2 A social profile: status and mobility

The limestone stele on which this epigram was inscribed, probably dating to the first or second century ce, is of considerable size (66 x 123 cm). The careful lettering, the indentations of the couplets, and the so-called ‘forked paragraphos’ between lines two and three – indicating a division or a change in the textFootnote ¹³ – show the care given to the monument. The text itself is composed in elegiacs (alternations of dactylic hexameters and pentameters), with a few irregularities (such as the penultimate syllable of the first line -ον which is short but should be scanned long for the hexameter). Such epigrams in elegiac couplets arose in the fifth century bce and already became in the fifth century the most common way to inscribe verse inscriptions – it dominated the epigrams of the Greco-Roman world for centuries to come.Footnote ¹⁴ The first section of the inscription tells us that Eudaimon set up the monument for his friend Dionysius, for whom he is grieving. Only in the second part do we learn that Dionysius was not just a friend, but also a former slave of Eudaimon – who himself may have been a former slave, based on his Greek name. Dionysius’ freedman status is both made explicit and at the same time downplayed: even while being a slave, Dionysius ‘did not experience slavery at all’. The Latin epigraphy of the imperial period shows a decline in the use of explicit status markers and (pseudo-)filiation, giving rise to a growing number of incerti (people of uncertain legal status). This phenomenon has been attributed to the freedman’s ‘unwillingness to declare his inferior status and his dependence on and obligation to his patron’.Footnote ¹⁵ That by contrast Dionysius’ status as freedman is so central to the epigram probably has to do with Eudaimon’s self-representation: he wished to be seen as a good slave-owner. At the same time, by ascribing certain characteristics of free citizens to Dionysius – he was ‘gentle, noble-looking, well-disposed, ready of wit’ – the former slave was humanized, too. Moreover, Dionysius was a skilled individual: he was ‘loved by the Muses’ (perhaps he himself composed poetry or prose texts) and a writer of shorthand, since he could ‘write swiftly’ in Greek and in Latin. As a secretary or scribe, he may have rendered his services to Eudaimon even after being freed – freedmen often stayed within (or near) the household of their former master.Footnote ¹⁶ The virtuousness of Dionysius and his friendship with Eudaimon are emphasized. These are the qualities of Dionysius that count – at least for Eudaimon, who produced the tomb with its inscription.Footnote ¹⁷ Important for us is that it provides information on which we can base our social profile, which in turn tells us something about who were commemorated in the metrical inscriptions. Dionysius was male and of freed status – but what about the other deceased individuals in the epigrams?

Let us briefly address matters of gender, age, and patterns of commemoration: most of the deceased seem to be male or female adults who were generally commemorated within the nuclear family or by their spouse – that is, if a commemorator is mentioned, for there are quite a few inscriptions that do not. One epigram commemorates a father who was ‘old in age’;Footnote ¹⁸ the two-year-old Kritias is commemorated by his parents;Footnote ¹⁹ and Rufina buries her husband Proclus, promising – in an act of piousness or virtuousness – to share his grave once it will be her time to go.Footnote ²⁰ Some deceased are commemorated not by family, but by friends – such as Dionysius. In another epigram a man is commemorated by his comrades (ἥλικες).Footnote ²¹ In light of the evidence and the question this article aims to answer, it is fruitful to give a more detailed account of two other aspects: the status of the deceased and the explicit mentions of mobility.

First, status. In most epigrams the legal status of the deceased individual is not made explicit – often the names are all we have. Greek single names – such as Dionysius and Eudaimon encountered at the beginning of this section – seem to dominate the corpus. Only a couple of individuals have purely Latin names. For example, in one epigram a woman is called Aelia Sabina.Footnote ²² It is well known that Greek names carried servile connotations – at least in Rome – and it was uncommon for freeborn people to have Greek cognomina (third personal names).Footnote ²³ Thus, many of the deceased receiving epigrams in Greek may have had a servile background, while some (possibly including the above-mentioned Eudaimon) might be the descendants of freed people.Footnote ²⁴

