Carolyn Tobin, Vassar College
A bilingual epitaph found in Rome from the second century CE proclaims: “Traveler, do not pass by my epitaph, but stop and listen, and then, when you have learned the truth, carry on. There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon... All of us who have died and gone below are bones and ashes: there is nothing else. What I have told you is true. Now leave, traveler, so that you will not think that, although dead, I talk too much” (CIL 1.6298 = EG 646). Our existence after death, the deceased insists, is purely physical – he can ‘speak’ with his monument and parts of his body linger on, but all who have died before persist only in their buried remains.
This paper explores concepts of embodiment in Roman funerary epigraphy and burial monuments from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. More specifically, it focuses upon monuments where the persistence of the physical body is recognized as a seat of the deceased’s personhood, sometimes even to the exclusion of the soul as in the epitaph above. Associations of the dead with their physical bodies after burial, already established by Roman funerary ritual and regular rites for the dead, are expressed both visually and textually by monuments that acknowledge the fate of the body after death and focus upon it as the center of postmortem identity. While Epicurean ideas about nonexistence after death or Stoic platitudes have been traced in funerary epigraphy, little attention has been paid to concepts of bodies persisting and changing separately from the fate of their souls. Epitaphs confront the reality of the changed size of the human body after cremation (EDCS 1394; CIL 5.2417), give advice to the bones of the deceased (CIL 8.1230), speak in the voice of ashes and request gentle treatment of the earth above (CIL 8.24787), or refer to ashes as imbibing the tears of mourners through the earth (CIL 3.6384). One epitaph of a doctor even acknowledges the reality of his own decomposition: “Look, the earth offers me a home, and my ashes a tomb; even the tiny worm devours my fallen limbs” (CIL 13.2414, en mihi terra domum praebet cinerisque sepulchrum/ vermis et exiguus membra caduca vorat)
Meanwhile, skeletal imagery on funerary monuments either depict the deceased as a lifelike, animated skeleton or visually draw attention to physical fate of entombed bodies. An altar at the Naples Archaeological Museum (fig. 1), for instance, shows the deceased as a skeleton reclining upon the ground, while is soul, represented as a butterfly, flits away. A stele at the British Museum (fig. 2), on the other hand, depicts a skeletal body inhumed in the ground, while its text focuses on death as the ultimate physical equalizer. The texts and images together of these funerary monuments suggest a discourse around the fate of the body after death and a recognition that the deceased continue to reside at least in part in their ever-changing, decomposing bodies.