How the deceased lived with the living.
By Dr. Mario Erasmo
Cultural Historian
Professor and Head Undergraduate Coordinator
University of Georgia
Introduction
Tunc uno quoque hinc inde instante ut quam primum se impendentibus contumeliis eriperet, scrobem coram fieri imperavit dimensus ad corporis sui modulum, componique simul, si qua invenirentur, frusta marmoris et aquam simul ac ligna conferri curando mox cadaveri, flens ad singula atque identidem dictitans: “Qualis artifex pereo!”1
Then with each of his companions urging him to free himself as soon as possible from the looming abuses, he ordered them to dig a pit, the size of his own body in dimension, and to gather at the same time pieces of marble, if any could be found, and for water and wood to be brought for the imminent preparation of his body, weeping at each step and saying over and over, “What an artist I die!” (Suetonius, Nero 49.1)
In this famous passage, Suetonius describes Nero’s directions for his grave just prior to his suicide, but the pathos of the scene is undercut by details surrounding his directions and the infamous quote which Nero dictates. Nero’s insistence that the length of the grave equal his actual height signals his fear of being beheaded as soon as he is dead and perhaps his realization that there would be no time to start and complete a cremation of his remains.2 Calls for water and fire in order to cleanse his corpse prior to burial might seem unnecessary given the haste needed to bury his body to avoid defilement. That the fire is intended to heat the water rather than to cremate Nero’s corpse seems likely in light of his directions that the length of the grave match his exact height. The pieces of marble reflect Nero’s vanity to have elements of common memorial materials, but they would call attention to his tomb in a way that soil and stones would not. Suetonius’ narrative makes clear that time is of the essence for Nero to commit suicide and have his remains buried in this impromptu grave.
The infamous quote, in which Nero sums up his life’s main accomplishment and often read as a statement of his egomaniacal self-delusion, might also be read as Nero’s dictation of his own epitaph. The first-person narrative is common on graves to (self) identify the deceased and their accomplishments, but the third-person narrative normally marks the location of the remains (iacet). The present tense of pereo signifies the act of dying rather than lying and would repeat Nero’s final words each time they are read and thereby promote the conceit that Nero is not actually dead (and buried). There is a further conceit, on Nero’s part, that passersby would know that the epitaph marked the location of his grave even without his proper name specified. Even in this somewhat anonymous state, marking the location of his corpse with such an epitaph would serve to betray the location of his corpse more than to eulogize the life accomplishments of the grave occupant.
Suetonius (Nero 50) provides further details surrounding Nero’s actual burial:
Funeratus est impensa ducentorum milium, stragulis albis auro intextis, quibus usus Kal. Ian. fuerat. Reliquas Egloge et Alexandria nutrices cum Acte concubina gentili Domitiorum monimento condiderunt, quod prospicitur e campo Martio impositum colli Hortulorum. In eo monimento solium porphyretici marmoris, superstante Lunensi ara, circumsaeptum est lapide Thasio.
He was buried at a cost of two hundred thousand sesterces and laid out in white robes woven with gold which he had worn on the Kalends in January. His nurses Egloge and Alexandria, with his mistress Acte, placed his remains in the family tomb of the Domitii which is located on the hill of the Gardens and visible from the Campus Martius. In the tomb, his sarcophagus of porphyry, with an altar of luna marble above it, was enclosed by Thasian stone.
The details are remarkable for a former emperor. No eulogy is specified: Nero is buried by social inferiors and he is laid to rest in the tomb of the Domitii rather than Augustus’ mausoleum. Despite the irony of his burial in the tomb, considering the offense he took at being called Domitius by Britannicus (Suet. Nero 7), the burial complies with Nero’s wish to change his name and identity from a Julio-Claudian back to Domitius to give up Imperial power and become a private citizen (Suet. Nero 51.1). Only the details of the porphyry sarchophagus and its setting seem appropriate to his former position. The site was later considered haunted (like the Lamian Gardens which were believed haunted by Caligula’s spirit) and was located at the current site of the church of S. Maria del Popolo.
Thus, Suetonius’ allusion to funerary ritual provides his readers with a cultural intertext against which to read Nero’s final moments. Nero imagines himself dead, cleansed, buried, and (self) represented by an epitaph while he is still alive, as he reifies his own funeral and burial as a physical and figurative experience, but the narrative also elicits questions concerning the rituals and Nero’s role in directing his own funeral and burial as a living corpse. Like Nero sightings all over the Empire following his death, the presence of Nero haunted the Via Flaminia and extended his (self) representation in a way more memorable than an epitaph.
Here, I examine the animation of the dead through select epitaphs from a narrative and semiotic perspective, rather than as evidence for historical, sociological, or anthropological reconstructions. I make no attempt to give a survey of epitaph features and how they changed over time. The focus will be on the narrative voice and setting (physical and figurative) of the deceased in epitaphs, especially those which have poeticizing/poetic features to analyze the (self) representation of the dead. In addition to actual grave inscriptions, I examine illusory epitaphs in Latin poetry as both grave and textual markers and as limited and limitive narratives and reading experiences in ancient and modern settings. I close my discussion of the animation of the dead with the (self) representation of the dead in elegiac texts which leads to a reciprocity between epitaphs and poetic texts in which the dead take control of their own authorial agenda and future commemoration.
Commemoration of the dead, through the recording of the accomplishments of one’s military or political career through epitaphs, or through portraiture, would have a multigenerational audience in an urban setting.3 In the case of public figures like Sulla, the record of one’s character or accomplishments would shape later interpretation and also be politically relevant since one’s career could provide the basis of later emulation. The actual words of Sulla’s epitaph do not survive; Plutarch, however, records that it was written by Sulla himself and that it emphasized this character (hence political) trait: no friend surpassed him in kindness, no enemy in mischief.4
From the perspective of the viewer/emulator, the deceased becomes an exemplum represented by former deeds and current statue/inscription. Pliny, Epistulae 2.7.5–7 describes his reaction to a decreed statue of Cottius and the didactic value of displaying the portraits and records of the dead in public spaces. To Pliny, the statue of Cottius is an object of contemplation that will inspire both a physical and an emotional interaction with him (Ep. 2.7.6–7):
Erit ergo pergratum mihi hanc effigiem eius subinde intueri subinde respicere, sub hac consistere praeter hanc commeare. Etenim si defunctorum imagines domi positae dolorem nostrum levant, quanto magis hae quibus in celeberrimo loco non modo species et vultus illorum, sed honor etiam et gloria refertur!5
Therefore, it will be especially pleasing for me to look at his statue, turning back frequently to look at it, standing before it, and walking past it. Truly do the imagines of the dead placed in the home lighten our sorrow; all the more do they in a public place not only to recall the appearance and portraits of men but also their honor and fame!
Imagines in the home are inspirational, but statues and records of the dead in public spaces are more inspirational still since they can reach a wider audience and encourage the emulation of the virtuous or valorous behavior of the dead. These memorials are not tombs that contain the remains of the deceased, rather, they are figurative and epigraphic tributes to the dead.6
The familiar trope of invoking the dead (evocatio mortuorum) in a forensic setting could also blur the distinction between the living and the dead in an urban setting and extend the figurative life of a historic figure. Cicero was aware of the dramatic potential of alluding to the dead as sentient personages since he refers, elsewhere, to the manes of the dead conspirators, in a forensic setting.7 In the Pro Caelio, Cicero resurrects the dead Appius Claudius Caecus the Censor to pass judgment on the scandalous sexual behavior of Clodia.8 In addition to recalling to Clodia the great position of her family, Appius compares her lurid ways to the virtuous actions of her female ancestors, such as Q. Claudia who saved the image of Cybele and Claudia the Vestal who saved her father. Perhaps Cicero’s most wicked use of this grand figure was to have him condemn his descendant’s lasciviousness in the words of a stern censor:
‘Cur te fraterna vitia potius quam bona paterna et avita et usque a nobis cum in viris tum etiam in feminis repetita moverunt? Ideone ego pacem Pyrrhi diremi, ut tu amorum turpissimorum cotidie foedera ferires, ideo aquam adduxi, ut ea tu inceste uterere, ideo viam munivi, ut eam tu alienis viris comitata celebrares?’
“Why did a brother’s vice move you more than your father’s or your ancestors’ which have been handed down since my time not only by the men but by the women? Was it for this that I tore up the peace of Pyrrhus, so that you might enter into compacts with your shameful lovers on a daily basis? Was it for this that I drew water to Rome so that you might use it lewdly, for this that I built a road so that you might loiter accompanied by the husbands of other women?”
T his character assassination is damning due to the force of Cicero’s rhetorical skill in conjuring up a seemingly realistic person or rather a portrait of the deceased in a familial context of chiding a child for shameful behavior. Cicero claims Appius is scolding in the stern old style, rather than the new gentle method, thereby drawing even more attention to Appius’ words and Clodia’s immorality. Moreover, resurrecting the dead as a witness in forensics is effective since the dead are not open to cross-examination and they also represent an earlier morality which was guaranteed, in the rhetoric of Rome’s moral degeneration, to draw a sharp contrast with the amorality of the present age.
If the dead could attack the living, then the living could also attack the dead. In his Satires, Juvenal chose his targets wisely and attacked the dead rather than risk offending the living:
[ . . . ] experiar quid concedatur in illos
quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina[ . . . ] I shall try what I may against those whose ashes
are covered along the Flaminia and Latina. (Sat.1.170–71)
As satiric targets, the dead cannot defend themselves against attacks on their former characters and actions. As metonymic targets, however, Juvenal can criticize an anonymous contemporary for the same behavior once committed by the deceased who is mentioned by name.
The deceased remain in an urban landscape as commemoration replaces demarcation of their remains.9 On a figurative level, the dead repopulate the boundaries of the city on whose roads, outside of the walls, they greet those who approach and leave as they transform the urban topography into a metaphorical landscape of death. The Etruscan necropolis, perhaps conceived as a reproduction/model of the world of the living but juxtaposed and separated from that world as though a parallel or even mirror image that is within view but separate and distinct has been replaced in the city of Rome with a figurative necropolis. Superimposed on the city with the deceased living among the current inhabitants, it shares the same urban and domestic space, and continues to affect the livings’ behavior through the visual and epigraphic recollection of the dead’s identities and achievements.
Epitaphs and Self-Representation of the Dead – Mark the Spot
Graves and epitaphs of the hic est ille situs type give directions for a viewer to look in a specific spot and identify the person buried there. Thus, they perform a deictic and a semantic function. Identification of the deceased is linked to memorialization of their accomplishments as Varro points out in his definition of a monimentum (De lingua latina 6.49):
Meminisse a memoria, cum id quod remansit in mente rursus movetur; quae a manendo ut manimoria potest esse dicta. Itaque Salii quod cantant: Mamuri Veturi, significant memoriam veterem. Ab eodem monere, quod is qui monet, proinde sit ac memoria; sic monimenta quae in sepulcris, et ideo secundum viam, quo praetereuntis admoneant et se fuisse et illos esse mortalis. Ab eo cetera quae scripta ac facta memoriae causa monimenta dicta.10
To remember comes from the word memory, since that which has remained in the mind is recalled; just as when something that has remained can be called a memory. So the Salii when they sing, Mamuri Veturi, they mean an ancient memory. From this comes the word to remind, since when one reminds, it is from memory. Thus the memorials on graves and even along the road admonish those passing by that they themselves were mortal and that the living, too, are mortal. From this other things that are written and done for the sake of memory are called monuments.
Funeral monuments, according to Varro, perform many functions that are physical and associative: mark the spot of burial; communicate the accomplishments of the deceased to a passerby who interprets the grave marker as a commemoration of the deceased’s accomplishments and a generic message on the brevity of life.
