Septimius
Severus, 193–211], victorious over the Arabs, the people of Adiabene [a territory
in modern northern Iraq] and greatest of all over the Parthians [the predecessors
of Persia], and for Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus [the official
name of his elder son, commonly called Caracalla, 197–217], and Lucius’ – the
Latin letters ET L are evidently wrong here (in his famous Corpus inscriptionum
Latinarum, Berlin, 1873, Theodore Mommsen amended it to FL, thus creating a
gentilicium that otherwise is missing): ‘Flavius Quirinalis Maximus, military trib-
une of the legio X Gemina (not Germanica!), the pious and loyal, fulfilled his vow
eagerly and happily, as the god deserves’.

||
11 The third item on this page is CIL 3, 4567, the honorific inscription for P. Claudius Pallas
Honoratus Repentinus, effective commander of the legio X Gemina in Vienna.
12 CIL 3, 4560. The Latin headlines in English: ‘Found in Vienna underground in the house of
John Gennter in Wipplingerstraße AD = CE 1493 by the Viennese citizen Henry Schruttauer and
his collaborators, who tried to find a hidden treasury which they believed was shown to them in
a dream’. Wipplingerstraße still exists in central Vienna; it corresponds to the via principalis
sinistra of the legionary fortress.
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 113

Fig. 9: Apianus and Amantius (1534), p. 401.

114 | Ekkehard Weber

Approximately fifty years ago, a bronze tablet was published in Prague that is a
fake without a doubt, representing the same text as the present inscription, but
with slight modifications. It mentions the legio Germ(anica) again (Fig. 10). The
question is, what did the treasure-hunters actually find in 1493 if their story is
true? Was the inscription in the book copied from the tablet or was the tablet cop-
ied from the book?

Fig. 10: Bronze tablet, approx. 9 × 11 cm, Prague, unknown private collection (Ryba 1950,
tab. 2). Note the probably correct letters F L in line 6 of the tablet.

The second inscription on Apianus’ page (Fig. 9), evidently found at the same
spot and probably on the same occasion, but now also lost, is enigmatic, too: no
high-ranking Roman officer – and no simple Roman person either for that
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 115

matter – would ever have referred to himself as idem Maximus = ‘Maximus, the
same’.13
The scholar who collected so much relevant material in those days was un-
known for a long time, so Theodor Mommsen referred to him as the ‘Antiquus
Austriacus’ when preparing his monumental Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum.14
Doris Marth recently succeeded in demonstrating that this mysterious collector
was Johannes Fuchsmagen (or Fuchsmag), one of the most important ministers
and counsellors of Maximilian I at his imperial court in Vienna. Despite
Fuchsmagen’s unquestionable merits and achievements, he was evidently a
rather modest man as he never praised himself about his achievements in epig-
raphy and left no portrait of himself either except for one on a rather expensive
tapestry that he donated to a monastery in Vienna. It seems likely that it was
Fuchsmagen who made the manuscript from which Apianus’ and Amantius’
book was printed in 1534 (now Prague, National Library of the Czech Republic,
CP XIII G 14).15

3 A gifted forger: Wolfgang Lazius

One generation later, during the mid-sixteenth century, there was another man
who played a similar role in epigraphy: the Viennese physician Wolfgang Lazius
(1514–1565), whose interests also extended to history, geography, genealogy and
epigraphy (Fig. 11). He wrote many books and left even more manuscripts to pos-
terity, all of which had a significant influence in subsequent periods. In spite of
the fact that he was appointed rector magnificus of the University of Vienna twice
and was highly praised for his work, he simply did not have the same profile as
the comparatively modest Johannes Fuchsmagen.

||
13 CIL 3, 4561. If you want to keep this inscription and prove it genuine, you may argue that
whoever copied the text saw that the dedicator was the same man and abbreviated his task by
adding only this short note (in Latin, of course). So it found its way into the ‘scientific
community’.
14 CIL 3, 564.
15 Marth 2016. For a portrait of Fuchsmagen, see Marth 2016, plate 3.
116 | Ekkehard Weber

Fig. 11: Wolfgang Lazius; drawing by Hanns Lautensack (1554). <https://commons.

wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wolfgang_Lazius.jpg> (last accessed on 17 April 2020); Creative
Commons Public Domain.