Still, some caution is needed. For example, there is an epigram for a boy who died at age 2 – the Kritias mentioned briefly above. He has a single name, his father three names (Lucius Attidius Kritias), his mother a single name (Peregrina). Perhaps his father was a freedman, but the deceased himself and his mother were probably slaves.Footnote ²⁵ In another epigram a woman named Lyka states that she ‘came from Crete because of my husband and Queen Rome exposed [i.e. buried] me here’.Footnote ²⁶ This formulation suggests a certain amount of agency and voluntary mobility (although we are dealing with marital mobility), which may imply that the woman, despite her single Greek name, did not have a servile background. One might expect Roman citizenship to be emphasized when someone had obtained it, and epigrams – being lengthier than prose epitaphs – certainly offered room to do so. But, as mentioned, explicit status markers gradually disappear in the Latin funerary inscriptions during the imperial period – something similar may have occurred in the Greek inscriptions in Rome. Moreover, although many Latin funerary inscriptions were commissioned by former slaves wanting to advertise their newly gained status, it was not necessarily citizenship, but family that took centre stage in their self-representation. After all, a slave’s existence was in the hands of his or her master – they had no control over their body or their life. Their families – spouses, children, siblings – were not recognized by Roman law, and they could be separated at any moment. A secure family unit did not come naturally to these individuals. Manumission, therefore, marked a turning point. Freed(wo)men could legally marry, and subsequent children born from this union would have been freeborn. They could also try to free their family members who were still enslaved.Footnote ²⁷ Some Greek epigrams from Rome do mention the citizenship of the deceased, but these are not numerous.Footnote ²⁸ In individual cases certainty is not often obtained; we are dealing with probabilities and tendencies. Still, we would argue that the silence on legal status, together with the overwhelmingly Greek cognomina, suggests that many of the deceased we find in the Greek epigrams from Rome had a servile background.

This servile presence in the Greek epigrams from Rome is noticeable. In the Greek epigrams from the Roman East, it is relatively unusual for slaves or freedmen to appear. Verse epitaphs can be seen as a privileged type of commemoration, as they required time and effort to be set up. They were highly personalized as well. There can be little doubt that among the tens if not hundreds of thousands of slaves and freedmen who lived and died in Rome, only a few would have the means or the relations to obtain so much attention after death. In the Latin epigraphy of the city of Rome, slaves and in particular freedmen dominate the record.Footnote ²⁹ It seems that Greek epigram production in Rome in this respect followed local trends.

Many Greek epigrams can be located in the milieu of slaves and freedmen, but it is noticeable that this does not apply to all. There are also individuals almost at the opposite end of the social scale, close to the Roman elite. In an epigram commemorating multiple family members, the commemorator’s husband, called Rusticus, is said to be a ἡγεμονεύς (‘governor’). Thus, he may have been a governor of a Roman province.Footnote ³⁰ Another example is a dedication by a wife to her husband. She had built a ‘large monument’ that was ‘visible from all sides, to be admired by all’. A life-size statue of her husband in ‘the posture that you had while you excelled among the Roman orators’ completed the funerary monument. All of this suggests that the wife, called Rufina, and her husband Proclus were part of the elite.Footnote ³¹ The implications are quite important. The Greek epigrams from the Roman East are socially relatively homogeneous: although members of local elites do appear in them, the epigrams often stem from the urban strata just below them. Compared with them, the Greek epigrams from Rome cover a significantly wider social spectrum. Put differently: status considerations, which were otherwise quite important to Roman thinking, were superseded by expressions of cultural identity. The use of Greek epigrams was not confined to slaves and freedmen, and apparently no social stigma applied to their use.

We may now move on to the question of migration. One of the obvious reasons why individuals may have preferred Greek over Latin epitaphs is that they were migrants. The many Greek cognomina present in our corpus already seem to imply this, even if they are not conclusive in themselves. Some epigrams corroborate this by explicitly mentioning geographical mobility. One example is the epigram for Rufinus, which we cited in the first section of this paper. He was probably born as Asterios, possibly in Egypt, and at some point he moved to Rome and took up the name Rufinus.Footnote ³² Later in life he went (back?) to Egypt – perhaps to conduct some public business or to tradeFootnote ³³ – and died there. It is not entirely clear where in Egypt he went exactly, but the ‘city of the Nile’ (Νείλου πόλιν) is most probably Alexandria.Footnote ³⁴ In another example, a mother mourned the loss of her eleven-months-old daughter. She vowed to send her ashes back to her ancestral lands. Potentially the mother – who seems to have commissioned the epigram – was herself a migrant. The inscription is slightly fragmentary at the point where the place name is mentioned; as such, it could refer to the Argolis region in Greece or perhaps Judea.Footnote ³⁵

