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2023
With over 4,000 surviving documents, Latin inscriptions in verse are not only an important element of the Roman practice of epigraphy, they are also the sole poetic genre with a continuous attestation for over 1,000 years, from across the Roman Empire. Frequently produced by and for members of the lower social classes, they raise numerous questions regarding their production and reception, especially in relation to their prose counterparts. Since most of them are of a funerary nature (more than 80%), they are closely related to death and its contexts, being a popular option to commemorate the death of a loved one with a last farewell full of values and sentiment.
A study of fictive orality in the Republican epitaphs of the CLE reveals that two categories of fictive orality are especially rare, and moreover limited to a specific situation: in a corpus of forty-nine inscriptions, only two (CIL I² 1603, CIL I² 10) are addressed to the deceased, and only two (CIL I² 1223b, CIL I² 1215) feature a speech by the deceased to specific still-living individuals; in all four cases the subjects died prematurely. These two categories of fictive orality seem, then, to be licensed specifically by premature death. This paper examines these four poems; as it explores how each kind of fictive orality is implemented, how each engages with the content of the epitaph, and why the use of these kinds of fictive orality might have been limited to cases of premature death, it also considers the even more compelling question of whether such speeches suggest an expectation of communication between the living and the dead.
Carroll, Maureen 2007/2008, “ ‘Vox tua nempe mea est’. Dialogues with the dead in Roman funerary commemoration,” Accordia Research Papers 11, 37-80.
Carroll, Maureen 2007/2008, “ ‘Vox tua nempe mea est’. Dialogues with the dead in Roman funerary commemoration,” Accordia Research Papers 11, 37-80.In this paper I analyse and compare the representations (or self-representations) of poets in the underworld in elegiac and lyric Roman poetry. I focus especially on five poems: Tibullus I.3; Propertius II. 34; Ovid, Amores II.6 (birds as poets) and III.9; Horace, Odes II.13. It is not my intention to give a detailed interpretation of the whole poems; my principal aim is to analyse how dead poets are pictured in two different genres, the elegiac and the lyric, which share certain features (for instance, we can have in some lyric poems the poetic persona of a lover, the amator, which characterizes erotic elegy discourse, and some similar topics, as the metaphor of love as illness, etc.). At the end of this paper, I will point to the images of dead poets that are (I think) the most representative of the difference between elegiac and lyric genres. In the footnotes I provide some bibliographical references on studies and commentaries about each of the poems I treat here.
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