Wolfgang Lazius quoted a great number of genuine Roman inscriptions in his

works, fully aware that these original texts were the best way of proving certain
historical points. But if there was no convenient inscription at hand, he simply
took one from elsewhere and modified it as much as necessary; he even produced
new ones of his own invention. He used them repeatedly in his writing, but
altered them time and again, so it is difficult to discern what the original form
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 117

was or might have been – if there ever was one. Here is an example from one of
his famous works, a local Roman history:16

Et ne dubitemus, istum belli Marcomannici apparatum prope Viennam factum extitisse,

supersunt aliquot fragmenta columnarum ac basium, ut ego opinor, ab arcubus triumpha-
libus diruta, in quibus uictoria illa Marcomannica ad plenum exprimitur, cum titulo
uidelicet fortunae Reginae: M.AVREL. AVG. V. S. L. L. M. Et iterum uictoriae de Marcomanis,
M. AVR. V. S. L. L. M. hoc est, Votum soluit, locum legit memoriae.
‘Lest we doubt that these preparations for the war against the Marcomanni near Vienna
existed, some fragments of columns and bases are still preserved, plundered, I believe, from
triumphal arches on which this Marcomannic victory was fully documented with an inscrip-
tion to Fortuna Regina, for example M. AVREL. AVG. V. S. L. L. M. And another one to Victoria
against the Marcomanni, M. AVR. V. S. L. L. M., which means ‘he fulfilled his vow and selected
this place for memory’.

Fig. 12: The two inscriptions that Lazius dealt with in his book; Lazius 1551, 900.

The Marcomanni were a mighty Germanic tribe on the other side of the Danube
that had made incursions into the Roman realm, penetrating as far as northern
Italy and plundering the provinces on their way. In this text, the author says that
a triumphal arch was erected in Vienna c. 170 CE in honour of Marcus Aurelius
after his victory over the Marcomanni to underline the importance of Vienna in
these days. In the case of the first inscription, which is dedicated to Fortuna, the
goddess of good fortune, he may have imitated some preserved fragments of writ-
ing, probably from an altar dedicated by a certain Marcus Aurelius, a very com-
mon name in the second and third century CE, but we do not know whether this
supposed original is from Vienna or from Carnuntum (which is more likely) or
what it really looked like. The second inscription, dedicated to Victoria, the per-
sonified goddess of victory, is pure invention, and his interpretation of the final
dedication formula is simply nonsense.17 It hardly needs to be said that the
inscription on a real triumphal arch would be rather different. In fact, when he

||
16 Lazius 1551, 669.
17 The letters v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) l(aetus) m(erito) mean ‘he fulfilled his vow eagerly,
happily, as (the goddess) deserved’. Several lines before that, the ‘German legion’ occurs again.
118 | Ekkehard Weber

quotes the same inscriptions later on in the same book (Fig. 12), there are slight
variations: apart from the evident misspelling in the case of the Fortuna inscrip-
tion, even the emperor’s name is abbreviated inconsistently.18
Lazius’ reason for inserting so many similar forgeries in his works was not to
gain money, but to boost his reputation among the scholars of his time by pre-
tending he had so many original documents from Antiquity at hand. In fact, he
often asserts that the inscription in question is kept at his own house – without
adding any details as to how he acquired it. Like most of the humanists of his
time, he was convinced that inscriptions – original texts from Antiquity – were
reliable documentation that helped to prove various historical facts. This was felt
to be much more important than literary tradition, especially if the latter did not
shed enough light on a matter. So obviously, he felt he had to forge an inscription
if a suitable one did not happen to be readily available.
Wolfgang Lazius was not the only person who forged inscriptions in those
days, though. Probably one of the most famous forgers of all was his contempo-
rary, Pirro Ligorio, an architect and archaeologist living in Rome19 who not only
invented Roman statues of his own and reconstructed fragments as he saw fit,
but who created ‘Roman’ inscriptions as well. I do not know what the real reason
was for him producing his forgeries, but he must have had a sense of pleasure in
deceiving others.
Wolfgang Lazius, however, is the primary source of one of the most important
inscriptions we know of concerning Vienna: the only inscription that seems to
prove that Vienna employed Roman municipal law in Roman times and that also
mentions a local functionary.20 It was found, as Lazius says, ‘last summer’, i.e.
the summer of 1544, during construction work on Vienna’s fortifications after the
first siege by the Ottomans in 1529. In Fig. 13 we can detect Lazius’ own handwrit-
ing and the very first attestation of this inscription, which he claims is kept in his
own house.21

