STONES IN THE FOREST 43
would render their mundane lives exotic with his verbal art, does not
accommodate the nuts and bolts of that world; he replaces the func-
tions of epigraphy with a far more oblique and sophisticated game of
words, the fragile medium of textual transmission paradoxically
trumping solid stone in both durability and breadth of access. The
absence of inscriptions from the Silvae is eloquent testimony to their
fundamental role in the society whose intelligentsia and glitterati Sta-
tius cultivated and entertained.
Fig. 1. Sketch by Julius Friedlaender of Mommsen inspecting an inscription
on a bridge at Castel di Sangro (ancient Aufidena) in Samnium, to the aston-
ishment of the locals. Reproduced from Wickert 1964, fig. 8, with the per-
mission of Vittorio Klostermann Verlag.