Monica Di Rosa (University of Calgary)
The aim of this study is to analyze the use of epithets in funerary inscriptions in Greek language for girls and women, contrasting them to the relationships between the deceased woman and the commemorator/s as they appear in the inscriptions themselves. The aim is to enhance our understanding of the representations of women in the city of Rome, according to whether the female was commemorated in a Greek or Latin speaking context, in the hope of moving beyond the examples that appear to denote a dependence on topoi in literary sources. My research focus is on the the city of Rome, comprising the long period of time between the 1st to the end of the 4th centuries CE. I will also draw a comparison between the results of this analysis and the evidence from compatible Latin funerary inscriptions from the same area, in order to ascertain cross-linguistic and cross-community social variations or commonalities. The importance of the analysis of epithets in inscriptions from funerary context has already been shown on various occasions (Sigismund Nielsen 1997 & 2001). Recently (2020), Sigismund Nielsen has pointed out how many times scholars have fallen short in an in-depth analysis of the recurrences of epithets for women; while many have claimed that the engagement in wool-making and the description of submissive womanly virtues are the most common qualities used to describe women in Roman society (Cenerini 2013; Torelli 1997), a quantitative analysis of the occurrences seems to move away from this depiction of women’s roles that is largely based on literary stereotypes. Furthermore, what about funerary inscriptions in Greek? There is recent work that investigates the relational status of girls/women in funerary inscriptions in Latin from Rome (Mueller 2010). However, when dealing with the material in Greek from the urbs scholars have mostly focused on the analysis of epigrams (Grandinetti 2006; Kotlińska-Toma 2012; Verilhac 1985), which are really a minority in the vast corpus of Greek funerary inscriptions; indeed, the use of epithets for women in this context, appears once again in line with typical and topical depiction in literary sources. My approach, on the other hand, is grounded on a quantitative analysis of data. Uses of the Greek epithets are first analyzed in correlation with the relationships represented in the tombstone and the age of the deceased. In the second phase, these results are compared with those from studies of Greek funerary epigrams. These further results will then be contrasted with data from the Latin material in the city of Rome. Among other observations from the analysis conducted on non-epigrammatic Greek funerary inscriptions, I will show that terms denoting domestic virtues (i.e. φίλεργος or οἰκονόμος), widely present in epigrams, do not appear in prose inscriptions. Instead, the most used adjectives are terms broadly denoting the good character of the woman (such as γλυκυτάτη or σεμνοτάτη) without such a heavy focus on reclusiveness and labor. This seems to correspond with what we find in the Latin material.