Throughout Varro’s fragmentary corpus is a seeming obsession with textual afterlives, his own as well as of others. This was not merely a literary trope, but an idea grounded in Neoptolemus of Parium’s ars poetica and its counter-intuitive definition of ‘poet’. In his theory of poetry, ‘poet’ refers not to the historical poet who creates a poem, but to the meaning or ‘mind’ of a poem, and this ‘poet’ (the poet scriptus) acquires an immortality denied to the flesh-and-blood poet (the poet scribens). Varro’s approach to literary history is informed by this definition of ‘poet’, and when he writes about Rome’s literary past, his interest is less in biographical data about historical poets than in poetic self-preservation through mimesis. An examination of fragments from the De poetis, the De poematis, the De comoediis Plautinis, and the poetic epitaphs preserved in Gellius demonstrates how Varro’s interest in literary immortality and mimesis was misread as literary history in the narrow sense.

On a well-known epitaph from first-century CE Rome, one man commemorates another as his “fellow freedman and, at the same time, dearest companion” (conlibertus idem consors carissimus) (CIL 6, 22355a). The phrase reveals that the men are connected in two ways: by their involuntary legal subjection to the same patron and by their mutual camaraderie. It is the relationship between these two ties, expressed by the Latin idem, that I investigate in this chapter. Over 100 epitaphs employ a form of idem to communicate two distinct but simultaneous bonds, the majority of which were formed through the processes of enslavement and liberation. Employing this corpus of inscriptions, I explore the entanglement of interpersonal ties experienced by freed persons in Roman households. I show that the word libertus/a (freed person), which we often read as a marker of status, is employed on these epitaphs as a relational term, interchangeable and sometimes overlapping with interpersonal ties generated by very different social and legal phenomena, including affection, birth, marriage, and testation.

This chapter discusses a group of inscriptions that include formulas granting permission for burial in a collective tomb on the Via Appia. These epigraphic formulas speak to the careful management of a resource that was of importance in a community in which enslaved and freed persons constituted the majority: the successful acquisition of a respectable burial. Curiously, these permissions are sometimes given out by the decurions of an association and in other cases by the aristocratic patriarchs. This suggests that the agency to grant these permissions did not rest exclusively with either enslavers or dependents, but more importantly the epigraphic commemoration of these arrangements may pay deference to the authority of the association and the aristocratic patrons. Taken as a group, the inscriptions thus appear to reflect a carefully choreographed interaction between enslaved, manumitted, freeborn, and aristocratic members of the gens Volusia. This reading complements interpretations of freed persons’ funerary culture as self-representations by positing that these funerary monuments are also concerned with securing burial privileges in the collective tomb.

It is the argument of this chapter that in the 1830s and 1840s, the pressure of memorialising old friends who had suffered or died with madness caused Wordsworth to write a kind of poetry that responded to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process, fraught with difficulty, he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions.

Hieradoumian tombstones – very unusually for Greek-language epitaphs – typically give the precise date of death in the format year, month, and day, and age at death is also very often specified. As a result, we have a large body of data for analyzing demographic patterns in the region. This chapter analyzes Hieradoumian patterns of seasonal mortality, broken down by sex and age. The results show both similarities and differences with other comparable datasets from other parts of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Infants and young children are heavily under-represented in the funerary record, as are (to a lesser extent) women. Since votive inscriptions are also often precisely dated, it is likewise possible to gain some sense of dominant seasonal patterns of religious activity in Roman Hieradoumia. The large number of dated epitaphs from the second-century AD allows us to trace the impact of the Antonine Plague in western Asia Minor; the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the pathogens which may have shaped ‘normal’ seasonal mortality patterns in the region.

This chapter introduces the two inscribed monument types which were characteristic of Roman Hieradoumia: the familial epitaph and the propitiation-stēlē. Both categories of monument tend to be dated by year, month, and day, which allows us to map the development of the epigraphic habit in the region with unusual precision. Hieradoumian tombstones generally take the form of pedimental marble stēlai, often bearing a depiction of a wreath, either incised or in relief. The associated funerary inscriptions have a highly stereotyped structure, in which the deceased is ‘honoured’ by a smaller or larger group of family members, whose relation to the deceased is very precisely defined. These funerary monuments have several formal similarities to the propitiation-stēlai erected in many Hieradoumian rural sanctuaries, which narrate individual transgressions, divine punishments, and acts of propitiation. Taken together, these two categories of ‘commemorative’ monument provide a vivid picture of the moral universe of rural Hieradoumia in the first three centuries AD.

By considering several of Johnson’s critical essays on poetry, this chapter compares his criticism of poetry with his own practice. In his lives of Milton and Gray, Johnson emphatically rejects poetics that employ language, images, and situations distinct from ordinary experience and normal speech. Milton and Gray are found wanting in this regard, with “Lycidas” ridiculed for its pastoral fiction and Gray indicted for thinking that poetry should be written in language remote from common speech. In treating London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson’s two imitations of Juvenal’s Roman satires, Richetti explores their differences from the Roman originals and shows how Johnson’s poems share many qualities with his occasional verse, written for friends to mark personal events, sometimes satirically, more often affectionately. The Vanity offers readers Johnson’s verse at its most powerful, unsparing in its renditions of the human condition, giving common language a vivid and almost terrifying concrete particularity.

In Part II, the death arts cover the post-mortem period from funerals to commemoration, completing the death-cycle initiated by Part I with its emphasis on the pre-mortem period and preparation for death. England’s protracted Reformation complicated this latter set of death arts. The relationship of worshippers to the dead underwent substantial reorientation on account of Protestantism’s elimination of the doctrine of Purgatory. Modernized and annotated excerpts, taken from a diversity of genres – including chronicles, the Book of Common Prayer, and consolation – reflect the changes not only to the Church’s burial rites but also less ritualized remembrance, which increasingly manifested itself through epitaphs, funeral elegies, and funeral sermons. Similar confessional and political tensions may be seen in the excerpts on Protestant and Catholic martyrs. Excerpts also represent a range of more secular commemorative acts from remembering traitors, regicide, and the ideal courtier, to a mother’s elegies for her infant son and a pamphleteer’s mourning of the unnamed masses killed by the plague.

This chapter surveys the major Athenian inscriptional genres as well as their placement and distribution over time, and attempts to convey what it might have meant to a passerby to experience the ‘inscribed’ city.