STONES IN THE FOREST 23
position, however routine and banal. A sense of the interest and effort
that was invested in the drafting of these announcements, especially
those designed to be permanent, is glimpsed in Gellius’ story of the
dilemma that Pompey faced in drafting the inscription for his theatre;
Cicero eventually advised him to employ an abbreviation, so as to
avoid having to choose between consul tertium or consul tertio:
persuasit igitur Pompeio, ut neque “tertium” neque “tertio” scriberetur,
se d ad secundum usque “t” fierent litterae, ut uerbo non perscripto res
quidem demonstraretur, sed dictio tamen ambigua uerbi lateret.
(Gell. NA 10.1.7)
So he persuaded Pompey not to write either tertium or tertio, but to put
the letters as far as the second t, so that without the word being written
out in full, the sense would be clear, but the actual form of the word
would be veiled in ambiguity.Such an anecdote conveys a sense of the texture that epigraphy lends
to Roman self-presentation in daily life.
It is not only prose authors who quote inscriptions. Poets also quote
them, or pretend to do so. Once again, epitaphs are the most common
category. Sometimes a little metrical adjustment is necessary, as with
Lucan’s rendering of the laconic epitaph for the mighty Pompey
(8.792–3), inscripsit sacrum semusto stipite nomen: / HIC SITVS EST
MAGNVS, adjusting to the straitjacket of the hexameter the original
formulation, quoted in De uiris illustribus (77.9): HIC POSITVS EST
MAGNVS. Another epitaph in Lucan, even more laconic, is envisaged
on her own tomb by Cato’s wife, Marcia (2.343–4): liceat tumulo
scripsisse: CATONIS / MARCIA, an example, as a recent commentator
astutely notes, of the use of the epitaph in elegy, and in poetry more
generally, “to evoke the self-image or ideals of the poet-speaker”.^10
The model for this use of epitaph goes back to the Augustan age. Ti-
bullus, Propertius, and—especially—Ovid favour it.^11 These poets are,
of course, all elegists, writing in the metre in which epitaphs are most
comfortably at home, although the tropes and dictions of funerary
epigram had already been accommodated in hexameter poetry, both
bucolic and epic, by Virgil.^12 Ovid “quotes” epitaphs in the Metamor-
10 Fantham 1992, 143.
11 Studied with great subtlety by Fedeli 1989.
12 Cf. the lines to be inscribed on the tomb of Daphnis (Ecl. 5.43–4). For the adap-
tation of funerary epigram to commemorate minor heroes in the Aeneid, see Dinter
2005.