The mobility of the individuals in the Greek epigrams from Rome can be observed in Figure 1.Footnote ³⁶ In forty-four epigrams there are forty-six attestations of mobility, yielding thirty-five different place names. All epigrams, except one, inscribed linear mobility, that is, the inscriptions only tell us where someone was born and where he or she died. The exception is an epitaph for a certain Chariton, who was an imperial freedman. It was Sardinia who gave birth to him. Later on he went to Tarsos to take up an administrative office. Death found him at the age of thirty-five, and he was buried in Italian soil (Rome).Footnote ³⁷

Figure 1.

Migration to Rome in the Greek epigrams from Rome (n = 46).

The map shows how the ‘Greek’ world was defined: with the exception of SardiniaFootnote ³⁸ and southern ItalyFootnote ³⁹ , people came from the eastern parts of the Roman empire, where (especially in the cities) Greek was the dominant written and spoken language. In itself it is not particularly surprising that migrants who came from these areas composed epigrams in Greek, as Greek language and culture enjoyed prestige in Rome. Yet we need to keep in mind that other spoken and written languages were also in use in the areas outside the Greek heartland, and that historical and cultural traditions in these areas could vary significantly. The epigrams carefully avoided any reference to this non-Greek heritage.

We can further distinguish between voluntary and forced mobility. As many of the deceased in our epigrams have a servile background, at least some of them may have been forced to move to Rome. For example, Euprosdektos commemorates his mother, Donata. She was probably enslaved and sent from Tralles (her place of birth) to Rome, where she was manumitted by the emperors (either Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus or Septimius Severus and Caracalla).Footnote ⁴⁰ Other movements were more voluntary in nature. We have already encountered a wife following her husband from Crete to Rome. In another epigram, dating to the late first or early second century ce, a woman called Julia Laudice, daughter of Gaius, is said to have moved from Same to Rome. Based on her filiation, we may assume that she is freeborn. The family names of both herself and her husband (called Titus Flavius Alcimus) may, however, imply servile descent traced back to the imperial family.Footnote ⁴¹ Another epigram commemorates multiple senatorial family members: a certain Pompeia, the deceased mother of the still-living Atinia, came from Tarsos. Since we are dealing with an elite household, it is quite likely that Pompeia’s mobility was voluntary. Perhaps she also followed her husband, just as the woman from Crete did.Footnote ⁴² In another epigram, which is structured like a dialogue, the deceased is asked ‘who was it, who raised you?’, the deceased supposedly replies: ‘it was the Cilician Athenaios’.Footnote ⁴³ Either this Athenaios or the deceased (called Numenios) moved from Cilicia to Rome.

More migrants may be hiding behind the other inscriptions; after all, mobility is rarely mentioned in epitaphs in general.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the absence of explicit statements, absolute certainty cannot be obtained, but with the exception of the two epigrams from Sardinia and South Italy (discussed above), we know of no Greek epigrams in Rome referring to migration from the western Roman provinces (though a relatively small number of Greek funerary epigrams has been found in these areas). We can safely assume that normally migrants moving from these western areas to Rome would use Latin for their epitaphs. There are some epigrams that refer to Rome explicitly as the place of birth. In one epigram the migrant status of the father, who came from Syria, is contrasted with that of his daughter, who was born in Rome.Footnote ⁴⁵ In another epigram that is accompanied by two Latin prose texts, the patris (‘fatherland’) of two individuals is said to be Rome. The Latin part explains the Greek: the two young men were vernae (natione verna) – that is, slaves born in the household of their master.Footnote ⁴⁶ These epigrams are quite exceptional, however. The main point here is that for the epigrams visualized in Figure 1 we can be certain that the deceased people or those closely related to them were migrants, and this may have contributed to the decision to set up a funerary epigram in Greek. This illustrates the globalizing nature of the Roman world most clearly: increased interconnectedness facilitated geographical mobility.

3 Constructing Greekness

By commissioning an epigram in Greek in a funerary landscape that was dominated by Latin epitaphs, the dedicators and/or the deceased chose to emphasize their Greekness. ‘Greekness’, however, was an elastic concept.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is therefore important to investigate in what ways Greek identity could be articulated in the epigrams.