In first-person narratives on epitaphs that address a visitor or passerby, the tomb represents and conveys the words of the deceased and initiates a dialogue with the viewer that stops short when the epitaph cannot continue the conversation beyond an initial address. Portraits of the deceased on their funerary monument make the engagement with a passerby more dynamic: the first-person narrative of the inscription (self) represents both the deceased and the tombstone and even competes with the deceased.11 Particularly engaging are funerary altars, like that of Cornelia Glyce, now in the Cortile Ottagono of the Vatican Museums (figure 1), that contain a portrait of the deceased within a window-like frame that gives the impression of occupancy within a house, rather than a burial within an altar.12 The deceased is a double presence (actual corpse and allusion to the corpse) that engages the solitary viewer. To each visitor, however, the deceased takes on a new personality; therefore, both the deceased and the visitor are constantly changing.
Both the tombstone and the viewer/reader are important for reification. But what about the actual dead whose presence is assumed beneath the gravestone and whose identity is subsumed by the inscription? Even if a proper name were recorded, the actual personality and appearance of the deceased, known to those who knew them in their lifetime, cannot be recovered by those reading an epitaph generations after their death. Photographs of the deceased are now common on tombstones; but often the physical information they provide can be of limited use if the deceased died in old age but is commemorated by a picture taken in their youth or even in their old age since, in either scenario, only a snapshot of a specific moment of life is captured. Despite the presence of biographical detail, whether in a photograph or in an inscription, a “type” or abstraction of their former selves seems to be memorialized more than a specific “individual.” Epitaphs give an “illusion of personality” since the words seem to belong to the deceased, but, in reality, we do not know who composed them. Thus, the writing and reading of epitaphs test the limits of self-representation and commemoration as a limited versus limitive narrative and reading experience.13 Juvenal (Sat. 10.142–46) mocks human vanity through the nonpermanence of stone inscriptions:
patriam tamen obruit olim
gloria paucorum et laudis titulique cupido
haesuri saxis cinerum custodibus, ad quae
discutienda valent sterilis mala robora fici,
quandoquidem data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulcris.14The pursuit of glory by a few men
has before crushed a country: out of desire for
praise and a title that clings on stones that guard their ashes,
which the evil strength of a barren fig tree can crush,
since a lifespan has been given even to their graves.
Representation of the deceased involves a similar dynamic of association: a portrait, whether accurate or not, represents yet competes with the deceased who no longer looks like his representation although an incription or recognition of features perpetuates the identification.15 The representational possibilities and limitations of the deceased self-identifying with their portrait appear in the poet Ennius’ epitaph:
aspicite, o cives, senis Enni imaginis formam.
hic vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum.Behold, o citizens, the appearance of the image of old Ennius.
He recorded the greatest deeds of your fathers.
Ennius’ imago is used as a rhetorical device. Ennius invites the viewer to look upon the appearance of his imago. Thus, the second-person address to the viewer turns Ennius from figurative interlocutor to the object of the viewer’s gaze, as subjective self-representation competes with objectification of the subject. Ennius is both absent and present in the multiple representation of his image to the solitary viewer.
The custom of having the dead address a visitor to their grave or a passerby, who is too busy or too young to ponder the brevity of life and the inevitability of death, is found in Greece; however, many examples from Italy reinforce specific Roman ideals. Epitaphs include descriptions in the first and or third person of their former identities that stress moral character, accomplishments, and social station in life with greetings and warnings to the living, whether a descendant or a passerby, with the effect that the dead speak for themselves in tomb inscriptions. We often find the same information included on epitaphs in the third person. While biographic elements varied, in ancient epitaphs the deceased’s concern about their reputation in death among the living and the dead is uniquely Roman. The dead engage the living in a way which causes one to question their status as “dead.”
The epitaph belonging to a Claudia, for example, dates to around 135–120 BCE and was inscribed on a tablet or pillar found at Rome, now lost (CIL 1.2.1211). The epitaph is written in the senarius, a conversational meter from the stage, one that gives this epitaph an informal and colloquial air, as though the deceased were actually conversing with the passerby:
Hospes, quod deico paullum est; asta ac pellage.
Heic est sepulcrum hau pulcrum pulcrai feminae.
Nomen parentes nominarunt Claudiam.
Suom mareitom corde deilixit souo.
Gnatos duos creavit, horunc alterum
in terra linquit, alium sub terra locat.
Sermone lepido, tum autem incessu commodo.
Domum servavit, lanam fecit. Dixi. Abei.Stranger, what I say is brief: stay and read it.
This is the unattractive tomb of an attractive woman.
Her parents gave her the name Claudia.
She loved her husband with all her heart.
She bore two sons, of these one she leaves
on earth, the other she has placed below the ground.
She was charming in conversation but proper in her behavior.
She kept house, she made wool. I have spoken. Depart.
Stylistic features suggest a writer other than the deceased, giving the epitaph an archaic feel that contrasts with the colloquial and informal meter: archaic spellings are found on line 1, deico for dico; line 2, heic for hic and pulcrai
for pulcrae, (h is missing for pulcrum, too); line 4, mareitom for maritum and souo for suo. In addition, all lines end in a period except for line 5, and line 4 contains a figura etymologica: nomen nominarunt which is a feature of archaic Latin poetry. Line 2 also attempts to make an etymological pun on the word sepulcrum with the phrase hau pulcrum since both the prefix se- and the adverb hau(d) can both mean “not.” The adjective pulcrai to describe Claudia’s physical appearance forms a nice contrast to the unattractiveness of the tomb which the tomb itself expresses.
Whoever the author of the epitaph was, the narrative voice belongs to Claudia.16 The epitaph opens and closes with first-person addresses by Claudia but her biographical details appear in the third person; thus, there are two narrative voices/speakers in an epitaph which Claudia apparently narrates herself (dixi). The combination of self-representation and presentation of her personality reflects her selfless personality by progressing in subject matter from her parents, to her husband, to her children, and finally to herself and her modesty by praising her virtues in the third-person narrative voice. The generic address to a passerby is here made personal through a combination of narrative voices that emphasize and even demonstrate Claudia’s character.17
The dynamic between presentation and self-representation on epitaphs is most apparent in texts that include a poeticizing/poetic narrative which is concerned with the form and content of expression that reveals as much about the deceased as it does about the narrative voice. If an epitaph represents and competes with the deceased, then a poetic presence adds a third narrative voice that imposes a narrative structure on the words of both the deceased and the epitaph. The tomb visitor who wishes to learn the identity of the deceased becomes engaged in a narratological exercise in which competing narrative voices (and visual elements) vie for attention.
The visitor/passerby as reader (lector) construct appears in the epitaph of Herennia Crocine from Gades (modern Cadiz), Spain that dates to the first century BCE (CIL 2.1821):
Ave! / Herennia Crocine / cara sueis inclusa hoc
tumulo. / Crocine cara sueis. Vixi ego / et
ante aliae vixere puellae. / Iam satis est.
Lector discedens, / dicat ‘Crocine sit tibi
Terra / levis.’ Valete superi.Hail! Herennia Crocine, dear to her own, is buried
in this tomb. Crocine, dear to her own. I lived even
as other girls lived before me. That is enough.
Let the reader say while departing, “Crocine, lightly
rest the earth on you.” Farewell to those who live above ground.
Herennia’s first-person address to the passerby reveals little beyond her age. The extent of her accomplishments is summed up by vixi ego–I lived just as other girls before me. Her individuality seems to reside in her appreciation of the inevitable fact that she shares in the collective fates of other girls. In her request of the passerby she wishes for a generic hope expressed by the proverb sit tibi terra levis / “lightly rest the earth on you.’ Crocine speaks these words on the passerby’s behalf and thus dramatizes a conversation/ exchange with strangers who continually wish her a peaceful repose. Thus, the passerby is a reader and a speaker through reification of the tomb and the epitaph.
The epitaph of Helvia Prima (CIL I, 2. 1732), in elegiac couplets, which dates to around 45 BCE and was found at Beneventum, is a variation on the passerby theme:
Tu qui secura spatiarus mente viator
et nostri voltus derigis inferieis,
Si quaeris quae sim, cinis en et tosta favilla,
ante obitus tristeis Helvia Prima fui.
Coniuge sum Cadmo fructa Scrateio,
concordesque pari viximus ingenio.
Nunce data sum Diti longum mansura per aevum,
deducta et fatali igne et aqua Stygia.Passerby, you who walk past with carefree mind and
glance on my funeral gifts,
If you ask who I am, look at my ashes and burnt embers,
I was Helvia Prima before my sad death.
I enjoyed my marriage to Cadmus Scrateius,
we lived one in heart with equal disposition.
Now I have been given to Dis to remain an eternity,
led down by fatal fire and the Styx’s water.
Helvia invites the passerby to identify her by looking at her cremated remains by which she identifies herself. She does not mention a profession or her age, only that she enjoyed a happy marriage. The contrast between the apparent good health of the passerby and the death of the deceased is exaggerated here with Helvia Prima’s emphasis on her cremated remains. The passerby
in line 1 physically measures out his steps as he passes Helvia’s tomb. On a figurative level, he also measures out his life on earth free from care (secura spatiarus mente), perhaps meaning that he is too confident in youth. In line 7, Helvia Prima claims that she too will measure out her (after)life, but this will be below the earth (longum mansura per aevum). Helvia’s description of her loving relationship with her husband, Cadmus Scrateius, is common in Latin epitaphs and is the focus of her life’s accomplishments. The theme of marriage is also contained in the final two lines of the epitaph—Helvia has been given to the god of Death, Dis (data sum Diti), in much the same way that her father/patron gave her once to her husband, Cadmus. This figurative double marriage emphasizes Helvia’s character as a devoted and congenial wife. Thus, poetic elements are used as a means of expressing Helvia’s character and (self) representation.
A poetic consciousness is apparent from the earliest Latin epitaphs that come from the Tomb of the Scipios near the Via Appia Antica in Rome. The anonymous authors of these inscriptions peppered their epitaphs with archaic language more appropriate to an earlier age, and yet this language was consciously at odds with the poetic style of the epitaph. We find modern spellings and contemporary concepts together with archaic forms, but we also find archaisms in epitaphs whose poetic style betrays a later date when the language does not. This archaizing style produced an eclectic if not jarring effect: like reading a contemporary obituary written in Elizabethan or Victorian verse or reading a Victorian obituary reworked in modern slang. However odd this may seem to us, descendants wished their ancestors to be portrayed in a favorable contemporary light, that is, Hellenized through a Greek education (even when this seems historically unlikely), but in language that was solemn and grounded in Italic tradition. While these epitaphs have already received much attention for their language and (emerging) poetic sensibilities, I would like to focus on self-representation and the effects of a poetic identity (super)imposed, literally and figuratively, on both the deceased and the tombstone.18
The earliest two epitaphs are literal palimpsests—reworked versions of the originals of which only the first line or two of each survives. As the firstknown epitaphs of ancient Rome, they are pre-conventional but they are also conventional in that the reworked versions reveal more about later attitudes toward burial customs and epitaphs. Both the original and reworked versions identify the deceased in relation to his father. The reworked versions give political and military accomplishments, making the epitaphs highly personal and specific in their recording of aristocratic virtues. The epitaphs were written by an unknown author or authors (tradition claims the poet Ennius but the evidence is inconclusive). The first-person voice, however, was intended to represent the (self-representational) words of the deceased. The reworked inscriptions were written for a contemporary reader who wanted to selfidentify with his ancestors, but also for his ancestors to self-identify with his own ideals. It is unclear how these epitaphs influenced later Roman epitaphic tradition since these tombs were in a family vault presumably accessible only to family members. In other words, we cannot answer the question of how poetic elements on epitaphs became normalized, especially considering the wide variety of objects (tombstone, plaque, vase, sarcophagus, etc.) upon which epitaphs were inscribed.