||
18 Lazius 1551, 900. Latin S. Udalricus – St. Ulrich in German – was a small village in the
suburbs of Vienna, now part of the seventh district of Vienna itself.
19 Coffin 2004; Cooley 2012, 386–389; Theodor Mommsen on him: CIL 6 (1876), LI–LIII.
20 CIL 3, 4557 and p. 1793. The question of the bronze tablet which is said to be a fragment of
the (Viennese?) municipal law is too complicated to be discussed here; cf. Rafetseder 2019.
21 For example Lazius 1551, 725: Viennae repertum quod in meis aedibus adservatur.
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 119

Fig. 13: Lazius-Codex Vienna, ÖNB, lat. 8457 (a. 1545), fol. 33 (detail); by courtesy of the
trustees of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

His main argument was that Vienna was called Fabiana in Antiquity – an
incorrect designation, actually, but one of some importance nonetheless.22 He in-
sisted on this theory, which is why he quoted the inscription so often. However,
the monument is dedicated ‘to the happiness of the gods’ (deorum prosperitati),
which is absurd and virtually unparalleled in any ancient inscription. It is most
unusual for the dedicator of such an inscription to quote his full curriculum, so I
am inclined to see this inscription as a fake, symptomatic of Lazius’ methods. He
was always eager to produce ‘original’ documents, in this case because of the for-
gery’s unique testimony about the ancient history of Vienna.

||
22 The letters FABI occur in the last line. Favianis – Mautern on the Danube – was the monastery
where St Severinus, a very important local saint, spent the last years of his life and died in the
late fifth century. The theory that it was Vienna or at least part of it was proposed by the medieval
historian Otto of Freising to support the efforts of the Babenberg margraves in making their
residence, Vienna, a bishopric.
120 | Ekkehard Weber

Fig. 14: The inscription as drawn by (or for)

Antonio Augustín, from MS Madrid, BNE,
5781, fol. 46; by courtesy of the trustees of
the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

Fig. 15: The inscription as drawn by Carolus

Clusius, from MS The Hague, Koninklijke
Bibliotheek, 72 B 22, fol. 1; by courtesy of
the trustees of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek,
The Hague.

There is a problem here, though, as there are two more authors who seem to have
read this inscription and understood it in slightly different ways. The first is
Antonio Augustín, the papal nuncio at the court in Vienna in 1558. This high-
ranking archbishop presumably did not visit Lazius’ house personally to make a
copy of the inscription (and others as well), but he copied them or had them cop-
ied from drawings supplied to him. So his version is probably not an independent
one (Fig. 14). The second source is even more difficult, however. Carolus Clusius
(Charles de l’Écluse) from Arras stayed in Vienna in 1573–1576. He was a promi-
nent scientist who chiefly studied the plants, flowers and mushrooms of the
adjacent regions and the Austrian Alps in those days. He scrupulously copied
Roman inscriptions in situ, including the dedication deorum prosperitati as well.
His drawing seems to derive from the original – insertus parieti, ‘built into a wall’,
as he says (Fig. 15).23 Clusius provides a somewhat different reading of the stone,

||
23 Codex Haag 72 B 22, fol. 1. Clusius’ manuscript is not preserved in the original form because
a hundred and fifty years later, Christopher Sachse, a professor at Utrecht University, cut his
 Fake Ancient Roman Inscriptions and the Case of Wolfgang Lazius | 121

especially of the lower part, but it coincides precisely with the words deorum
prosperitati. This could be explained somehow, of course. Did Lazius, who died
about ten years earlier, possibly have this stone made by a skilful stonecutter? To
sum up, then, this inscription also seems to be a fake, although I cannot prove it
– at the moment.

