Remembering the Enslaved and the Emancipated in Latin Verse Epitaphs, Epigrams, and Poems of Consolation

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the extant Latin poetry written to commemorate enslaved and emancipated persons in the ancient Roman world. My study engages with two bodies of evidence. The first comprises the 243 surviving Latin verse epitaphs inscribed on the gravestones of persons from these social groups: these epitaphs date from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE and originate from across the Roman empire. The second body of evidence comprises the poems within the Latin literary canon (that is, the texts circulated in manuscript form rather than being incised on stone) that were written to commemorate enslaved and emancipated persons and/or to console someone on the loss of one such person. 19 poems of this nature survive: one by Lucilius, 14 by Martial, and four by Statius, ranging in length from two lines to 234. These forms of sepulchral poetry, I argue, not only served to honor deceased individuals, but also provided a space in which contrasting perspectives on slavery, including both positive and negative sentiments, could be expressed. In Chapters 1 and 2, I demonstrate that, when slaveholders commemorate their enslaved and emancipated dependents (which is the case in all of the canonical texts and some of the inscribed epitaphs), they tend to depict slavery as benevolent and paternalistic and to position themselves as central to their dependents’ social and professional lives. In Chapter 1, I analyze how these tendencies are manifested in the inscribed verse epitaphs; in Chapter 2, I consider how they are manifested in two canonical genres of poetry (namely, the epigram and the poem of consolation). In Chapters 3 and 4, I examine how, when enslaved and emancipated persons memorialize themselves, or are memorialized by their family and friends (which is the case in most of the inscribed epitaphs), they often challenge or reframe this worldview. In Chapter 3, I examine cases where this is done overtly, including an epitaph from Gaul that describes enslavement as traumatic, and a group of epitaphs, two from Carthage and one from Italy, that equate death with liberation from bondage. As I demonstrate in Chapter 4, enslaved and emancipated persons could also engage in more subtle modes of resistance. Many of them, when writing their own epitaphs or those of their family members, choose to tell their life stories in ways that conflict with the picture presented by the slaveholders: for instance, they may foreground their family and community rather than their relationship with their slaveholder. Finally, in Chapter 5, I underscore the subjectivity of sepulchral poetry, and its capacity to shape perceptions of particular social groups, by examining the extant poems, both canonical and epigraphic, for a more complex social group: namely, alumni, meaning children born to enslaved or emancipated parents and ‘fostered’ by their slaveholder. These alumni may be represented in different ways (e.g., as ordinary household slaves or as adoptive children) according to the perspective and agenda of their commemorator(s). Overall, therefore, these poems enabled persons from various social backgrounds not just to mourn their deceased loved ones, but also to participate in a broader dialogue on slavery and to shape the ways in which the experiences of enslavement and emancipation were remembered.Classic