The earliest of the Scipio epitaphs is that of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (consul 298, censor 290 BCE; CIL 1.2.6–7):
a) [L. Cornelio] Cn. f. Scipio
b) Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus
Gnaivod patre prognatus, fortis vir sapiensque,
quoius forma virtutei parisuma fuit,
consol censor aidilis quei fuit apud vos,
Taurasia Cisauna Samnio cepit
subigit omne Loucanam opsidesque abdoucit.a) Lucius Cornelius Cn. f. Scipio
b) Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus
son begat by Gnaeus, a brave and wise man,
whose beauty matched his bravery,
he was a consul, censor, and aedile among you,
he captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium,
he subdued all of Loucania and took hostages.
The epitaph appears on Barbatus’ sarcophagus in two different versions: an original (painted) line survives as line a which provides the name of the deceased in a traditional ordering of names. The reworked and inscribed inscription is section b. A poetic treatment of the reworked inscription is apparent in the first line which rearranges the traditional format of a Roman name, as it appears in line 1 of the original inscription. In line 2, fortis vir sapiensque is a reference to a Hellenic education, for which Barbatus is historically too early, but a trait traditionally ascribed to his famous descendant (great-grandson) Scipio Africanus. The Greek emphasis on physical beauty as an indication of inner virtue is apparent in line 3 and is another anachronistic cultural detail superimposed on stone and onto the character and personality of the deceased. Barbatus’ elected offices are listed in line 4 while the tribes he conquered are listed in the final two lines. Modern spellings are evident in the list of offices: consol for archaic cosol; censor for archaic cesor. Archaic elements include the spelling of Gnaeus in line 2 as Gnaivod, parisuma in line 3 for parissima, and quei in line 4 for qui. The epitaph is composed in the Saturnian meter which predates hexameter verse at Rome and was used in epitaphs until at least the mid-first century BCE, long after its disappearance as a literary meter (except in the earliest books of Lucilius’ Satires). Therefore, this epitaph contains a fusion of Greek (content) and traditional Roman/Italic elements (content/form).
The content of the epitaph is now as eclectic as its appearance and current location. The sarcophagus recalls Greek altar designs from South Italy with Ionic and Doric decorative elements, but it also shares general characteristics with Etruscan sarcophagi (figure 2).
It was moved from the Tomb of the Scipios on the Via Appia Antica to the Vatican Museums where it now sits in a niche along a busy corridor across from a satellite gift shop that sells posters of the Sistine Chapel, gift items, and museum publications (figure 3). Large tour groups that pass through the corridor make it almost impossible to stop long enough to read Barbatus’ epitaph or to read the epitaph of his son Lucius Cornelius Scipio which hangs directly above Barbatus’ sarcophagus. To read the father’s epitaph is a challenge, but to read the son’s requires a museum visitor to step back and stand firm against the crowds rushing past unaware of the tomb or the historically important epitaphs. Not only is the tomb out of its ritual context, so too has the commemoration of the deceased changed if the act of reading an epitaph designed to grab a passerby’s attention is made impossible because of Barbatus’ new (nonfunerary) surroundings. To museum visitors rushing past the sarcophagus en route to or from the Sistine Chapel and only vaguely aware of the objects in their peripheral vision, there is no time or interest to commemorate the dead; instead, a funerary marker has become an itinerary marker to get one’s bearings between exhibition halls.
The following epitaph of Barbatus’ son, Lucius Cornelius Scipio (consul 259, censor 258 BCE; CIL 1.2.8–9) is the second oldest and also of historic and linguistic interest:
a) [L.] Cornelio L.f. Scipio
[a]idiles cosol cesor
b) Honc oino ploirume cosentiont R[omai]
duonoro optumo fuise viro
Luciom Scipione. Filios Barbati
consol censor aidilis hic fuet a[pud vos].
hec cepit Corsica Aleriaque urbe
dedet Tempestatebus aide mereto[d].a) [L.] Cornelius L. f. Scipio
aedile, consul, censor
b) Most would agree that he excelled all men at Rome,
Lucius Scipio. The son of Barbatus,
he was consul, censor, and aedile among you.
he captured Corsica and the city Aleria,
he dedicated to the Goddesses of Weather a temple, by merit.
This epitaph is more recent than that of the elder Scipio, but the archaizing elements evoke the language of an even earlier date. The language is at odds with its innovative poetic style and the result is an epitaph that is at once archaizing and modern. The effect of this lingustic/artistic contradiction is to obscure the (self) representation of the deceased in the original epitaph. The imposition of an aesthetic on an epitaph reveals more about Scipio’s descendants’ representation of their ancestor and self-representation of their own eclectic tastes.
Two lines survive from the original inscription in section a, and the reworked epitaph appears in section b. We can see from the original inscription that Scipio’s name is given in the traditional word order in the first line and the public offices which he held in the second line. In the reworked version, Cornelius is dropped and the second L for Lucius to signify his father’s name is changed to Barbatus. Scipio’s name does not appear until line 3 where the traditional order of Lucius (Cornelius) Barbati Filios Scipio is given a poetic treatment so that his name is rearranged and divided in two by a period, thereby separating the epitaph into roughly two halves.
The epitaph is full of archaisms: in line 1, we find honc for hunc; oino for unum, ploirume for plurimi; consentiont for consentiunt and Romai for Romae. In line 2, duonoro . . . viro substitutes for bonorum virorum, and fuise replaces fuisse. The offices held in line 4, consol, censor, aidilis, are properly written and replace the archaisms of the original line 2 which do not have an n for consol and censor. In line 5, hec replaces hic. The reason for the change in spelling between hic in line 4 and hec in line 5 is unclear; hic replaces the relative pronoun quei which we find in Scipio’s father’s epitaph, line 4, and points to a deliberate break with the previous sentence (epitaph 1 puts the titles and the names of the conquered places in the same sentence); the final m is not written for the accusatives Corsica Aleriaque urbe. In line 6, Tempestatebus replaces Tempestatibus and is a personification of Weather goddesses. The final m is missing for aide.
There were many generations buried at the Tomb of the Scipios, including Gn. Cornelius Scipio Hispanus (c 135 BCE; CIL 1.2.15), whose epitaph is remarkable for its poetic form and content:
Cn. Cornelius Cn. f. Scipio Hispanus pr. aid. cur.
q. tr. mil. II Xvir sl. iudik. Xvir sacr. fac.
Virtutes generis mieis moribus accumulavi,
progeniem genui, facta patris petiei.
Maiorum optenui laudem, ut sibei me esse creatum
laetentur; stirpem nobilitavit honor.Gnaeus Cornelius, son of Gnaeus, Scipio Hispanus, praetor, curule aedile,
quaestor, tribune of soldiers twice; member of the Board of Ten for
Judging Lawsuits; member of the Board of Ten for Making Sacrifices.
By my virtue, I increased the virtue of my clan,
I begat offspring and sought to rival my father’s deeds.
I upheld the praise of my ancestors, so that they may be happy
that I was created with themselves; my honor ennobled my stock.
The epitaph is written in elegiac couplets (alternating lines of hexameter and pentameter verse), which are the earliest surviving examples. The first two lines appear to be aimed at the living while the two elegiac lines appear to be aimed at his ancestors. Hispanus’ emphasis on his ancestors mirrors the ancestor worship that would be found in the home, and he furthermore strives to be worthy of similar praise by employing, in the Latin, archaisms (mieis; petiei; sibei) that would have been used by his ancestors a century earlier. That his dead ancestors would be happy (laetentur) with his moral character illustrates a readership joined, rather than separated, by death. Thus, the epitaph reflects a need for accuracy since self-representation would have an objective assessment by ancestors who now form the contemporary family of the deceased, as would his descendants who will join him and their ancestors and face a similar reckoning of their accomplishments and virtues.
The arrangement of the epitaph’s information contrasts strongly with the previous two. The first two lines contain the deceased’s name and the names of the public offices which he held. His special offices are listed in line 2. Abbreviations are given for his offices and their minimalization here serves to emphasize the importance of the elegiac portion of the epitaph. With line 3, the elegiac portion opens with the word virtutes while line 6 ends with the word honor. In other words, the verses open and close with the personal qualities of Hispanus. In line 3, accumulavi replaces the thirdperson voice of the first two epitaphs. We find poetic features: alliteration of m’s, p’s, g’s, and t’s throughout which adds an archaic sound to the epitaph. A figura etymologica (the side-by-side placement of a noun and verb derived from the same root), in line 4: progeniem genui. The line emphasizes three generations of Hispanus’ family: his children, his parents, and himself. Line 5 contains three elisions and ends in an enjambment while the other lines end in a period. Therefore, this epitaph represents a departure from the first two epitaphs in its poetic form and content: seemingly paradoxically, it preserves archaic forms and poetic features side by side that give it, at once, both an archaic and a contemporary flavor to reflect Hispanus’ stated audience of the dead and the living. Despite the highly poetic character of the epitaph, poetry emerges as a vehicle for self-representation of the deceased rather than the poet.
So far, I have examined select epitaphs in which the words describing the deceased have been changed in a later rewriting of the epitaph or in which the deceased is (self) represented on a tombstone that competes for narrative attention. The presence of a poetic/poeticizing voice complicates the narrative of epitaphs and engages a visitor, who is interested in learning the identity of the deceased, in an interpretative challenge. The epitaph that the poet Laberius composed for his wife illustrates this challenge: the narrating poet and the deceased share the tomb’s narrative only to have Laberius replaced by the narrative voice of an unknown writer who composes Laberius’ own epitaph:
Bassa, vatis quae Laberi coniuga, hoc alto sinu
frugae matris quiescit, moribus priscis nurus.
animus sanctus cum maritost, anima caelo reddita est.Parato hospitium; cara iungant corpora
haec rursum nostrae, sed perpetuae, nuptiae.
In spica et casia es, benedora stacta et amomo.
inde oro gramenue novum vel flos oriatur,
unde coronem amens aram carmenque meum et me.
purpureo varum vitis depicta racemo
quattuor amplesast ulmos de palmite dulci.
scaenales frondes detexant hinc geminam umbram
arboream procaeram et mollis vincla maritae.Hic corpus vatis Laberi, nam spiritus ivit
illuc unde ortus. quaerite fontem animae.Quod fueram non sum, sed rursum ero quod modo non sum.
ortus et occasus vitaque morsque itidest.19Bassa, wife of the poet Laberius, rests here in the
deep lap of fruitful Earth, a wife of ancient morals.
Her revered thoughts are with her husband, her soul has returned to heaven.Prepare a suite; let our marriage vows unite our beloved
bodies again, but forever.You are in saffron and cinnamon, fragrant myrrh and balsam.
From there I pray a plant or a flower may grow, with which,
grief stricken, I may wreath the altar, my verses, and myself.
The vine colored with the purple bunches of grapes has
embraced four elm trees with their dear tendrils.
Let the scenic greenery weave here a twin shadow,
the tall tree and the bonds of their tender spouse.Here lies the body of the poet Laberius, for his spirit returned
whence it came. Seek the fountainhead of the soul.What I was, I am not now, but I will be again what I am not now.
Rising and setting, life and death are the same.
Laberius identifies his wife in relation to himself and his role of poet (vates). The wife occupies various physical and figurative locations: her remains are buried below the earth which is personified as a giving mother while her soul is in heaven. Her (cremated?) remains are surrounded by spices and fragrant greens which the poet hopes will grow into a new herb or flower to mark her altar and wear as a physical sign of his grief. The new herb or flower will also signal the content and emotion of his dirge.
