In the late summer of ad 359, the Roman senator Junius Bassus was buried at St. Peter’s basilica on the Vatican hill. His body was laid to rest in a large doubleregister columnar marble sarcophagus. The facade of the sarcophagus displayed ten deeply cut tableaux depicting events from the Bible and the era of the apostles. Its lid, now badly damaged, presented on its right side a traditional ‘‘meal of the dead’’ and on the left a scene no longer identifiable. The sarcophagus also offered two inscriptions: one on the very upper edge of the sarcophagus box; the other, in verse, set in the center of the lid’s forward-facing vertical field. The first identified Bassus as urban prefect and newly baptized at the time of his death on August 25, ad 359: in ipsa praefectura urbi neofitus iit ad deum. The second, of eight elegiac couplets now incomplete, praised his career and munificence, recalled his extraordinary public funeral, and asserted that death (mors) had not cheated him of further success but given him distinction far beyond any terrestrial honor. The verse epitaph, therefore, expressed in words the same pretensions as those signaled by the visual splendor of the sarcophagus’s sculpting (PLRE i: 155; Malbon 1990; Alan Cameron 2002). Although inscribed sarcophagi have a long history at Rome - highlighted, for example, by those deposited in the late republican Tomb of the Scipios - Junius Bassus (or his heirs) used his to announce surprising claims about the afterlife, claims that reflected the new confidence that came with ritual incorporation into the community of Christian believers at Rome.
A generation later, another Roman aristocrat of high achievement was buried at St. Peter’s. The ultra-wealthy Petronius Probus had been ordinary consul and four times praetorian prefect before he died in about ad 390 and was interred in a grand mausoleum snug against the apse of Constantine’s church. Few at Rome then matched Probus in prestige. When it was discovered in the fifteenth century, his marble sarcophagus (a single-register columnar type) still contained remnants of the golden cloth that had adorned his corpse. Probus’ sarcophagus bears no inscription, but his mausoleum itself was decorated with two lengthy verse inscriptions. Supremely self-confident epitaphs, the two poems echo both Virgil and Christian scripture to boast of Probus’ earthly accomplishments and forecast his heavenly rewards. As with Junius Bassus, not death but eternal life - in this case to be enjoyed among the stars (vivit et astra tenet, his epitaph proclaimed) - was the proper reward for a nobilis like Probus (PLRE i: 736-40). Probus’ claims appear bold enough when set against the more pessimistic background of early imperial epitaphs; but their immediate force emerges most vividly when read in conjunction with the highly conservative (literary) elogia of the earthbound Roman aristocrats celebrated by Probus’ contemporary, the pagan senator Avianius Symmachus. Avianius’ avowed model was the Hebdomades of the late republican writer Varro: Probus was tapping the rapidly rising stream of new Christian poetry and ideology (Trout 2001).
Both the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus and the mausoleum of Petronius Probus announced the claims of a particular segment of the fourth-century Roman elite, whose Christian affiliation did not directly induce them (as it did some of their Christian peers) to renounce the prerogatives of their class. As assemblies of words and images, these monuments were self-assured declarations within an increasingly strident debate over the value of wealth and secular achievements at a crucial moment when paganism was far from crushed but when Christian asceticism had increasingly powerful allies. Yet, while these grand funerary monuments are representative of some of the ways in which Christian epigraphy collaborated in the assertion of identity in a competitive atmosphere, they were, like Rome itself, atypical in other respects. Far more than half of the known Latin inscriptions of Late Antiquity come from this single city, where the tally of texts from the catacombs alone runs to 45,000 — 40,000 of them in Latin and the great majority of those post-Constantinian (Carletti 1986: 11). Furthermore, although aristocrats elsewhere were also sometimes buried in grand tombs and commemorated with verse epitaphs, the majority of extant funerary inscriptions in Italy and the provinces are far simpler.
In the mass of these relatively brief and humble epitaphs lurks a deeper social history. Third-century Christian epitaphs are relatively few; but even they suggest how early Christians used funerary epigraphy to demarcate communal identity. The great majority (82.9%) of the texts in an early third-century group (in Greek as well as Latin) from the catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria Nova, for example, have been described as ‘‘neutral,’’ avoiding explicit advertisement of religious allegiances (though some graves were marked by images of fish or anchors). Over the following decades, however, the Christian salutations seen in a minority of the texts from the catacomb of Priscilla, such as pax and pax tibi, as well as the eschatological expression in pace, become more common. In a group of inscriptions from the cemetery of Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Labicana, for example, dated to the later third century, half of the texts now signaled Christian affiliation, especially through the phrase in pace but also in the first appearances of the word depositio. In such language, as well as in the brevity of the earlier epitaphs, whose preference for a single name contrasted with contemporary non-Christian practice, it is possible to glimpse the desire of these Christians to proclaim the distinction and the collective cohesion of their community within an urban world characterized by countless religious and social opportunities (Carletti 1986: 12-15; 1988; Yasin 2005: 441-6).
