Works of Julia Balbilla

Edited and encoded by Gabriel Bodard (Institute of Classical Studies)

This project will involve a digital edition and analysis of the extant works of Julia Balbilla, a Comagene/Roman princess and poet who accompanied the Emperor Hadrian and Empress Sabinna on their visit to Thebes in Egypt in 130 CE. In part an experiment in digital encoding and publlication, I conceived of this edition in order to practice as many as possible of the digital philological techniques taught in the Sunoikisis Digital Classics programme and related courses (including tools and methods I introduce to my students in the Digital Classics module at the ICS). I will explore how to annotate, relation, combine, document, publish and disseminate the various methods, tools and outputs involved, with an eye on usability, stability, sustainability, transparency and scholarly attribution. Results and discussion will be posted here over time.

Technologies and methods to be included

• EpiDoc encoding (including transcription, history and description, translation, tokenization and lemmatization, and metrical scansion)
• Treebanking (using the PapyGreek interface and Arethusa tree editor)
• Translation alignment (using the Ugarit aligner by Tariq Yousef)

Identifiers for Julia Balbilla

• Wikidata:Q441786
• Wikipedia:Julia_Balbilla
• DBpedia:Julia_Balbilla
• Viaf 34843877
• Library of Congress
• Trismegistos People:85919
• PIR² I 650

Bibliography of editions and translations

• Bernand, André & Étienne Bernard. 1960. Les inscriptions grecques et latines du Colosse de Memnon. Paris: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale.
• Cirio, Amalia Margherita. 2011. Gli epigrammi di Giulia Balbilla: (ricordi di una dama di corte) e altri testi al femminile sul colosso di Memnone. Satura: Testi e Studi di Litteratura antica 9. Pensa Multimedia.
• Kaibel, G. 1878. Epigrammata Graeca ex lapidibus conlecta. Berlin: Reimer.
• Letronne, Antoine-Jean. 1848. Recueil des inscriptions grecques et latines de l'Égypte. Paris: L'Imprimerie royale.
• Peek, Werner. 1934. “Zu den Gdichten auf dem Memnonskoloss von Theben.” Mitteilungen des deutschen Instituts für Ägyptische Altertumskunde in Kairo 5-1: 95–127.
• Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. 2018. The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus. Oxford University Press.