The thought of being figuratively surrounded by his wife through the flowers that she would give life to turns Laberius’ thoughts to the physical setting of the tomb. The epitaph describes the appearance of the tomb which is a cepotaphium: four elm trees which are supporting grape vines are paired like spouses and their interwoven branches form a theatrical backdrop (scaenales frondes) to the tomb, altar, and epitaph. The branches also recall the romantic pastoral setting of Daphnis’ tomb in Vergil’s Eclogue 5, thus further transforming the tomb’s location into an intertextual space. Laberius’ tribute to his wife turns the act of reading an epitaph for the identity of the deceased into an intertextual experience that involves his self-identification as a poet in a physical and figurative landscape with her remains (actual and metaphorically transformed). In its original setting, the epitaph that describes the figurative metamorphosis of the tomb’s setting was also part of the landscape it described, thus serving as a botanical marker common in public gardens today that allow a visitor to “read” the epitaph for the identity of the deceased against its setting.
Laberius’ third-person narrative voice of his wife is replaced by the thirdperson narrative of an unknown author. This added narrative voice does not add to the biographical and self-identifying information contained in Laberius’ epitaph to his wife; rather, the epitaph simply marks the location of Laberius’ remains without reference to his wife and informs the passerby that his soul has returned to its source. The identity of the first-person narrative voice in the final two lines of the epitaph is unclear: Laberius? his soul? The universalizing statement of birth, life, and death is reminscent of tragedy, and if the reader understands them as belonging to Laberius, they would be words full of gravity and pathos from a poet famous for his mimes.
Survivors of the deceased can also impose their presence and narrative voices onto epitaphs that turn the focus away from the deceased and even the poetic voice toward the survivor expressing their grief. Even in the following damaged epitaph, the marking of a son’s death, for example, gives the deceased’s mother an opportunity to mourn his death and lament the sad circumstances of her own life:
filio
[infelicis]sim mater
[aetatis pri]mo qui mihi flore perit [perit]
percussus cornu, bubus dum pascua ponit;
ad quem dum curro, dum miser ante perit.
infelixs genetrix Diti tria funera duxsi;
lugebam natas cum mihi natus obit.
quod superest matri saltem concedite, Manes,
ut sint qui voltus post mea fata premant.
M. Octavi Pulli f. Rufi.20to her son
a most unfortunate mother
who in the first bloom of youth was taken [taken] from me
gored by a horn as he was laying out fodder for the oxen;
the poor boy died even as I was running to him.
I, an unlucky mother, have led three funerals to Dis.
I was mourning my daughters when my son died.
Manes, at least allow a mother to keep what is left
so that there may be those who can close my eyes after death.
Marcus Octavius Rufus, son of Pullus.
The epitaph is remarkable for the manner in which the deceased, Marcus Octavius Rufus, died while in the farm fields and for the prominent role in the narrative that his mother occupies. The son shares his epitaph with sisters who predeceased him. Therefore, the tombstone marks the location/ identity of her son, but it also represents and marks the grief of his mother who also expresses a wish for the future that someone will survive her and give her a burial.
In another epitaph, a grave is used as the memorial to the grief of a man who lost his wife and son when their ship sank. The husband/father’s grief dominates the epitaph and overshadows the personalities of his wife and son:
Heu crudele nimis fatum. dua funera maerens
plango vir et genitor flebile mersa deo.
sat fuerat, Portmeu, cumba vexsisse maritam
abreptamque mihi sede iacere tua.
adiecit Chloto iteratum rumpere filum,
ut natum raperet tristis, ut ante, mihi.
me decuit morti prius occubuisse suppremae
tuque mihi tales, nate, dare exsequias.
ad tu ne propera, simili qui sorte teneris,
dunc annos titulo, nomina ut ipse legas.
illa bis undenos vixit, natus quoque senos;
nomen huic Probus est, huic quidem Athenaidis.
quas ego, quas genitor pro te dabo, nate, querellas,
raptum que(m) Stygio detinet unda lacu!
quam bene bis senos florebas, parve, per annos,
credebantque deis vota placere mea!
stamina ruperunt subito tua candida Parcae
apstuleruntque simul vota precesque mihi.
cum te, nate, fleo, planctus dabet Attica aedo
et comes ad lachrimas veniet pro coniuge Siren,
semper et Alcyone flebit te voce suprema
et tristis mecum resonabet carmen et Echo
Oebaliusque dabit mecum tibi murmura cycnus.21Alas, my too cruel fate. Mourning, I weep for two deaths,
as husband and father, sadly drowned by fate.
It would have been enough, Charon, for you to have carried
my wife in your boat, and once taken, to rest in your home.
Clotho took part and broke a second thread, so that, as before,
she, sullen, could snatch my son from me.
It was proper for me to be laid out in final death before you
and for you to offer such funeral tributes to me.
But do not hasten to read the names yourself, you who are grasping a
similar fate, until
you read the years on the epitaph.
She lived twenty two years, my son twelve;
his name was Probus, hers was Athenais.
What laments, my son, will I your father give you whom the
water of the Stygian stream detains, snatched from me?
How well you lived, child, for your twelve years, and
they thought my vows were pleasing to the gods!
Suddenly, the Parcae cut your white thread and, at the same time,
robbed me of my vows and prayers.
When I weep for you, my son, the Attic nightingale will give a lament
and the Siren will come as companion to the tears for my wife,|
and Alcyone will weep for you with her final cries and sad Echo
will repeat the funeral song with me
and the Spartan swan will lament you with me.
The narrative voice (= a Probus based on the son’s name) mourns his losses in his dual roles as husband and father. The unknown author/poet of the epitaph not only poeticizes Probus’ grief, but also identifies himself as a poet, as he links himself with mythological birds associated with death, in particular with the dying swan which is common as a metaphor for a poet’s last song. The highly poeticized expression of his grief, however, is at odds with the numerous grammatical mistakes that pepper the epitaph. The comparison of the shipwreck that took the lives of both wife and son to the boat of Charon, at the beginning of the epitaph, is relevant but also signals that the expression of grief will be highly figurative and less likely to reflect the actual self-expression of the husband/father.
Illusory Epitahs
Mark the Spot?
How should we interpret graves of the hic est ille situs type, like the one given to Pompey in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, which do not mark the location of the deceased’s remains? My own experience with my father’s grave illustrates the danger of interpreting epitaphs literally, but even with the knowledge that the deceased is not buried where an epitaph specifies, how should a viewer/ reader interpret information contained in an epitaph, like that of Scipio Barbatus now in the Vatican Museums, that no longer serves its original purpose in announcing and demarcating where the deceased is buried? From a physical perspective, this results when a grave marker is moved but not the deceased (or remains of the deceased are disturbed and also relocated, but not where the grave marker is located); thus the epitaph no longer demarcates the location of a corpse. The location of its new surroundings takes on a new aesthetic context that replaces the former religious/sociological one.
Cicero, for example, in planning a memorial park for his daughter Tullia, advises Atticus to decorate the grounds with Greek and Roman (funeral) monuments:
de fano illo dico, de quo tantum quantum me amas velim cogites. equidem neque de genere dubito (placet enim mihi Cluati) neque de re (statutum est enim), de loco non numquam. velim igitur cogites. ego, quantum his temporibus tam eruditis fieri potuerit, profecto illam consecrabo omni genere monimentorum ab omnium ingeniis sumptorum et Graecorum et Latinorum.22
I refer to that temple, about which I wish you to think about as much as you esteem me. I have no hesitation at all about the form (indeed, the plan of Cluatius pleases me), nor about the idea (since it is already decided), but I sometimes do about the location. Therefore, I wish for you to think about it. I, as much as it will be possible in these informed times, will consecrate to her every kind of memorial supplied from the masterpieces of the Greeks and Latins.
Although Cicero is still in search of a site, the landscape design has already been planned by an architect who will (super)impose his design on the site which will itself be an imposition/physical sign of Cicero’s grief on the landscape. The mixture of Greek and Roman monuments to decorate the gardens represents a further recontextualizing of the original objects as funeral markers in a new landscape setting.
Today, epitaphs on museum walls are decorative items and mark a shift from the topography of death where the dead are buried to the decoration with death in a secular setting, where the objects of death ritual from epitaphs, urns, sarchopaghi, to grave goods are displayed. At the Capitoline Museums in the Palazzo Nuovo, for example, to the right of the entrance to the alcove containing the Capitoline Venus, is the epitaph of a certain Rufus (figure 4) that is powerful and full of pathos in its simplicity:
D.M.
RUFO
RUFILLA•MATER
FILIO•CARISSIMO
FECITD.M.
To Rufus
His mother Rufilla
for her dearest son
made this.
The inscription is brief like many epitaphs that have just D.M. (= dis manibus, i.e., to the divine shades), and the name of the deceased, but this one also contains the name of the deceased’s mother. No family name of a gens or clan is given, perhaps signifying the epitaph of a freedwoman. Furthermore, the inscription is painted on a small plaque with few words and was therefore inexpensive to produce. Rufilla informs the reader of her relationship to her dead son, but we do not know whether her husband is already dead
or indeed, whether she had even been married since the boy seems to be named after her and not his father. Rufus is defined by his mother’s affection for him, rather than by his own attributes or accomplishments, therefore suggesting that this is an epitaph to a dead child. Rufilla does not, however, dominate the epitaph in the same way as does the mother of Marcus Octavius Rufus. The syntax also conveys information in an iconic reading of the epitaph: the datives Rufo and filio carissimo are separated by Rufilla mater and fecit, the placement of which words evokes a maternal caress and reflects the centrality of the mother’s role in her son’s life. On lines 2 and 3, we also have an enjambment, a line that carries over into another line without punctuation, with mater and filio separated by lines 3 and 4 that poignantly signifies that a mother is close to her son even though separated by death. Rufus’ mother could not have known that her memorial would be in a museum someday, especially as a peripheral attraction to a famous statue.
The juxtaposition between Rufus’ epitaph (just one of many along the same wall) and the Capitoline Venus is interesting. A cordon blocks the entrance to the alcove and the viewer stands at the entrance with funeral plaques on the walls on either side. (figure 5). The cordon separates both the museum visitor and the epitaphs of the Roman dead from Venus, spatially and temporally, but it also unites them as mortals, past and present. The primary focus of attention is the statue, but it is visible through the peripheral vision of death memorials: Venus, on her pedestal, represents an artistic ideal that has outlasted the mortality of generations of Romans and which continues to be perpetuated. Nonfunerary art competes with or is complemented by memorials, depending on the perspective of the viewer, of the Roman dead who are not buried in the museum, but whose presence is nonetheless suggested or even advertised along its walls.
Venus preparing for her bath behind the cordon, however, may not be safe from misinterpretation. If the placement of Rufus’ epitaph in a museum elevates it to the status of “art,” the placement of Venus’ statue among funerary markers may turn it into a funerary statue by assimilation: to museum visitors familiar with second-century CE portraits of wealthy Romans modeled after Venus (especially of the Capua type), and imitated in the funerary portrait reliefs of freedwomen, Venus may be misinterpreted as a portrait of an ancient Roman woman depicted as Venus.23 The mistake would be facilitated if a museum visitor noticed the portrait of a Flavian Woman as Venus, located in the same corridor as Rufus’ epitaph but along the other wall, before approaching the alcove of the Capitoline Venus (figure 6). This portrait statue was found in Rome near the Basilica and Catacombs of San Sebastiano, which suggests a funerary context among the tombs along the Via Appia Antica.24 The pose of this Venus is less modest than that of the Capitoline Venus pudica type; nonetheless, the contrast between the Venuslike body and the Roman face of the woman commands attention.
