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Hic Tacitus Lapis: Voice, Audience, and Space in Early Roman Verse-Epitaphs

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Hic Tacitus Lapis: Voice, Audience, and Space in Early Roman Verse-Epitaphs HIC TACITUS LAPIS: VOICE, AUDIENCE, AND SPACE IN EARLY ROMAN VERSE-EPITAPHS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Allison Catherine Boex August 2014 © 2014 Allison Catherine Boex HIC TACITUS LAPIS: VOICE, AUDIENCE AND, SPACE IN EARLY ROMAN VERSE-EPITAPHS Allison Catherine Boex, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 This dissertation sets out to investigate the content, role, and effects of ancient Roman grave-inscriptions; I argue that Roman gravestones and their inscriptions were intended to serve as metonymic markers, stand-ins for their deceased subjects in the land of the living, allowing the dead to engage with the living and the living with the dead. As many previous studies of Roman grave-inscriptions have been undermined by the fact that their authors attempt to address the entire body of Roman epitaphs (a corpus too large and diverse to allow productive study of its entirety), this dissertation focuses on a smaller corpus, the forty-nine extant verse-inscriptions generally assigned to the Roman Republic. In investigating these epitaphs, I focus on the effects of the reading-act and the related issues of voice, audience, and space; my approach is informed by the works of Svenbro (1993) and Vallette-Cagnac (1997) on the reading- act in ancient Greece and Rome respectively, Sourvinou-Inwood’s (1995) study of voice in ancient Greek epitaphs, and Lowrie’s (2006) work on deixis and its effects on the reader’s perception of presence and absence. I argue that the reading-act of the passer-by activates a depiction of the deceased’s life, tied to the stone as the metonymic marker of the deceased; it is through this depiction that the figure of the deceased can engage, implicitly and explicitly, with the living upon each reading of the inscription. Even among the most basic poems, devoid of any acknowledgement of a living audience, we find epitaphs that seek to connect through various devices to the real time and space of the living reader; other examples engage in what Conso (1994) terms “oralité fictive,” allowing the epitaph to speak directly to that reader. And finally, we find examples in which the deceased’s attempt to engage with the living is explicit: the deceased speaks, co-opting the voice of the reader to present his own portrait, in some cases without addressing a specific audience, but in other cases addressing the passer-by, or loved ones left behind. This study not only offers a detailed look at the content and artistry of these fascinating (and in many cases neglected) poems, but also illuminates the ways in which ancient Romans dealt with life and death. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Allison Catherine Boex holds a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College; as an undergraduate she also spent a semester studying Latin and ancient Greek at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. At Kenyon, she received high honors for a thesis on the sepulchral epigrams of the new Posidippus papyrus and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa before graduating summa cum laude in 2003. Other research interests include Latin poetry of the Republican period and Indo-European linguistics. During her time at Cornell she has taught Latin at the EAC Montessori School of Ithaca, worked for the American Philological Association’s online ‘Classical Works Knowledge Base’ (http://cwkb.org/), and done freelance editing of classical scholarship for Cornell University Press and Brill; she also enjoys getting her hands dirty in the fields and orchards of Indian Creek Farm in Ithaca. iii Multis sodalibus iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have completed this dissertation without the help of teachers, friends, colleagues, and family. I would like to thank first the department of Classics at Cornell University for many years of education and support. I cannot thank my adviser David Mankin enough for his many years of teaching, friendship, and guidance; I also wish to thank Michael Weiss and Hayden Pelliccia for their input and also for their patience and continued faith in me. Other faculty members have offered integral support, especially Eric Rebillard (though not a committee member, he was among the first to read much of the work), Alan Nussbaum, Charles Brittain, Michael Fontaine, and Jeffrey Rusten. I also wish to thank my first Latin teacher, Donita Hill, and my professors at Kenyon College for teaching me to read and love Latin and Greek literature, and the latter group especially for facilitating my work on the new Posidippus papyrus, during which I found my love for sepulchral poetry. The support of friends and family has also been integral: I