The much larger number of surviving fourth - and fifth-century epitaphs highlights the variety of styles and formulae that emerged with the phenomenal post-Constan-tinian growth of Christianity. Not surprisingly, these more loquacious epitaphs continue to spotlight traditional values shared by Christians with their contemporaries - innocentia and castitas, for example. But other elements of praise also begin to appear or increase in incidence, perhaps as prescriptions for the living as much as descriptions of the dead. References to caritas or amor pauperum stress the Christian’s social responsibility. Attributes such as faithfulness (fidelis) and obedience or humility ( servus Dei) become prominent as terms of praise. Traditional images of death as sleep or repose are now made more specific with the tag in pace. The more frequent use of formulae of deposition (e. g., depositus/a [in pace]) accompanied by precise dates bears forceful witness to deeper shifts in thinking, for this practice reflects the Christian reconfiguration of death as a day of birth (natalis) into a new life that could be commemorated annually by those left behind. Indeed, although survivors still lament the loss of loved ones, solace is found in assurance of the victory over death won by Christ’s followers. In these still relatively modest epitaphs, the familiar and the novel coalesce in the expression of ideals increasingly popular in this age (Charles Pietri 1983b: 1448-68).
These texts also reveal unintentionally the widening gap between the literary Latin of the formally educated and forms of the spoken language. They help us thereby to gauge the evolution of Vulgar (or demotic) Latin toward the Romance languages within the empire’s former provinces. The definitive break in intelligibility between the spoken language and the far more conservative forms of literary Latin (i. e., late and then medieval Latin) may have come only in and after the eighth century;
But most aspects of demotic Latin had already evolved considerably during Late Antiquity. The changes are wholesale, spanning pronunciation, spelling, morphology, and syntax. As already evident in the texts just cited - in the case of biba (for vivas), for example - epitaphs offer clear examples of the exchange of labial b for v with the loss of a final consonant. Phonetic change is even more radical in the vowel system, where inscriptions reveal the disappearing distinction of many long and short vowels (for example, the frequent assimilation of short i and long e). Likewise, epigraphic texts signal the breakdown of the inflectional system, particularly in nominal morphology, and illustrate the increasing reliance on prepositional phrases to do the work of cases. Such changes in syntax as the replacement of accusative and infinitive constructions with subordinate clauses containing a finite verb and introduced by a conjunction (often quod or quia) are less evident in these short texts; but the often distinct evidence preserved on epitaphs may bring us closer than many literary texts to the Latin of Late Antiquity’s non-elites (Rigg 1996; Herman 2000).
In the end, of course, epitaphs also bring us back to individuals. Thousands of the late antique dead are only names, but some graves are more forthcoming about the lives of their occupants. In the basilichetta of the Roman Catacomb of Commodilla, adjacent to a memoria of the saints Felix and Adauctus, a painted verse inscription in five elegiac couplets, probably of the mid sixth century, accompanies a large image of the deceased widow Turtura. The text (Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae, ii: 6018) is the lament of a bereaved son. It highlights the marital fidelity of a maternal ‘‘turtle-dove’’ (turtura), who preserved her chastity for thirty-six years after her husband’s death. Little is overtly ‘‘Christian’’ in the son’s eulogy; but its words are part of the same large fresco panel that includes Turtura’s portrait. Above the verses of an epitaph that centers on Turtura’s life on earth, the saints Felix and Adauctus present the deceased matrona to an enthroned Madonna and Child (Deckers et al. 1994). This iconic panel, a ‘‘precocious example’’ of the rising cult of Maria Regina at Rome (Thun0 2003), conditioned every reading of the epitaph below it, just as the verses affected the viewer’s response to the widowed mother’s image. The classicizing lament draws emotional force from the portrait at the same time as the poem’s consolatory tone is reinforced then obviated by the arresting image of Turtura’s admission into a heavenly court unbounded by time. Many late antique epitaphs, in far simpler fashion, expressed similar hopes.
For many late antique Romans, death especially activated the will to inscribe, to set down in stone or plaster something about a life. The particular motives and contingencies behind every act of inscription surely vary across the centuries, as do the roles and proportions of tradition and innovation in the language of commemoration. The sarcophagus of Junius Bassus and the fresco of Turtura are separated by some two centuries of change. Though these two memorials are bound together by the verses that adorn them, they are distinguished by the historical events that divide the Rome of Constantine’s sons from that of the popes of the Justinianic age. And yet, every Christian epitaph stills the social and religious cross currents of the moment. Despite epigraphy’s inherent limitations as an index of late antique society and demography, inscribed late Latin funerary monuments nevertheless capture aspects of the age that might otherwise have slipped away.
World History
