of Latin inscriptions bears witness to the difficulty of
this choice. "The arrangement according to date was impossible, seeing
that most of the inscriptions are not dated. From the time of Smetius it
was usual to divide them into classes, that is, a distinction was made,
resting solely on the contents of the inscription, and having no regard
to their place of origin, between religious, sepulchral, military, and
poetical inscriptions, those which have a public character, and those
which only concern private persons, and so on. Boeckh, although he had
preferred the geographical arrangement for his _Corpus Inscriptionum
Graecarum_, was of opinion that the arrangement by subjects, which had
been hitherto employed, was the only possible one for a Latin
_Corpus_...." [Even those who, in France, proposed the geographical
arrangement] "wished to make an exception of texts relating to the
general history of a country, certainly, at any rate, in the case of the
Empire; in 1845 Zumpt defended a very complicated eclectic system of
this kind. In 1847 Mommsen still rejected the geographical arrangement
except for municipal inscriptions, and in 1852, when he published the
Inscriptions of the Kingdom of Naples, he had not entirely changed his
opinion. It was only on being charged by the Academy of Berlin with the
publication of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, that, grown wise by
experience, he rejected even the exceptions proposed by Egger in the
case of the general history of a province, and thought it his duty to
keep to the geographical arrangement pure and simple."[98] And yet,
considering the nature of epigraphic documents, the arrangement
according to place was the only rational one. This has been amply
demonstrated for more than fifty years; but collectors of inscriptions
did not come to an agreement on the subject till after two centuries of
tentative efforts in different directions. For two centuries collections
of Latin inscriptions have been made without any perception of the fact
that "to group inscriptions according to their subjects is much the same
thing as to publish an edition of Cicero in which his speeches,
treatises, and letters should be cut up and the fragments arranged
according to their subject-matter;" that "epigraphic monuments belonging
to the same territory mutually explain each other when placed side by
side;" and, lastly, that "while it is all but impossible to range in
order of subject-matter a hundr