Paradoxically, through assimilation, the Capitoline Venus, herself the model for funeral portrait types, would become a copy of herself adapted for funerary commemoration in an alcove that enshrines (or entombs) its famous model. Through falsely advertising the location of their remains, the epitaphs of Rufus and the other Roman dead lining the corridor of the Palazzo Nuovo turn funerary art into art and art into funerary art in an interpretive exercise that requires a museum visitor to contemplate an object, whether epitaph or portrait, within the contexts of its original function in its former location and its new (aesthetic) function in its new (nonfunerary) location.25
Mark the Text
Epitaphs in a literary passage, like their museum counterparts, are also removed from their original ritual contexts and express a similar deception or paradox: a corpse is not buried where the text indicates. The viator was a lector at an actual tombstone, but now the lector becomes a viator through the reading of texts that are encoded with epitaphs. A grave marker functions as a narrative marker since the text is literally encoded with an epitaph (versus an actual tombstone which encodes a landscape). Just as an epitaph on a tombstone represents and competes with the narrative voice of the deceased, epitaphs in literary texts compete with the narrative voice of the author. Actual and figurative epitaphs both provide narrative closure: an epitaph on a tombstone represents biological and biographical closure, but an epitaph in a literary text may frustrate an expectation or imitation of that closure when the death is just a fiction for a character (or author) who continues to live beyond the narrative of the epitaph and its literary setting.
Dido, for example, in the speech which Seneca quoted in condemning Pacuvius’ mock funerals, delivers her own epitaph in the Aeneid (4.653–58). Immediately prior to her suicide on a funeral pyre, which she constructed with objects of sentimental value that Aeneas had given to her, Dido lists her life’s major accomplishments:
vixi et quem dederat cursum Fortuna peregi,
et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.
urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia vidi,
ulta virum poenas inimico a fratre recepi,
felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum
numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae.I lived and what course Fortune gave, I completed,
and now my great imago will go below the earth.
I founded a famous city and saw my city walls,
I avenged my husband from his enemy, my brother,
happy, more than happy I would have been if the
Dardanian fleet had never reached our shores.
Dido represents herself and her accomplishments with emphasis on verbs in the first person, but she does not identify herself explicitly. Emphasis is placed on survival, revenge, and unhappiness (since the repetition of felix in line 4 is part of a conditional clause). Dido does not give any details of her relationship with her husband and significantly, she does not see or describe herself as pia, a common epithet for women on tombstones.
As a self-represented character, Dido’s narrative voice competes with Vergil’s. She does not make any direct references to her relationship with Aeneas; rather, the narrative of her epitaph and of her life’s accomplishments ends with the arrival of the Trojans to Carthage. Until Anna arrives to find her sister dying on a burning pyre, Dido is her own funeral director, corpse, and mourner/audience. The pathos of the scene is increased by reading/hearing Dido recite her own epitaph since she has consciously separated herself from her body and the living as though a stranger reads and interprets what she is, in fact, reciting about herself. The epitaph serves as a textual marker of the location of Dido’s suicide and cremation, but it also foreshadows Dido’s reappearance in the text in Book 6. Dido’s epitaph provides closure and nonclosure to the narrative: the conceit that she expresses that she will continue to live on in death in the Underworld is common on actual epitaphs, but here is programmatic (to readers who remember the epitaph when she reappears in the epic or on a rereading of the poem).26
The frequent allusions to and inclusion of epitaphs in epic, which formed part of the narratives of funerals from Vergil to Statius, encode the shared narrative landscape of epic, but they also serve as authorial and emotional markers in elegiac poetry. While the origins of Latin elegiac poetry are obscure, its themes of love and death share features with epitaph verse from the shared elegiac meter of alternating hexameter and pentameter verse for the arousal of pathos.27 As a literary genre, however, elegy is related to death and Propertius uses death and the dead as theme and interlocutor to deemphasize the distinctions between life and death and assert the originality of his poetry. In elegy 1.7. 21–26, for example, the poet states his preference for elegiac over epic poetry and imagines his readers discussing his artistic legacy as though visiting his tomb:
tum me non humilem mirabere saepe poetam,|
tunc ego Romanis praeferar ingeniis;
nec poterunt iuvenes nostro reticere sepulcro
‘Ardoris nostri magne poeta, iaces.’
tu cave nostra tuo contemnas carmina fastu:
saepe venit magno faenore tardus Amor.28Then you will often marvel at me, not an obscure poet,
and I will be preferred to all the talents of Rome:
Nor will young men be able to stay silent at my tomb:
“Great poet of our passions, you lie buried.”
Be careful not to despise our poems with your arrogance:
often, Love comes late at great cost.
Propertius projects his fame beyond his death to promote the quality of his poetry in the present. The lector of his poetry is also the scriptor of his illusory epitaph, which extends the narrative presence of Propertius in death.
Propertius exploits the epitaph tradition in elegies 1.21 and 1.22, dating to 41–40 BCE, in which he describes the dying words of his kinsman Gallus, who had fought at the siege of Perugia. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the poem is spoken not by a dying, but rather an already dead Gallus. By employing an epitaph form, Propertius can give the ostensible words of Gallus after his death. Emotion and the expression of sentiments are exchanged between the living and the dead as though death were no impediment:
‘Tu, qui consortem properas evadere casum,
miles ab Etruscis saucius aggeribus,
quid nostro gemitu turgentia lumina torques?
pars ego sum vestrae proxima militiae.
sic te servato ut possint gaudere parentes,
ne soror acta tuis sentiat e lacrimis:
Gallum per medios ereptum Caesaris ensis
effugere ignotas non potuisse manus;
et quaecumque super dispersa invenerit ossa
montibus Etruscis, haec sciat esse mea.’“You who hasten to avoid a companion fate,
a soldier wounded on the Etruscan ramparts,
why do you turn your eyes welling with tears to my groans?
I am your closest comrade-in-arms.
So save yourself so that your parents may rejoice,
and my sister not guess these deeds from your tears:
that Gallus stole out from the midst of Caesar’s swords,
but was not able to flee the hands of someone unknown;
and whatever bones she may find scattered atop
Etruscan mounds, let her know that these are mine.”
The words on the epitaph self represent both Gallus and his words which continue in death. The epitaph marks the location where Gallus’ remains are located, but the final lines inform the passerby that his remains are not all buried but rather, are scattered around the battle site. Therefore, the epitaph does not mark the spot where Gallus is buried, even though the narrative serves as a physical and textual marker for his sister who will search for his tomb and his unburied remains. The illusory epitaph as the self-represented words of Gallus requires the passerby/reader to question whether or not Gallus is dead or alive and buried or unburied. The epitaph is both limited and limitive to the addressee/lector who seems to be reading an epitaph, but is actually reading a poem modeled on an epitaph for a character who is already dead but addressing the reader as though he were still alive.
In elegy 22, Propertius responds to the previous poem and again uses the death of his kinsman to comment on contemporary politics. The poem is not an epitaph, but rather a description of Gallus’ family’s connection to Perugia and the losses it sustained, measured in both life and land. Lines 6–8 make it clear that the Gallus of elegy 21 never received a burial:
Qualis et unde genus, qui sint mihi, Tulle, Penates,
quaeris pro nostro semper amicitia.
si Perusina tibi patriae sunt nota sepulcra,
Italiae duris funera temporibus,
cum Romana suos egit discordia civis,
(sic mihi praecipue, pulvis Etrusca, dolor,
tu proiecta mei perpessa es membra propinqui,
tu nullo miseri contegis ossa solo),
proxima supposito contingens Umbria campo
me genuit terris fertilis uberibus.Of what sort and from where, Tullus, are my Penates
you are constantly seeking on behalf of our friendship.
If the Perusine tombs of our homeland are known to you,
and the deaths of Italy in harsh times,
when Roman civil war drove on her own citizens
(this is an especial grief to me, Etruscan dust, that
you have endured the bones of my relative to be flung away.
With no soil do you cover his wretched bones),
fertile Umbria, where she touches closest to the adjoining fields,
bore me among fruitful lands.
The contrast drawn in the final lines between the unburied body of Propertius’ kinsman and the Etruscan soil as the source of his own birth emphasize earth as both the starting and ending points of life. It thus adds to the pathos of Gallus’ death, in that his body was never buried and hence he could not be found by his relatives, despite the illusory epitaph providing a physical and textual marker to identify his remains. From the perspective of death ritual, the absence of a grave epitaph also means that Gallus could not converse with passersby as they reanimate his personality by reading his epitaph aloud, despite the narrative conceit that elegy 1.21 preserved the text of both tomb and the deceased.
If a poet can turn a reader of his elegies into a scriptor and lector of epitaphs, he can also reverse the exchange through imitation of a deceased addressing a passerby/lector on an epitaph that does not mark the figurative location of his remains. The poet furthermore plays dead in imitation of epitaphs in the first-person narrative voice. In his second (verse) preface to the Parentalia, written in the 4th c CE, the Christian Ausonius, for example, introduces his collection of epitaphs (epicedes) with a poem that is itself modeled upon epitaphs:
Nomina carorum iam condita funere iusto,
fleta prius lacrimis, nunc memorabo modis,
nuda, sine ornatu, fandique carentia cultu:
sufficit inferiis exsequialis honos.
nenia, funereis satis officiosa querellis,
annua ne tacitum munera praetereas
quae Numa cognatis sollemnia dedicat umbris,
ut gradus aut mortis postulat aut generis.
hoc satis est tumulis, satis et telluris egenis:
voce ciere animas funeris instar habet.
gaudent compositi cineres sua nomina dici;
frontibus hoc scriptis et monumenta iubent.
ille etiam, maesti cui defuit urna sepulchri,
nomine ter dicto paene sepultus erit.
at tu, quicumque es, lector, qui fata meorum
dignaris maestis commemorare elegis,
inconcussa tuae percurras tempora vitae
et praeter iustum funera nulla fleas.29The names of loved ones already buried in a proper ritual,
already mourned with tears, I now commemorate in verse,
plain, without ornament and lacking polished turns of phrase:
a funereal tribute is sufficient for the dead.
Dirge, ever dutiful in funeral laments,
do not forget the annual gifts for the silent ones
which Numa established as annual rites for kindred shades,
as the distance or relation of the dead demands.
This is enough for the dead, those buried and those lacking earth:
calling upon the dead by name is similar to a funeral.
Buried ashes are gladdened when their own names are spoken;
even their graves order this on their inscribed fronts.
Even that man, for whom the urn of a sad burial is lacking,
will be as though buried when his name is said three times.
But you, Reader, whoever you are, who think it worthwhile to
commemorate
the deaths of my relatives in sad verses,
may you pass the span of your life unharmed and
may you never mourn a death unless it is natural. (1–18)
Ausonius addresses the reader of his poems (lector, 15), as though he were a self-represented narrating voice of an epitaph that is addressed to a passerby. Ausonius does not use the address to predict his poetic immortality, but rather he asks the reader to participate in his tribute to his dead relatives. The animated dead will rejoice at the voicing of their names by the reader and even the unburied will be honored as buried if the reader says their name three times: gaudent compositi cineres sua nomina dici; / frontibus hoc scriptis et monumenta iubent (11,12). Thus the reader of Ausonius’ poems is the figurative lector of an epitaph who himself becomes a second narrative presence to the dead through a reading process that simultaneously addresses and pleases the dead honorand.30
Ausonius refers to the Parentalia as nenia (line 5) and as elegea (7.1), but the collection is unique as a literary genre since it combines elements of illusive epitaphs and elegy (epicede) in theme and poetic format. Epicede, borrowed from Greek literature, included the voicing of grief and the offering of consolation, was a very popular theme in both Roman poetry and prose.31 Epicede in verse occurs as early as Homer and the dirge-like laments of the tragic stage and bucolic song provided much for Romans to emulate in poetry and prose for expressing grief or offering consolation to a survivor after the death of a loved one. Grief and consolation are addressed to the deceased and to the living: In 106, Catullus mourns the death of his brother; Horace consoles Vergil in Odes 1.24 following the death of Quinctilius Varus; Ovid, in Amores 3.9, offers a lamentation on the death of Tibullus; the unknown author of the Consolatio ad Liviam offers sympathy to Livia on the death of her son Drusus in 9 BCE. Other examples can be culled from the letters of Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny, the epigrams of Martial, and the Silvae of Statius.
