Epitome and Eternity: Some Epitaphs and Votive Inscriptions in the Latin Love Elegists

Abstract

In few (if any) genres of Roman poetry do ‘embedded’ inscriptions appear with such regularity or such prominence as in Latin love elegy. Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, and their elegiac successors all rank the composition of epitaphs for their own personae and for other inhabitants of their poetic world among their chief literary pastimes — and the same is true of votive inscriptions, of which the genre includes numerous examples. Part of the reason for this may be suggested by Horace's account of the earliest uses of the elegiac couplet at Ars poetica 75-6: versibus impariter iunctis querimonia primum, ¦ post etiam inclusa est voti sententia compos (‘As for unequally-matched elegiac verses, first of all lamentation, and afterwards also the fulfilment of vows, was their content’.) This chapter explores some of the functions performed by these epigraphic interventions in Latin love poetry, concentrating particularly on the ways in which epitaphs and votive inscriptions serve to summarize and epitomize the poetic contexts in which they appear, and on how, by undermining the mimetic character of these embedded inscriptions and/or emphasizing their essential textuality, the elegists set out their claim to the more potent immortality of their literary monuments.