Chiara Battisti, Princeton University
This paper examines the encoding of family memories in two poetic texts from the High Roman Empire: Silvae 3.3, a funerary poem written by the Flavian poet Statius for Claudius Etruscus’ father, and the funerary poem from the mausoleum of the Flavii in Cillium (second c. AD, CIL VIII, 211-216). Using these poems, this paper studies the role of poetic texts in placing the individual and his family within the framework of the Roman Empire from the center to its periphery, with particular focus on modes of representation, imageries, narratives, language, and context of inscriptions.
First, this research focuses on aspects of continuity and presence of common motifs and concerns in these texts, such as the bond between son and father, the assertion of specific values in the Roman family (cf. the importance of immortales mores in CIL VIII 211-216), the connections within Roman families at the service of the empire and the emperor, and the articulation of a distinct social mobility. It analyzes how the individual and his family are represented in these poetic pieces in relation to the Empire and the emperor, and how discourses of power and the role of the individuals in it are framed by poetry and monumentality.
Pillinger has examined at length the commemorative practices and processes of visualization at work behind the Flavii’s monument. Drawing upon Pillinger’s work, and Dinter’s research on inscriptional intermediality in Latin literature, this paper studies more in detail the relation between Statius’ Silvae’s poetry, and its engagement with the epigraphic code and text of the Flavii’s poem. Van Dam had shed light on the recreation of performances in Statius’ consolatory poetry. The Flavii’s monument is influenced by the same discursive practices, and uses them to foster a certain biographical narrative, as we see in the elaborate descriptio funeris and laudatio of the deceased present in both texts.
This paper argues that, while poetic forms stemmed from the center of the Empire and reached its periphery, the Cillium inscription demonstrates a re-enactment and expansion of these tendencies. The poem from Cillium clearly challenges monumentalizing practices enacted in the capital, and in other parts of the empire (cf. the references to the Neronian Colossus, the Alexandrian Pharos, the obelisk in the Circus Maximus). Starting from this premise, this paper reflects further on the role of carmina epigraphica, and poems encoded in epigraphic forms, in articulating and distributing a language of commemoration and self-representation of distinct sectors of the Roman élite, ‘central’ and ‘local’. It is through the form of epigrammata longa that family memories at the service of empire come to be associated with performed spaces of selective memory and display of power, of traditionalism, and desire for memorability.