Tyler Lansford

Tyler Lansford is an independent scholar who lives in Boulder, Colorado. He teaches for the University of Colorado Department of Classics. Lansford taught Latin and Greek for eight years at the University of Washington, where he completed his Ph.D. in classics. In 1996, he co-founded Seattle Language Academy and directed its program in classics for more than a decade. He has also led tours of Rome for The Grand Tour Travel Company.

Ever since his first visit to Rome as an undergraduate, Lansford had been searching for the ideal book on the Eternal City; like every inquisitive traveler, he was overwhelmed by the sheer weight of its 3,000 year history. He sought a key to Rome's riches that would unite the scope of a guidebook with the rigor of a scholarly monograph. As it turned out, that book didn't exist. Rome was simply too big.

In the course of repeated visits to Rome, Lansford became increasingly fascinated with the City's wealth of Latin inscriptions, which date from the sixth century BC to the present decade. Each inscription seemed a palpable -- and indeed a petrified -- particle of Rome's history. Then it came to him: the inscriptions were the ideal vehicle for a synopsis of the City's entire story; taken together, they constituted a kaleidoscopic portrait of Rome from antiquity to the present day. The inscriptions furnished the perfect means of representing the full chronological scope of the city's history without sacrificing the particular detail of individual episodes.

By arranging the inscriptions topographically -- the way one encounters them while exploring the City on foot -- Lansford could respect Rome's famous stratification of ancient, medieval and modern; by arranging the entries "Loeb-style" -- Latin on the left and English translation on the right -- he could throw open this treasure-house of information to as wide an audience as possible. Because the form and the contents of the book were more than usually interdependent, he designed the layout and set the type himself.

Lansford acknowledges that it is audacious (if not downright foolhardy) for one individual to write a book treating material from so many disciplines -- classics, history, art history, architecture and theology, to mention the most prominent. The risk of academic disapprobation nevertheless seemed to him to be outweighed by the potential pleasure and utility that the project would bring to a wide spectrum of readers. It is in that spirit that he presents The Latin Inscriptions of Rome: A Walking Guide.