Abbreviations
AE L’année épigraphique. Revue des publications épigraphiques relatives à l’antiquité
romaine, founded by René Cagnat in 1888. The inscriptions are only cited by
the year of the relevant volume and number.
CIL Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, edited by Theodor Mommsen and his collabora-
tors from 1862 onwards. The inscriptions are only cited by volume and
number.
CLE Carmina Latina Epigraphica. Anthologia Latina sive poesis Latinae supplementum,
pars posterior, edited by Franz Buecheler and Erik Lommatzsch, 1894–1930.
The inscriptions are only cited by number.

References
Apianus, Petrus, and Bar{p}tholomeus Amantius (1534), Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis,
non illae quidem Romanae, sed totius fere orbis summo studio ac maximis impensis terra
mariq(ue) conquisitae, Ingolstadt: in aedibus P. Apiani.
Brein, Friedrich (1980), ‘Das Aguntiner Kuckucksei’, in Römisches Österreich, 8: 5–26.
Coffin, David R. (2004), Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect and Antiquarian, Univer-
sity Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Cooley, Alison (2012), Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dondin-Payre, Monique (ed.) (2011), Les noms de personnes dans l’Empire romain: transforma-
tions, adaptation, évolution (Scripta Antiqua 36), Bordeaux: Ausonius (diff. Paris:
De Boccard).
Kremer, Gabrielle (2012), Götterdarstellungen, Kult- und Weihedenkmäler aus Carnuntum (Cor-
pus signorum Imperii Romani – Corpus der Skulpturen der römischen Welt, Österreich,
Carnuntum Supplement 1), Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissen-
schaften.
Lazius, Wolfgang (1551), Commentariorum rei pub(licae) Romanae illius in exteris provinciis
bello acquisitis constitutae libri duodecim, Basel: Ioannes Oporinus.

||
sheets into small pieces and glued them into his own epigraphic volume, with the result that
some of Clusius’ drawings are now lost.
122 | Ekkehard Weber

Marth, Doris (2016), Der sogenannte Antiquus Austriacus und weitere auctores antiquissimi.
Zur ältesten Überlieferung römerzeitlicher Inschriften im österreichischen Raum (Tyche
Sonderband 8), Vienna: Holzhausen.
Noelke, Peter (1991), ‘Carnuntiner Votivaltäre in rheinischem Privatbesitz’, in Carnuntum Jahr-
buch, 1991: 117–122.
Pangerl, Andreas (2006), ‘Modern Fakes of Roman Military Diplomas’, in Paul Holder (ed.),
Roman Military Diplomas V, London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London,
929–933.
Rafetseder, Niklas (2019), ‘Das Stadtgesetzfragment von Vindobona’, in Tyche, 34: 141–150.
Rüpke, Jörg (2006), Die Religion der Römer. Eine Einführung, Munich: Beck.
Ryba, Bohumil (1950), ‘Nove zjisteny originál nápisu CIL III 4560 a text Ptolemaiovy Geographie
II 6,28; 14.3’, in Listý filologicke, 74: 71–75.
Salway, Benet (1994), ‘What’s in a Name? A Survey of Roman Onomastic Practice from c. 700
BC to AD 700’, in Journal of Roman Studies, 84: 124–145.
Sandys, John Edwin (1969), Latin Epigraphy, Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis.
Scherrer, Peter (2008), ‘Silvanus in Verdacht. Auf den Spuren einer Fälscherwerkstatt in
Carnuntum’, in Ralph Haeussler and Antony C. King (eds), Continuity and Innovation in
Religion in the Roman West, vol. 2 (Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary Series
No. 67), Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 217–238.
Weber, Ekkehard (2001), ‘Iscrizioni falsificate sul “mercato nero” d’oggi’, in Gabriella Angeli
Bertinelli and Angela Donati (eds), Varia Epigraphica. Atti del Colloquio Internazionale di
Epigrafia, Bertinoro 8–10 giugno 2000 (Epigrafia e antichità 17), Faenza: Fratelli Lega,
462–473.
Weber, Ekkehard (2016), ‘Namen bei den Römern’, in Verena Halbwachs, Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal,
and Stefan Schima (eds), Die Kultur der Namensgebung (Juridicum Spotlight III), Vienna:
Manz’sche Verlags- und Universitätsbuchhandlung.