Ausonius’ poems were written as poetic tributes that imitate the offerings to the dead normally given at their tombs during the festival Parentalia and were probably composed soon after his Epicedion in Patrem.32 Although a Christian, Ausonius draws on the ancient pagan funerary festival called the Dies Ferales or Dies Parentales, observed between the Ides of February (13th) and February 21, during which the dead were honored at their graves. Religious differences are not explored, but rather the focus is on the ongoing communion between the poet and his dead family which connects pagan and Christian funerary practice.
As figurative offerings to the dead, the poems turn the reading process into a ritualized experience. To Statius, Vergil’s tomb was a source of poetic inspiration that literally and figuratively encoded his poetry. Ausonius, by contrast, uses the Roman festival of the dead as a pretext and text for his collection that transforms the reader into a participant in the commemoration who figuratively visits the tombs of his relatives and recites Ausonius’ text. Thus, Ausonius uses allusion to death ritual to transform his readers into grave visitors who will recite his words to his own relatives: the more the poems are read, the more Ausonius’ relatives (and not those of the reader) will be commemorated.
As a symbolic ritualized narrative, the poems differ from Ovid’s description of the Parentalia in his Fasti (2.533–70) and his narrative of other people’s observance of ritual (2.571–616).33 Ovid describes the proper rites for the worship and commemoration of the dead of the Parentalia, the origin of which he assigns to Aeneas (2.533–46):
Est honor et tumulis, animas placare paternas,
parvaque in exstructas munera ferre pyras.
parva petunt manes: pietas pro divite grata est
munere; non avidos Styx habet ima deos.
tegula porrectis satis est velata coronis
et sparsae fruges parcaque mica salis,
inque mero mollita Ceres violaeque solutae:
haec habeat media testa relicta via.
nec maiora veto, sed et his placabilis umbra est:
adde preces positis et sua verba focis.
hunc morem Aeneas, pietatis idoneus auctor,
attulit in terras, iuste Latine, tuas.
ille patris Genio sollemnia dona ferebat:
hinc populi ritus edidicere pios.34There is honor even for graves: to placate your ancestral souls,
bring small offerings to the constructed pyres.
The shades seek small gifts: instead of an expensive one, piety
is cherished; deepest Styx does not have greedy gods.
A clay tile covered with a laid wreath is sufficient,
sprinkled fruit and small grains of salt,
and Ceres softened in wine and scattered violets:
let a clay urn left in the middle of the road hold these.
I do not forbid greater gifts, but a shade is placated with these things.
Add prayers and familiar words to the raised hearth.
Aeneas, the fitting author of piety, brought this custom
to your lands, righteous inhabitant of Latium.
He offered sollemn gifts to the Genius of his father:
from him the rites were taught to the pious populace.
Ovid’s description of the rituals associated with the Parentalia double as a prescription of those rituals to the reader as he advises simple gifts and sincerity as the most necessary elements to honor the dead, including the temporary suspension of rites such as marriage to give the dead their due. The aitiology of the ritual which assigns to Augustus’ mythological ancestor Aeneas the pious commemoration of the dead also serves as a warning for those neglecting the festival.35 The dead are animated recipients of the offerings (parva petunt manes, 535), but later in the description of the feast, they actually repopulate the earth (as they did once when their rites were neglected, 547 ff.) during the course of the festival: nunc animae tenues et corpora functa sepulcris / errant, nunc posito pascitur umbra cibo (565–66). Whereas Ovid advises the reader on the proper observance of the festival, Ausonius transforms his readers into figurative participants in the festival through the reading process.
A reader approaching Ausonius’ Parentalia for the first time, however, cannot anticipate the content based on Ovid’s Fasti nor the order of the poems. The collection begins with poems addressed to Ausonius’ parents and next come poems addressed, in a seeming random order, to his uncle, grandfather, grandmother, aunt, two more uncles, his father-in-law, his wife, son, grandson, sister, brother, son-in-law, brother-in-law, nephew’s wife, nephew, another brother-in-law, sister-in-law, another nephew, another sister-in-law and brother-in-law, his son’s father-in-law, his niece’s son and daughter, his sister’s son-in-law, three aunts, a cousin, another sister, and his son’s motherin-law.36 There is no teleological order to the list, progressing as it does from direct relations to relations related by marriage or vice versa, since the poems addressed to his wife and son follow poems addressed to his grandparents, aunt, uncles, and father-in-law. In Parentalia 3.1–5, for example, Ausonius struggles with his decision to place his uncle after his father. The last word of the collection is Ausonius’ own name which functions as a sphragis and echoes line 1 of the first poem dedicated to his father in which his name, also Ausonius, appears.
Ausonius could have arranged the poems in any order and there is a certain artistry apparent in the haphazard arrangement that reflects the uncertainty of life and death since members of a family do not die in a set order or symmetrical pattern. The effect is like a visit to a cemetery where one encounters tombstones in a random order, depending on the date of death or the date the tomb or burial plot was purchased, even in areas where members of the same family are buried. Since the poems perform a ritualistic function as commemorative tributes read by the reader, the order of the collection also serves as a legend or map for a reader to negotiate the various tombs and even the various dead who are animated recipients of the poems.
In Parentalia 1, Ausonius praises his father for his moderation and philosophy which accounted for his sastisfying life:
Primus in his pater Ausonius, quem ponere primum,
etsi cunctetur filius, ordo iubet.
cura dei, placidae functus quod honore senectae
undecies binas vixit Olympiades;
omnia quae voluit qui prospera vidit; eidem
optavit quicquid, contigit ut voluit,
non quia fatorum nimia indulgentia, sed quod
tam moderata illi vota fuere viro;
quem sua contendit septem sapientibus aetas,
quorum doctrinam moribus excoluit,
viveret ut potius quam diceret arte sophorum,
quamquam et facundo non rudis ingenio,
praeditus et vitas hominum ratione medendi
porrigere et fatis amplificare moras.
inde et perfunctae manet haec reverentia vitae,
aetas nostra illi quod dedit hunc titulum:
ut nullum Ausonius quem sectaretur habebat,
sic nullum qui se nunc imitetur habet.37First among these is my father Ausonius, whom nature orders
to be placed first even if his son should hestitate.
He was a care to God, since he enjoyed the honor of a serene
old age and lived for twice eleven Olympiads.
all that he wanted, he saw as hoped; likewise, whatever he
hoped for, he acquired just as he wanted,
not because of overindulgence on the part of the Fates, but because
his prayers were so reasonable;
whom his own age compared to the seven sages,
whose teaching he followed in his habits,
since he would rather live by the rule of wisdom than profess it,
although he was not unskilled in eloquence;
he was gifted in the knowledge of healing the lives of men
and to stretch out and lengthen delays for the Fates.
Therefore, this reverence remains of his life
that has passed, that our age has given this epitaph to him:
Just as Ausonius had no one whom he could follow,
so he has no one who now could imitate him.
Ausonius emphasizes the primacy of position of his father, in terms of relationship and position within the poetic collection with the repetition of primus and primum in line 2. The poem glosses over details of his father’s life given in the longer Epicedion in Patrem, in particular his father’s career in oratory (9–10) which is here the subject of a debate between art and innate ability (lines 11–12).
Ausonius’ poem ends with an epitaph (titulus) in praise of his father’s uniqueness but it does not list major life achievements. The two balanced lines offer seemingly generic praise. As a titulus, the epitaph does not mark the location of his father’s remains and it gives a generic rather than a biographical description of his father’s life.
In the first half of Parentalia 4 to his grandfather, Ausonius describes how his grandfather was exiled after he fell out of political favor with Victorinus. He also describes his grandfather’s marriage to Aemilia, who was poor despite his own financial misery.38 Ausonius’ address to his grandfather in the second half (lines 17–32) imitates the details found on an epitaph:
tu caeli numeros et conscia sidera fati
callebas, studium dissimulanter agens.
non ignota tibi nostrae quoque formula vitae,
signatis quam tu condideras tabulis,
prodita non umquam,
sed matris cura retexit sedula quod timidi cura tegebat avi.
tu novies denos vitam cum duxeris annos,
expertus Fortis tela cavenda deae,
amissum flebas post trina decennia natum
saucius—hoc laevo lumine cassus eras—
dicebas sed te solacia longa fovere,
quod mea praecipuus fata maneret honos.
et modo conciliis animarum mixte priorum
fata tui certe nota nepotis habes
sentis quod quaestor, quod te praefectus, et idem
consul honorifico munere commemoro.You knew the measurements of heaven and about stars
knowing of fate, following this pursuit secretly.
Nor was the pattern of my life unknown to you,
which you had recorded on sealed tablets,
never brought forward, but the care of my mother uncovered
what the persistent care of my shy grandfather concealed.
When you had lived out your life of ninety years,
you knew well the dangerous arrows of the goddess Chance,
you wept, wounded, for a son who died in his thirtieth year
you were void of light by this calamity—
you used to say that you cherished a far off consolation,
because high honor was waiting for my fates.
Now that you have joined the assemblies of those former lives,
surely you have noted the fortunes of your grandson.
You perceive that I, a quaestor, a prefect, and likewise a
consul, commemorate you with the honor of a tribute.
Ausonius mentions that the loss of his uncle was a source of grief for his grandfather, but that his own success provided solace and pride in his old age. Rather than end the poem with the accomplishments or offices attained by his grandfather that are typical on tombstones, Ausonius lists his own political positions: quaestor, prefect, and consul, which are more appropriate to his own epitaph.
The final word commemoro emphasizes the primacy of Ausonius and his accomplishments within his grandfather’s epitaph as though a tribute to him. It also emphasizes the narrating and reading processes that turn the poems into ritualized experiences. Like the mother of Marcus Octavius Rufus in the epitaph to her son and Probus’ epitaph for his wife and son, Ausonius the poet supplants the dead as the narrative focus. But unlike as in actual epitaphs, he does so within a fictionalized ritual context: the illusory epitaph does not mark where the grandfather is buried.
Ausonius’ poem to his wife (Parentalia 9) is touching since Ausonius describes moments from a typical day that reinforce his loneliness without her:
Hactenus ut caros, ita iusto
funere fletos, functa piis cecinit nenia nostra modis.
nunc dolor atque cruces nec contrectabile fulmen,
coniugis ereptae mors memoranda mihi.
nobilis a proavis et origine clara senatus,
moribus usque bonis clara Sabina magis,
te iuvenis primis luxi deceptus in annis
perque novem caelebs te fleo Olympiades.
nec licet obductum senio sopire dolorem;
semper crudescit nam mihi poena recens.
admittunt alii solacia temporis aegri;
haec graviora facit vulnera longa dies.
torqueo deceptos ego vita caelibe canos,
quoque magis solus, hoc mage maestus ago.
vulnus alit, quod muta domus silet et torus alget,
quod mala non cuiquam, non bona participo.
maero, si coniunx alii bona, maereo contra,
si mala: ad exemplum tu mihi semper ades.
tu mihi crux ab utraque venis, sive est mala, quod tu
dissimilis fueris, seu bona, quod similis.
non ego opes cassas et inania gaudia plango,
sed iuvenis iuveni quod mihi rapta viro:
laeta, pudica, gravis, genus inclita
et inclita forma, et dolor atque decus coniugis Ausonii.
quae modo septenos quarter impletura Decembres,
liquisti natos, pignora nostra, duos.
illa favore dei, sicut tua vota fuerunt,
florent, optatis accumulata bonis,
et precor ut vigeant tandemque superstite utroque
nuntiet hoc cineri nostra favilla tuo.So far our dirge, performed in pious measures, has sung
of our dear ones mourned at the completion of their full lives.
