Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe - continued

Dr Maureen Carroll

Different specialists study different aspects of Roman funerary practices. Archaeologists focus on styles and architecture of tombs, on the disposal of the body itself and on burial ritual. But they often find Latin inscriptions inaccessible and daunting, so that the importance of this source of information on life, death and social customs is commonly underestimated and unappreciated. Significant numbers of the texts on funerary monuments have been of interest only to epigraphists, or to ancient historians who read Latin. They are published primarily in 19th century corpora of Latin inscriptions, or they appear irregularly (as they are found) as brief entries in specialist journals. Historians use these inscriptions to extract information on specific topics such as mortality rates, legal practices and literacy. Corpora of inscriptions and statistical analyses are important sources of information, but they do not necessarily make the monuments more accessible to archaeologists and students of archaeology. Nor do they adequately illuminate the personal nature of the information on life and its vagaries in the inscribed texts. Furthermore, most epigraphic studies are severely Rome-orientated, i.e. the inscriptions from the city of Rome have been the primary focus of most investigations on Roman social history and demography.

In this research project, epitaphs from Rome and other Italian cities naturally are examined, but, the bulk of the material analysed comes from western Europe, from France, Germany, the Low Countries, Britain and Spain. This is important because funerary monuments in Rome are not representative of and can differ greatly from those in other parts of the Empire. Funerary monuments varied widely from town to town, and from region to region. The popularity of particular types, and one might even say standardised types of monuments, within a community is often the result of the wish of individuals in that community to emulate their neighbours and to conform to what was deemed a suitable form of self-representation understood by a `local audience´.

By considering funerary monuments and their texts outside Rome and Italy we can then see to what degree people who were not in the centre of the Empire commemorated their dead in the Roman fashion, using Latin epitaphs and Roman images. This wider geographical and comparative approach enables us to recognise which regions and which sectors of society did or did not compete in this very Roman form of publicly expressing status and belonging, and to ask why this was so.

My study on Roman epitaphs from the 1st century B.C. to the 5th century A.D. spans the gap between archaeological and historical/epigraphic approaches to funerary monuments and thus enable personal narratives to be told by exploring a variety of themes. These themes include memory and commemoration; epitaphs and literacy; selecting a monument; choosing a message; causes of death; family and household; physical and social mobility; Christian commemoration; and violation and neglect of monuments. Also of interest are wills and testaments; stonemasons, sculptors and workshops, the significance of unfinished, altered and reused gravestones, and the use of humour in funerary texts. The study demonstrates for archaeologists, Roman funerary epitaphs are a significant resource for information on life, death and social customs.

The project was generously supported by the British Academy and by the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.