STONES IN THE FOREST: EPIGRAPHIC ALLUSION IN THE
SILVAE*
Kathleen M. ColemanText was everywhere in the Roman world. While the circulation of
books was restricted to the learned and wealthy élite, public writing
was accessible to all, even if it was a code that the illiterate could not
crack. The example of Pompeii demonstrates that the walls of an an-
cient city were covered with writing: accounts, shop-signs, lost-and-
found notices, quotations from literary works, original compositions
with literary aspirations, obscenities, gladiatorial tallies, all jostling
cheek-by-jowl with the more “official” register of painted program-
mata and lapidary inscriptions. Public writing was perhaps more visi-
ble in a Roman city than at any other subsequent period until the in-
vention of the advertising poster and the neon sign. In a material envi-
ronment that was covered with writing, it should therefore be no sur-
prise that what we think of as the “epigraphic” and “literary” registers
informed one another. Many types of inscription originated as distilla-
tions of more expansive oral forms—the funerary laudatio, for in-
stance, must have lent its essence to the digest of achievements in
elogia inscribed in the Forum—and remained susceptible to influence
from literary tropes and phrasing;^1 traces of the Augustan poets are
prominent in the carmina epigraphica of the later Empire.^2 It is how-
ever, with influence in the opposite direction that I am primarily con-
- Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the annual meeting of the Classi-
cal Association of Canada in May 2005 and at the triennial meeting of the Interna-
tionale Thesaurus-Kommission in Munich two months later. I am grateful for stimu-
lating comments on both those occasions, and at the conference on Statius commemo-
rated in this volume. To Bruce Gibson, who commented on a subsequent draft, and to
Damien Nelis and Jocelyne Clément-Nelis, who alerted me to valuable bibliography, I
owe special gratitude, as I do also to the editors for their acute suggestions. For pas-
sages from Silvae 5, I quote Bruce Gibson’s translation (Gibson 2006a); the remain-
ing translations are my own, except where otherwise indicated.
1 For a study of similarities in thought and expression between the inscribed
metrical epitaphs and poems preserved in the literary canon, see Tolman 1910.
2 For echoes of the elegists, see Lissberger 1934; for echoes of Virgil, Hoogma