wish to thank Alice Brigance and Jennifer Schwarz for being the friends I go to in times of trouble, dissertation-related or otherwise; Tino Navarra and Carissa Sims for their support at important moments; Antonia Ruppel, an excellent model and friend; Stephen and Owen Cummins, Alan Leonard and Joanna Upton, Amy Willis, and many others at Indian Creek Farm for their continuing love and support. I also wish to thank everyone at EACMSI for their support as I worked to finish the project, and Mary Shelley for helping me to get it done. Finally, I wish to thank my family: my four parents and my siblings have each in their own way encouraged me throughout this project. A desire to show my appreciation for the support of the individuals listed above and the hope of making them proud have been major factors in my completion of this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Examination of the corpus 11 Chapter summary 21 The elogia of the Scipios 23 Chapter 2: ‘Endocentric’ poems 49 CIL I² 1259 51 CIL I² 1283 56 CIL I² 1270 59 CIL I² 1761 62 CIL I² 1924 67 CIL I² 2139 72 CIL I² 1798 74 CIL I² 1547 77 CIL I² 1213 81 CIL I² 708 86 Chapter 3: Deixis 92 CIL I² 1406 93 CIL I² 1347 96 CIL I² 2274 101 CIL I² 1861 105 CIL X 2971 109 Chapter 4: Specified audience 117 CIL I² 1219 117 CIL I² 1702 122 CIL I² 1930 129 CIL I² 1210 134 CIL I² 1209 141 CIL I² 1212 146 CIL I² 1211 151 CIL I² 1837 161 CIL I² 1222 165 CIL I² 2273 170 CIL I² 1603 175 vi Chapter 5: Dead speak, no audience 181 CIL I² 1822 181 CIL I² 1570 186 CIL VI 142111 191 CIL I² 1319 194 CIL I² 1325 198 CIL I² 1218 200 CIL I² 1216 206 CIL I² 1221 211 CIL I² 1217 219 Chapter 6: Dead speak to specified audiences 227 CIL I² 1732 227 CIL I² 1202 233 CIL I² 2161 238 CIL I² 3449d 243 CIL I² 1836 247 CIL I² 2138 250 CIL I² 1214 252 CIL I² 1223 259 CIL I² 1215 267 Conclusions 277 The elogia of the Scipios 277 General conclusions 290 Bibliography 304 vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION In our quest to understand the institutions of Rome and her inhabitants, we study texts of all sorts, from the sparest of occasional inscriptions to ornate poetic epics; the former can tell us much about the workaday life of the Romans, and the latter about their rich cultural life. Firmly in the middle of this spectrum lies the genre of poetic epitaph. In its most basic form, an epitaph might contain the name of the deceased and his or her filiation and age, allowing us to extract information as to what sort of subject merited what Armando Petrucci calls a ‘written death.’1 But when the commissioner of the epitaph saw fit to order the inclusion of more than these basic facts, we are given the opportunity to observe even more tantalizing information: imbued as they often are with emotion, these more elaborate epitaphs contain glimpses of how the Romans – a people who indisputably revered their ancestors – saw (and chose to depict) the relations between the living and the dead. In these inscriptions we see enacted a complex nexus of interaction, perceived by the Romans at the scene of the gravesite, involving the deceased, the tombstone, and such overlapping groups as the commissioner(s) of the monument, the family, and mourners.2 This graveyard scene was intended to be activated, as it were, by a reading audience, most often the passer-by to whom many of the epitaphs are addressed. The Romans sought through this medium not only to memorialize their deceased but also in many cases to provide via the inscription a continued interaction between the dead and the living. Although non-metrical epitaphs are also worthy of study, the verse-epitaphs, by their nature more intricate, merit a deeper investigation. The poetic nature of 1 Petrucci 1998, xvi. 2 Cf. Shaw 1991, 67: “The act of placing a tombstone, of having it inscribed, was integrally connected with the web of duties and feelings concerning the dead and, by extension, a mirroring of their status while still among the living.” 1 these inscriptions is itself a clue to the motivation of the commissioner of the epitaph: the desire was not only for an occasional marker, but for something aspiring to art. The use of meter further indicates that the composer,3 rather than simply recording information, is self-consciously tapping into a poetic tradition. As such, the craft of the poetic epitaph begs investigation, both in and of itself, and as a component in that poetic tradition. The relationship between poetry and commemoration was firmly established in the Greek literary world, beginning with Homer’s emphasis on the importance of kleos aphthiton and its conferral via poetry, with or without the presence of a physical monument.4 The Latin poets, too, would explore the topos of poetry-as-monument, most famously Horace at Odes 3.30.5 In the early Latin verse-epitaphs, we can examine the implementation of poetry as a commemorative tool on a physical monument.
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