Titulus pictus

A titulus pictus is a commercial inscription painted in red or black on the surface of certain artefacts, most often the neck of an amphora. These inscriptions specified details such as origin, destination, product type, and owner, and were frequent on Roman pottery containers used for trade. They also served as advertisements and may have functioned as insurance if a good was damaged. The text employed a wide variety of abbreviations, including terms like primum, excellens, optimum, flos, florum, praecellens, penuarium, and secundarium, possibly to convey product quality.

Numerals indicated the age and weight of the contents and the empty container's weight. The structure included a tria nomina for buyer and seller, and the owner's name. The most intricate tituli were for Spanish oil amphorae, painted in black, showing weight, contents, producer, and owner in the genitive case. Wine tituli from Crete were written in Greek, Latin, or both, and informed the reader of wine qualities, volume, date, origin, and owner (whose name was in red and the dative case).

Colors conveyed source information: white referred to producers, red to local producers, and black to wholesale traders. Grammatical cases carried specific meanings: dative for recipient or buyer, genitive for producer and owner, ablative for consignor, and nominative for consumer or wholesaler.