Now, a grief and a misery and a wound that cannot be touched—
the untimely death of my wife must be commemorated by me.
Noble in her lineage and from an illustrious line of senators,
Sabina was more renowned for her good character,
I wept for you in my youth deceived in early years
and through these thirty six years, unwedded, I weep for you;
nor, in my old age, is it possible to lull my prolonged grief;
for always does it grow raw as a fresh pain for me.
Others find release through the pain filled solace of time;
but the length of days makes my wounds more heavy.
I tear my grey hairs that are mocked by my unwed life,
and the more that I am alone, the more lonely I am.
My wound is fed because my quiet house is silent
and my bed is cold, and because I share my troubles or joys with no one.
I am saddened, if one has a good wife, and saddened likewise, if
another has a bad one: you are always the paragon before my eyes.
You are my pain and from either type you come to mind, if one is bad
since you were dissimilar, or if good, since you were the same.
I do not weep for useless wealth or for empty joys,
rather that, in your youth, you were taken from your young husband:
Cheerful, modest, respected, famous for high birth and famed for beauty,
you were both the grief and glory of your husband Ausonius.
Before you completed your twenty-eighth December,
you left our two children, the pledges of our love.
By the grace of god, just as were your prayers,
they prosper surrounded by an abundance of hoped-for goods,
and I pray that they may thrive so that, at last, my embers
will announce to your ashes that they still live.
This follows the poem dedicated to his wife’s father, which Ausonius ends with a declaration of his devotion as a widower and son-in-law (8.15–18):
et nunc perpetui sentis sub honore sepulcri,
quam reverens natae quamque tui maneam.
caelebs namque gener haec nunc pia munera solvo:
nam et caelebs numquam desinam et esse gener.And now beneath your eternal tomb you perceive with honor
how I have remained devoted to your daughter and to yourself.
For unwed, I, your son-in-law, now complete my pious pledges:
that I will never stop being unwed or your son-in-law.
Thus the reader is already aware of Ausonius’ devotion to his wife before reading the poem, yet it does not prepare the reader for the extent of the loneliness which fills Ausonius years after her death.39 The expressions of love in this poem evocative of Vergilian intertexts (dolor decusque recalls Aen. 10.57: Aeneas’ apostrophe to the dead Pallas) also form the epilogue of the vibrant love between the couple described in epigram 20 which is playful and romantic.
The final third of the poem (line 21 ff.) is an epitaph to Ausonius’ wife and contains typical elements such as the love between spouses, a listing of her virtues, her age, and Ausonius’ hope of being reunited with her after death. Ausonius and Sabina are united through marriage and their surviving children whom Ausonius will announce as thriving to her as soon as they are rejoined through the cremation process: the embers burning his remains will reunite with her burnt ashes in a physical communion to replace the figurative communion that existed when only one spouse was dead.
Thus, Ausonius combines epitaph with epicede to produce a poetic genre that is both highly personal and yet communal, since Ausonius’ poems transform the reader into a performer of ritual commemoration of his relatives. The dead are animated as they hear Ausonius’ tributes to them, which are also his meditations on the effect of their deaths on him. The dead are not where the epitaphs claim they are; rather the epitaphs serve as textual markers that distinguish each of Ausonius’ dead relatives and effect the same reification as an epigram on an actual tombstone for an ongoing communion with the dead.
Reviving the Dead
In T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (No. 4 of Four Quartets), the narrator describes an encounter with a dead teacher who summarizes life’s lessons as he simultaneously causes the narrator/reader to question the validity of previous thoughts, words, and actions. The poem erases the distinction between beginning and end, life and death, and the living in the dead:
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone; and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead;
See, they return and bring us with them.40
Poetry is a vehicle for self-expression, which, like an epitaph, marks an end that is destined to be lost to the living. The living are inseparable from the dead who give the living the paradigm and pattern of death.
Eliot’s blurring of the boundaries between life and death from the perspective of one who is dead but recognizable by one who is living adds pathos to the reunion, since the dead figuratively assume their former identities and (literally) communicate with the living more effectively than they can through epitaphs. Somewhat different than a poem (epicede) or a prose passage voicing grief or expressing consolation to a mourner or the figurative repopulation of the dead among the living during the Parentalia, is the inclusion of the dead as a literary character (like Eliot’s teacher), or the ostensible poetic voice in a poem of those who continue to represent themselves to an author/interlocutor/ reader as they console them. This reversal of roles animates the dead and redirects the focus and narrative flow of poems and epitaphs. The dead Julia, for example, in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, addresses Pompey in a dream, while standing on a burning funeral pyre (3.12–34):
‘[ . . . ] coniuge me laetos duxisti, Magne, triumphos:
fortuna est mutata toris, semperque potentis
detrahere in cladem fato damnata maritos
innupsit tepido paelex Cornelia busto.
haereat illa tuis per bella per aequora signis,
dum non securos liceat mihi rumpere somnos
et nullam vestro vacuum sit tempus amori
sed teneat Caesarque dies et Iulia noctes.
me non Lethaeae, coniunx, oblivia ripae
immemorem fecere tui, regesque silentum
permisere sequi. veniam te bella gerente
in medias acies. numquam tibi, Magne,
per umbras perque meos manes genero non esse licebit;
abscidis frustra ferro tua pignora: bellum
te faciet civile meum.’ 41“[ . . . ] With me as your wife, Magnus, you led happy triumphs home:
your fortune changed with your wedding bed, and Cornelia,
your concubine, always damned by fate to drag down powerful
husbands into disaster, married into a warm tomb. Through war
and the deep seas, let her cling to your standards, as long as I can
disturb your sleepless nights, and there is no spare time for
your love, but let Caesar own your days, and Julia your nights.
The oblivion of Lethe’s shore, husband, has not made me forgetful
of you, and the Kings of the Dead allowed me to pursue you.
While you wage war, I will come into the lines of battle. Never,
Magnus, by my ghost and by my shade, will you stop being his
son-in-law; in vain do you cut your family pledges with your sword:
civil war will make you mine.”
Julia’s speech reverses the narrative flow from narrator to character and from the living to the dead. Julia is described in terms that make her physical appearance a decreasingly recognizable and visible form as though her apparition begins to fade the moment she begins to speak: imago (3.9); manes (3.32); and umbra (3.35). The continuation of family strife, in the underworld, reinforces the civil war between her former husband (Pompey) and her father (Caesar) as she represents herself as Pompey’s widow and Caesar’s daughter. Julia uses the imagery of cremations to illustrate the doomed marriages of her successor Cornelia, whose life can be measured by the time that elapses between the cremations of her husbands. The dead occupy the world of the poet, the interlocutor, and reader thus, blurring the distinctions and boundaries between the living and the dead who continue to represent themselves.
Today, communion with the dead continues literally and figuratively via the Internet which is changing contemporary mourning and communication options with the dead and, in some cases, for the dead themselves. The location of one’s keyboard is replacing traditional venues such as churches and funeral homes to pay one’s last respects and to offer condolences to the family of the deceased. Web guest books, for example, on the World Wide Cemetery allow one to post messages any time of the day without leaving home or actually viewing the deceased or attending a funeral service in person. Online postings, which do not expire, also outlast the permanence of a traditional condolence card.
The Internet is also changing the dynamic between the deceased and (self) representation of epitaphs that allows for reciprocity of communication between the living and the dead. The website, My-last-e-mail.com, for example, allows the dead to send a final email on the day of their death to both friends and enemies. Another site, www.tomylovedones.com, is reserved for messages to family and friends and messages are sent after the company receives a death certificate, so messages may arrive a month after a death, rather than on the day of one’s death. Although the messages were composed while the dead were still alive, the website allows the dead to continue to communicate with the living who may not be expecting further communication with the dead. The conversation is one-sided and the dead get the final word, so to speak, since the recipient of their last email cannot send a reply. The sending of unintentional emails to the dead whose email addresses are still included in distribution lists is awkward, but the effect is less jarring than the receipt of an email intentionally sent from the deceased, especially with malicious intent. Thus, just as epitaphs and tombs compete with the identity and narrative voice of the deceased, the “cyber dead” extend the lives and impact of their embodied alter egos.
In Poem 2.13b, Propertius, playing dead, addressed Cynthia to chide her for her inattention. The motif of a dialogue with a character who is not actually dead but who has an imagined conversation with a beloved after death, is similar to 4.7 in which Cynthia’s ghost communicates with Propertius in a dream following her cremation and burial.42 The poem reverses the narrative direction of 2.13b, but neither character is actually dead in the fictional reality of the elegies. In Poem 4.11, however, Propertius animates the dead, rather than imagines himself or Cynthia dead, to dramatize the advice which the dead Cornelia, daughter of Augustus’ former wife, Scribonia, gives to her grieving husband Paullus (L. Aemilius Lepidus Paullus).43 In form it is much like the anonymous poem “The Unquiet Grave,” in which a deceased wife urges her husband, from her grave, to stop grieving and either return to the living or join her with the dead.44 The effect is similar to reading the messages of the “cyber dead” in that the reader cannot respond to Cornelia. But the words she speaks are those given to her by Propertius; therefore, the effect, while dramatic, is less effective than receiving an actual email message from someone dead.
In Propertius, the tomb (sepulcrum, 1) serves as the setting of the dialogue and also as a representation of the dead Cornelia who describes the barriers between the living and the dead which she subsequently bridges through an epicede to her husband and a summation, before the gods of the underworld, of her ancestry and life accomplishments (27–36):
‘ipsa loquor pro me: si fallo, poena sororum
infelix umeros urgeat urna meos.|
si cui fama fuit per avita tropaea decori,
Afra Numantinos regna loquuntur avos:
altera maternos exaequat turba Libones,
et domus est titulis utraque fulta suis.
mox, ubi iam facibus cessit praetexta maritis,
vinxit et acceptas altera vitta comas,
iungor, Paulle, tuo sic discessura cubili:
in lapide hoc uni nupta fuisse legar.’45“I plead on my own behalf: if I lie, let the unhappy
urn, the punishment of the Sisters, crush my shoulders.
If to anyone was the fame of honor through ancestral trophies,
African kingdoms speak of my Numantine ancestors:
the crowd on the other side, my maternal Libones, is balanced,
and either house is propped up by their own honors.
Early, when my bordered robe gave way to marriage torches,
and I bound my gathered hair with parting fillets,
thus was I joined to your bed, Paullus, soon to leave it:
on this stone, I shall be recorded as the wife of one man.”
Cornelia represents herself in giving the poet (ipsa loquor pro me) the text of her epitaph. Only when Cornelia self-identifies as a univira (36) and remarks that a reference to her sole marriage is inscribed on her tomb is the reader made aware of a competing text on her epitaph that is visible to Paullus in the poem.46 The poem does not make clear, however, whether other details contained in Cornelia’s epitaphic summary of her life are modeled upon the epitaph. Thus, her self-representation may elaborate or even contradict details inscribed on her fictional epitaph (which was composed by Paullus after her death?) As a self-represented character, Cornelia also vies with the poetic voice of the elegy.
