Ovid’s Tombs: Afterlives of the Poetic Corpus
By Nora Goldschmidt
‘I prefer to speak from the depths of my tomb’ (Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe)
Ennius’ imago Between Tomb and Text
By Francesca Martelli
Ennius occupies a foundational yet anomalous position in the history of authorial portraiture in Rome. The story that a statue of the poet was placed in the tomb of the Scipiones is a departure from the standard tropes of authorial depiction: it locates the poet’s statue not in a public space (e.g. a library) nor in his own tomb, but in a tomb belonging to his ‘patrons’ – who thereby thank him for the fame he has granted them.
The Tomb as Metapoetic Space in Hellenistic Epigram
By Irene Peirano
The Hellenistic period witnessed the development of a rich literary tradition of funerary epigrams dedicated to poets (Gabathuler, 1937) which not only continued to be written in the Roman period, when Varro, for example, collected epigrams on the poets Plautus, Naevius and Pacuvius in his De Poetis (Gellius 1.24.), but also influenced the development of the Latin sphragis (e.g. Ennius, Ep. 2; Horace, C. 3.30; Propertius 1.22; Ovid, Met. 15 and see Keith, 2011). While some were transmitted in biographies of poets (e.g.
Pausanias’ Dead Poets Society
By Johanna Hanink
This paper argues that the treatment of poets’ tombs in Pausanias’ Description of Greece (2nd c.CE) exemplifies a tradition that saw graves as sites for connecting and communing with dead poets. It also argues that Pausanias’ narrative serves to write the poets whose graves he mentions into the very mythical worlds which they had created, thereby casting the poets as part of the mythical history that for Pausanias is embodied – and entombed – in what for him is the Greek sacred landscape (Alcock; Elsner; Porter).
Silent Bones and Singing Stones: Materializing the Poetic Corpus in Hellenistic Greece
By Verity Platt
Poets’ tombs, whether real or imagined, mark the physical presence of authors’ mortal remains. In ancient Greece, they were sources of civic pride, sites of literary pilgrimage, even the focus of cultic honors, and drew particular attention from the third century BCE, when local historiographical practices coincided with the formation of a Greek literary canon and an intensely creative engagement with the poetic past (Hunter; Acosta-Hughes).