22 KATHLEEN M. COLEMAN
ated with a grand imperial gesture of recusatio to describe his decision
not to join the freedman decuriae in Rome (noluit); furthermore, the
claim that he was elected seuir in absentia gives him away, since elec-
tion in absentia is associated with candidacy for a much higher office
than the routine appointment of seuiri.^7 His concluding list of vir-
tues—itself a combination without epigraphic parallel^8 —is dominated
by his bank balance, and he betrays a comical lack of culture in his
claim never to have listened to a philosopher; one might have ex-
pected a conventional sentiment from the realm of popular thought,
rather than its rejection. But he gets the valediction right (uale et tu),
although the stark simplicity of the formula, without even an accom-
panying vocative, is perhaps inverted pretentiousness on Trimalchio’s
part, given that a much more inflated version—attested in epigraphi-
cally abbreviated form—would have seemed more generally conso-
nant with his manner.^9
Epitaphs are the most common epigraphic category, and they are
proportionately the category that is most commonly “quoted” in liter-
ary texts. But it is not only Trimalchio’s imagination that is preoccu-
pied with an epigraphic form; his house displays several different
sorts, starting with the CAVE CANEM in the entrance that is familiar
from Pompeii:
ad sinistram enim intrantibus non longe ab ostiarii cella canis ingens,
catena uinctus, in pariete erat pictus superque quadrata littera scriptum:
CAVE CANEM.
(Petr. Sat. 29.1)
On the left as you come in, not far from the porter’s cubbyhole, there
was a huge dog, all chained up, painted on the wall, and above it was
written in block capitals: BEWARE OF THE DOG.There is also, inter alia, the list of penalties for slaves who have gone
missing (28.7), the dedicatory inscription on bronze recording a dona-
tion from Trimalchio’s dispensator (30.1), the inscribed version of his
engagement calendar (30.3). These few examples suggest the range of
inscribed texts that formed the epigraphic background to daily life,
each of them the product of a conscious process of selection and com-
7 For Trimalchio’s misunderstanding of Roman élite norms, see Beard 1998, 96–
8.
8 Tremoli 1960, 22.
9 CIL 6.10651 u(iator) u(ale) it(em) tu q(ui) l(egis). For the simpler uiator uale et
tu, cf. CIL 5.4887, 7838.