Cornelia places emphasis on her faithfulness as a wife and her noble virtue: viximus insignes inter utramque facem (46). She claims that she speaks the truth and hopes that her urn will weigh heavily on her (49) if she does not, in a reversal of the terra tibi levis sit formula. The tone of the poem is different from 2.13b which was intended to rejuvenate Propertius’ affair with Cynthia; thus the elegiac lover/mistress model is here exchanged for a husband/wife model. The wife is also presented as a mother and Cornelia emphasizes to her daughter the virtues appropriate to women, such as faithfulness to her husband (68)—an ideal antithetical to elegy but which is contextualized by Propertius into the moral climate of Augustan Rome (57–74):
maternis laudor lacrimis urbisque querelis,
defensa et gemitu Caesaris ossa mea.
ille sua nata dignam vixisse sororem
increpat, et lacrimas vidimus ire deo.
et tamen emerui generosos vestis honores,
nec mea de sterili facta rapina domo. tu, Lepide, et
tu, Paulle, meum post fata levamen,
condita sunt vestro lumina nostra sinu.
vidimus et fratrem sellam geminasse curulem;
consule quo, festo tempore, rapta soror.
filia, tu specimen censurae nata paternae,
fac teneas unum nos imitata virum.
et serie fulcite genus: mihi cumba volenti
solvitur aucturis tot mea facta meis.
haec est feminei merces extrema triumphi,
laudat ubi emeritum libera fama rogum.
nunc tibi commendo communia pignora natos:
haec cura et cineri spirat inusta meo.I am praised with maternal tears
and public mourning, and my bones are honored even with Caesar’s groans.
He laments me who lived as worthy sister to his own daughter,
and I saw the tears of a god flow.
Nevertheless, I earned the noble honors of my matron’s stole,
nor was I snatched by death in a sterile home.
You, Lepidus, and you, Paullus, my comfort in death,
my eyes were closed in your embrace.
I saw my brother twice earn the curule chair;
in whose consulship, a happy time, his sister died.
Daughter, born as the mirror of your father as censor,
be sure, in imitation of me, that you keep to one husband.
Extend, even, our lineage: the ferry awaits and I willingly go,
so many of my good deeds left to those who will grow them.
This is the supreme reward of a woman’s triumph,
that a shameless reputation should praise her deserving grave.
Now I entrust to you our children, our common pledge:
this care breathes, unburned, among my ashes.
Fidelity and a good reputation (symbolized by Cornelia’s adoption of a stola to symbolize the bearing of at least three children and an honourable burial) are equated with a military triumph. The concern for one’s reputation even after death (laudat ubi emeritum libera fama rogum, 72) recalls the epitaph to her ancestor Hispanus, discussed above, in which he imagines his ancestors judging his character from the underworld. The presence of Augustus at her funeral is further witness to Cornelia’s lineage and character and the emphasis on honor and family. Concern for her children is still felt in death and is equated with the heat that burns the ashes of her pyre (74). This is an anachronistic reference since she has already been cremated and buried, but the metaphor is effective in animating Cornelia and placing her in a constantly changing liminal state between corpse, funeral recipient, and living interlocutor.
Cornelia addresses the judges of the Underworld in the final lines of her speech as though on trial in order to defend her former virtue:
causa perorata est. flentes me surgite, testes,
dum pretium vitae grata rependit humus.
moribus et caelum patuit: sim digna merendo,
cuius honoratis ossa vehanter avis.My speech is ended. Arise, you witnesses who weep for me
while the welcoming earth rewards the value of my life.
To virtue, heaven lies open: may I seem deserving to
be among the shades of my honored ancestors. (99–102)
Cornelia’s final words contain intertextual references to Ennius’ Elogium of the Scipios. The expression at line 101, moribus et caelum patuit, alludes to the words of her ancestor Scipio Africanus, who emphasizes the reward of immortality for his virtue in Ennius’ Elogium of the Scipios:
a sole exoriente supra Maeotis paludes
<next two lines missing>
nemo est qui factis aequiperare queat.
si fas endo plagas caelestum ascendere cuiquam,
mi soli caeli maxima porta patet.47By the rising sun above the Maeiotian marshes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
there is no one who is able to be equal with the deeds.
if it is sanctioned for anyone to rise to the regions of the gods
the greatest gate of the sky lies open to me alone.
Thus, Cornelia connects her own virtue with that of Scipio Africanus by adapting the last line of Ennius’ Elogium. By emphasizing this connection, Cornelia and Scipio are connected in life through common blood and in death through common virtue. Cornelia expresses the idea common on epitaphs that through one’s conduct while alive, one must earn respect from dead ancestors. The striking image of the gates of heaven lying open to virtue led to further imitation of the Ennian passage by Silius Italicus, who adapts the line in his Punica. Indeed, the epigram was adapted on an actual tombstone illustrating the reciprocity between epitaphs and poetic texts.48
Reciprocity between poetry and actual epitaphs is further illustrated by the epitaph of M. Lucceius Nepos, which is Flavian in date and similar to the narrative features of Propertius 4.11, in which the buried dead communicate with the living through speech and epitaph. This is an actual tombstone in which Nepos is figuratively animated by his epitaph and at the site of his burial through poetic intertexts, such as Ennius, Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Ovid, Tibullus, and Lygdamus, that mythologize the deceased and present him as a god. The unidentified narrative voice of the epitaph converses with the dead Nepos, his kinsman, who self-represents himself as divine (desine flere deum, 16), and therefore asks his interlocutor to stop mourning. In lines 1–12, of which only half lines survive, the narrator insists that the vision is not part of a dream but is the deceased himself: non fuit illa quies, / sed verus iuveni color et sonus, at status ipse / maior erat nota corporis effigie / “it was not a dream, / but the true appearance and sound of the youth, but his height was greater than the usual form of his body” (10–12).49 The rest of the poem consists of a dialogue between M. Lucceius Nepos and his unidentified kinsman (13–46):
ardentis oculorum orbes umerosq(ue) nitentis
ostendens roseo reddidit ore sonos:
‘adfinis memorande, quid o me ad sidera caeli
ablatum quereris? desine flere deum,
ne pietas ignara superna sede receptum
lugeat et laedat numina tristitia.
non ego Tartareas penetrabo tristis ad undas,
non Acheronteis transuehar umbra vadis,
non ego caeruleam remo pulsabo carinam
nec te terribilem fronte timebo, Charon,
nec Minos mihi iura dabit grandaeuus et atris
non errabo locis nec cohibebor aquis.
surge, refer matri ne me noctesque diesque
defleat ut maerens Attica mater Ityn.
nam me sancta Venus sedes non nosse silentum
iussit et in caeli lucida templa tulit.’
erigor et gelidos horror perfuderat artus;
spirabat suavi tinctus odore locus.
die Nepos, seu tu turba stipatus Amorum
laetus Adoneis lusibus insereris,
seu grege Pieridum gaudes seu Palladis [arte,
omnis caelicolum te chor[u]s exc[ipiet.
si libeat thyrsum gravidis aptare co[rymbis
et velare comam palmite, Liber[eris;
pascere si crinem et lauro redimire [u—que
arcum cum pharetra sumere, Ph[oebus eris.
indueris teretis manicas Phrygium [que u—x,
non unus Cybeles pectore vivet a[mor.
si spumantis equi libeat quatere ora [lupatis,
Cyllare, formosi membra vehes e[quitis.
sed quicumque deus, quicumque vocaber[is heros,
sit soror et mater, sit puer incolu[mis.
haec dona unguentis et sunt potiora c[orollis
quae non tempus edax, non rapi[t—u u x.50Showing the blazing orbs of his eyes and gleaming shoulders
he uttered words from his rosy lips:
“Kinsman, who mourns me, why do you lament that I have been
abducted to the stars of the sky? Stop mourning a god,
that your devotion may not mourn me unaware that I have been
welcomed
into that place above and insult a god by your sorrow.
I will not sadly approach the streams of Tartarus,
nor will I be conveyed across the waters of Acheron as a shade.
I will not inch the sea-blue boat forward with my oar,
nor will I fear you, Charon, menacing in your looks,
nor will Minos, the ancient one, pass judgment on me; I will not
roam in the dark places nor be constrained by those waters.
Rise, tell my mother not to weep for me night and day
just as the Attic mother mourns for Itys.
Sacred Venus has forbidden me to know the places of the silent ones
and has brought me to the bright shrines of heaven.”
I jumped back and fear had taken hold of my cold limbs;
the place was filled with a sweet perfume.|
Divine Nepos, whether you are surrounded by a crowd of cupids,
or you have happily joined the games of Adonis,
whether you delight in the company of the Muses or in the skill of
Minerva,
the whole chorus of heavenly dwellers will welcome you.
If it should please you to wrap a thyrsus with ripe ivy-berries
or to cover your hair with vine shoots, you will be Liber;
if it should please you to grow your hair out and tie it with laurel,
and to take up the bow and quiver, you will be Pheobus.
Wear fine sleeves and a Phrygian cap, and not one
love will burn in the heart of Cybele.
If it should please you to shake the mouth of a foaming horse in
reins, Cyllarus, you will carry the limbs of a handsome rider.
But whatever god, whatever hero you will be called,
may your sister and mother and your child be free from harm.
These gifts, which greedy time cannot snatch [ . . . ], are more
important than perfumes and garlands.
Poetic and mythological intertexts define and distinguish Nepos from the other dead: he will not cross the river Styx, be judged by Minos, nor face a fate similar to Itys’ (20–26). Venus has made Nepos immortal and transported him to heaven (27–28). The role of Venus in the immortalization of humans recalls the funerary portraiture of women, like the portrait of the Flavian woman as Venus in the Capitoline Museums, which signify an apotheosis through representation and assimulation as Venus. Nepos’ apotheosis (28) also recalls narratives in Ennius’ Annales and Ovid’s Fasti, which describe the apotheosis of Romulus. Nepos’ kinsman idealizes his ascent and integration into heaven, with excessive imagery that evokes the anticipated and hyperbolic arrival of Augustus among the constellations in the Georgics.
To Nepos’ family, his apotheosis is not in question, only the nature of his metamorphosis. In addition to the content of the epitaph which celebrates the apotheosis of the deceased, rather than mark the location of the burial of his formerly human remains, the epitaph, as poetic (inter) text, also functions as an illusory epitaph. It recalls the speech of Cornelia in Propertius 4.11 and the ghost of Cynthia in 4.7, and illustrates the reciprocity between epitaphs and elegies as related genres that influence each other’s themes and language. The (self) representation of the dead also points to the ongoing communion between the living and the dead who take control of their commemoration through their figurative participation in their own funerary ritual. The divine presence of Nepos leaves behind a fragrance, a detail which adds to the figurative encounter between the living and the dead (29–30).
This essay has focused on the narrative voice and setting (physical and figurative) of the deceased in epitaphs, especially those which have poeticizing/poetic features to analyze the (self) representation of the dead. In addition to actual grave inscriptions, I examined illusory epitaphs in Latin poetry as both grave and textual markers and as limited and limitive narrative and reading experiences. The animation of the dead through their figurative (self) representation in elegiac texts highlights the reciprocity between epitaphs and poetic texts, in particular the reciprocal communication between the living and the dead. The figurative revival of the dead to console the living in elegies reverses the narrative voice of epicedes and includes the narrative of the deceased’s own epitaph in an ongoing communion with the living.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 5 (154-204), “Playing Dead”, from Reading Death in Ancient Rome, by Mario Erasmo (The Ohio State University Press, 2008), published by Project Muse under and Open Access license.