Robert Rohland, University of Cambridge
Verse inscriptions record the fates of numerous people who suffered shipwreck: funeral epigrams tell of those who drowned, and dedicatory epigrams of those who survived shipwreck. Allusions to Homeric poetry frequently paint these people as Odysseus figures (Bing 2009, Hunter 2018). How should we treat such literary allusions in verse inscriptions? Are such allusions simply pieces of poetry which were common knowledge and which even the worst poetaster would have known? Or should we assume that allusions in inscriptions are part of the same sophisticated “allusive art” that we can see in the poetry of Vergil? And how about the fact that some inscriptions do not simply allude to Homeric texts but tell of actual people who suffered Odyssean fates? This paper argues that recent trends of reading allusions as part of the cultural memory helps us to address such questions (cf. Ginsberg 2016): I will show how shipwreck epigrams treat Homeric language as a source for literary allusions and treat the Odyssean journey as an Erinnerungsfigur which is actualised by the experience of real people who suffer shipwreck. My paper will include case studies on epigrams of people who survived shipwrecks and left dedicatory inscriptions (e.g., CEG 755; SEG xlvii no.1517) as well as of people who drowned and are remembered in epitaphs (e.g., SGO 16/31/05).
My paper is influenced by recent work of Astrid Erll, one of the leading figures in memory studies, who is currently working on a project that analyses the “mnemohistory” of the Odyssey (see Erll 2018 building on concepts of J. Assmann 2011 [1992]). If Erll is right that one “of memory’s fundamental dynamics consists in the actualization of (sometimes age- old) narrative schemata”, then inscriptions about shipwrecks are crucial places for locating Homer in the cultural memory: these texts tell us of real people and their Odyssean experience in Homeric language. In doing so, verse inscriptions take part in a poetics of shipwreck in which fact and fiction are hopelessly blurred: shipwreck is a common, sometimes even trite, literary motif and at the same time it is as a disastrous reality. Inscriptions tell of real fates in words that are sometimes taken wholesale from the Odyssey, one of the best-known accounts of fiction (and about fiction, one might add). My paper will show how allusions to the Odyssey involve a poetics of shipwreck that is all about recrafting bits and pieces of shipwrecks: short inscriptions engage in the materiality of shipwreck as they craft stories from debris and planks, just as they craft stories from bits and pieces of Homer. As inscriptions recraft and actualise the Homeric story and keep it in memory on stone, they become a crucial building block in the mnemohistory of the Odyssey.