STONES IN THE FOREST 27
cial twist to Ovid’s choice of first-person narrative here: even death
does not stop the loquacious bird from talking.^21
It is important to stress that epitaphs do not have a monopoly on the
inscriptions embedded in Latin verse. The Heroides are a useful ex-
ample to set beside the Silvae, since, although their subject-matter is
mythological, their epistolary form clothes the stories in the quotidian
atmosphere of the real world. To cite examples of three non-funerary
types from this work: an inscription on a statue-base is represented by
the titulus that Phyllis imagines carving beneath a putative statue of
Demophoon (Her. 2.73–4),^22 graffiti are represented by Oenone’s
name and oath carved on trees (Her. 5.21–2, 25–30),^23 and the genre
of dedicatory inscriptions is represented by Sappho’s vow to dedicate
her lyre to Apollo (Her. 15.183–4). Nor is it only by verbatim quota-
tion that Roman poets allude to the epigraphic register. They fre-
quently emphasize the epigraphic nature of vows, dedications, epi-
taphs, and other conventionally inscribed forms without explicitly
quoting them, as in the Pyrrha ode, when Horace imagines himself, a
shipwreck-survivor, dedicating his sopping clothes to Neptune:^24
... me tabula sacer
uotiua paries indicat uuida
suspendisse potenti
uestimenta maris deo.
(Hor. Odes 1.5.13–6)
As for me,
the votive tablet on the temple wall announces
that I have dedicated my dripping wet clothes
to the god who rules the sea.^2520 Fedeli 1989, 96.
21 Noted by McKeown 1998, 144. Fedeli 1989, 96 remarks that the parrot’s model,
Lesbia’s passer, which chirped non-stop to its mistress all its life, “per la via tene-
brosa dell’Orco aveva avuto il buon gusto di andarsene in silenzio”.
22 Cleverly subverting our expectations of an ex voto with a denunciation of the
honorand’s faithlessness: see Fedeli 1989, 84.
23 The carving of the beloved’s name upon a tree is an elegiac topos that goes back
to Callimachus: cf. Aet. fr. 73 Pf. (Acontius carving Cydippe’s name), Verg. Ecl.
10.52–4 (Gallus carving the name of his amores), Prop. 1.18.21–2 (Propertius carving
the name of Cynthia). The instance in Eclogue 10, the poem in which Virgil cele-
brates Gallus as the model for love-elegy, has been interpreted as an “intense metalit-
erary moment” reflecting on the origins of elegy: see Barchiesi 2001a, 124.
24 “[A]n iconic representation of an inscription”: Thomas 1998, 221.
25 Trans. West 1995.