[2] Travelling in Italy with one of his pupils, he made an exhaustive study of the antiquities of Rome.

In 1549 Fabricius edited the first short selection of Roman inscriptions focusing specifically on legal texts.

This was a key moment in the history of classical epigraphy: for the first time in print a humanist explicitly demonstrated the value of such archaeological remains for the discipline of law, and implicitly accorded texts inscribed in stone as authoritative a status as those recorded in manuscripts.

[2] He published fuller results in his Roma, in which the correspondence between every discoverable relic of the old city and the references to them in ancient literature was traced in detail.

His "In Praise of Georgius Agricola" includes the quote "Death comes to all but great achievements raise a monument which shall endure until the sun grows old.