There are some bits in research that you know in the best of times are going to make your brain hurt. These are not the best of times and I decided I may as well get on with it anyway and tackle one of them right now.

Gates of Apulum (Codrinb / CC BY-SA 3.0 RO)

So over the past couple of days I’ve been mostly polishing a draft chapter (which I need to send to someone – that super-exciting post-PhD possibility) where I’d found a great snarl-up.

My argument was unclear and didn’t convey what I was trying to say. In this part of the chapter I’m looking at a Roman family tree that has been reconstructed before but I don’t think it’s quite right, or at least it’s not as certain as has been argued. So I needed to tease out again the familial relationships within several Latin inscriptions put up at Apulum.

In this family tree are either two or three generations of men who have the same name and I am trying to settle the number. What I have are five inscriptions which variously state the men’s names, their father’s names, sons and daughters and a wife, an adoptive father,  and different positions that the men held.

Crucially to my argument, is the fact that the inscriptions were all put up by people during their lifetimes so none of them sums up a life in the way that an epitaph often does. This means the inscriptions that were put up later can have roles added to them that don’t appear in the earlier inscriptions. The roles might also be presented differently – grouped and in reverse chronology, or summarised. Oh and because it’s not complicated enough, there are no dates on any of the inscriptions, although there is contextual information that helps, such as when the army units they commanded changed their names.

Example of an inscribed Roman-era statue base. The big holes would have had attached a bronze statue to the base. (Roman Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0)

The inscriptions are mostly cut into  statue bases, and the whole thing looks very much like a series of PR exercises for an opportunistic family on the make. What I’m looking at is some good Roman social climbing.

So I went through the inscriptions again, teasing out the whole who’s who and then started to try to explain my reasoning more carefully. I need to get hold of a couple of publications to check again the previous work on this family and make sure I’m representing its arguments fairly, and then finish explaining my argument.

What’s left to do is among the easier things though, for me at least. Other people’s mileage may differ but it’s the crunchy and complex primary material that is the tough and interesting stuff. Having untangled this particular knot I am feeling a bit more confident about returning to writing up too.