Grace Funsten (University of Washington)
Located in Vigna Codini III just outside Rome, CIL 6.5302 is an unusual columbarium epitaph in many respects. It consists of eight lines in elegiac couplets, omits the names of both the dedicant and the deceased, and focuses for the most part on erotodidaxis rather than lament. In this paper, I offer a new reading of CIL 6.5302 centering its engagement with Augustan elegy. Next, I turn to its physical context in Vigna Codini III, arguing that the group served by this columbarium was particularly interested in literary competition.
CIL 6.5302 has received very little individual attention in previous scholarship aside from its inclusion in Courtney’s (1995) collection of Latin verse inscriptions and in Massaro 2006. As a result, although its allusions to elegy have been noted, the implications of its literary tone have not been studied. Vigna Codini III appears in larger discussions of columbaria and Roman burial, such as Borbonus 2014 and Toynbee 1996, but its epitaphs have not been studied as a collection. Parri (1998) uses a selection of its inscriptions as evidence for Vigna Codini III’s chronology, Massaro (2006) examines the columbarium’s verse epitaphs separately, and Vilella (2019) publishes previously unnoticed inscriptions from the columbarium. My approach will differ by using CIL 6.5302 as a case study to shed light on “the group dynamics of the burial collective” (Borbonus 2014, 67) in Vigna Codini III.
I first examine CIL 6.5302’s engagements with Augustan elegy. The epitaph is written in the first person, commemorating an unnamed woman from her lover’s perspective. He begins by positioning himself as a praeceptor amoris and advising young lovers not to buy jewelry for their mistresses (vv. 1-4). He uses the death of his domina (v. 7) as an example to give weight to his advice, alluding to the elegiac servitium amoris and confirming his pose as a lover-poet in the Augustan style. Next, I examine CIL 6.5302 in the context of Vigna Codini III’s other inscriptions to consider why its author chose to imitate elegy. As many of the people in this columbarium were members of the familia Caesaris from the reigns of Tiberius through Nero, the author of CIL 6.5302 was likely a slave or freedman of the Julio-Claudian family. Positioning himself as an elegiac lover-poet may have allowed him to try on attitudes of power and leisure that were not, in fact, available to him. Furthermore, many of the epitaphs in Vigna Codini III emphasize the literacy of their subjects. Five of them mention library workers (CIL 6.5188 – 5192) and two others are in verse (CIL 6.5254, 5263). Given the importance of literary patronage to the imperial family in the Julio-Claudian period, the emphasis on reading and writing in Vigna Codini III may suggest that the emperor’s household noticed his interest in literary patronage and imitated it. CIL 6.5302’s unusually erotic tone and engagement with Augustan elegy may thus have been intended to draw attention to this epitaph in a collective burial space that valued literary skill.