The obvious starting point is the simple fact that the commemorators chose to express themselves in the Greek language. These epigrams are, however, not just written in the koine Greek that was spoken and written in everyday life in Rome. They used an artificial and distinct poetic form of Greek, which is closely associated with the literary genre of epigram and its metre (either pure dactylic hexameters, which are also characteristic of Homeric and Hesiodic epic, or elegiac distichs). In the epigrams, we encounter words from the Ionian or Aeolian dialect that are part of an artificial Homeric, poetic language. Examples include the formulation παλαιγενέεσσιν […] ἡρώεσσιν, ‘heroes of ancient times’, which – even though it is not a literal quotation – has obvious associations with Homeric epic.Footnote ⁴⁸ Another example from the same epigram is the use of the phrase νῆσοι μακάρων (‘islands of the blessed’) to refer to the underworld, which can be traced back to Hesiod – it became a common way to refer to the underworld in later Greek epitaphic poetry.Footnote ⁴⁹

It seems that in using this particular language the dedicators intended not just to convey a clear sense of Greekness, but more specifically to associate themselves with the Greek poetic tradition and, in a broader sense, with Greek literature and intellectual culture. The epigrams convey the Greek paideia of the deceased and the dedicators by expressing a knowledge of classical Greek culture and suggesting a classical Greek education.

Apart from the language and poetic allusions, another typical marker of Greekness are the frequent references to Greek mythology. In many of the epigrams, the deceased is compared to a god or a mythical figure. For example, in IGUR 1226, an epigram dedicated by a certain Aeneas to his sister Olympias and her husband, Olympias is compared to both Leda and Alcestis: she surpasses Leda in appearance and Alcestis in intelligence.

Olympias, the wife of Eitheos, is compared to ‘husband-loving heroines’ (φιλάνδρους ἡρωίνας) in general, and in particular to two mythological models who illustrate her qualities: Alcestis and Leda. Out of love for her husband Admetus, king of Pherae, with whom she had two children, Alcestis offered to die in his place; she later rose from the dead through the intervention of either Hercules or Persephone. Alcestis is often mentioned in inscriptions for dead wives, as she serves as an exemplum for wives who lived and died virtuously and faithfully to their husband. This is a very old and influential example in funerary poetry. We can find it in Greek epitaphs from the classical period, but also in literature, most famously in Euripides’ play Alcestis. Leda was married to King Tyndareus of Sparta. She was the mother of Castor, Clytemnestra, Helen, and Pollux (the latter two by Zeus, not Tyndareus). Olympias is said to resemble Alcestis in ‘understanding’ (πινυτή) and ‘lovely looking’ Leda in shape (μορφή); Leda’s beauty was indeed famous; according to Ovid (Amores 2.4) she had beautiful black hair and a snowy skin. Although the epigram does not mention whether Olympias and Eitheos had any children, the exempla of Alcestis and Leda might evoke associations with motherhood, too.

In another interesting case, the deceased woman Marcia Helike is compared to several mythological exempla:

The poem, composed in dactylic hexameters, was commissioned by a husband for his deceased wife, Marcia Helike, who was a former slave. In the epigram, she is compared to Aphrodite and said to be just as beautiful as the goddess. In line 12, it is stated that in death she obtained the beauty of an Amazon. Although Amazons in Greek literature could be associated with war and violence, here it is their ‘unbelievable beauty’ (κάλλος … ἄπιστον) that the passer-by is asked to remember. It is possible that the reference also suggests something about the origins of Marcia Helike: Amazons were ‘barbarian’ figures, associated with Asia Minor (Lycia and Caria in particular). Notably, the Amazons were also known for their nomadic lifestyle. It is possible, then, that the Amazon, through the associations with mobility and eastern culture, points to a local eastern identity of the deceased.

The reference to the Amazon also brings to mind the well-known story of Achilles and Penthesilea.Footnote ⁵⁰ This story was told in the Aethiopis, as part of the Trojan cycle, but also by Quintus of Smyrna in his Posthomerica, written in the third century ce, roughly around the same time as this epigram was composed. In this story Achilles slays Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, but when he looks at her dead body, he is struck by her beauty and falls in love with her.Footnote ⁵¹ The comparison of the deceased wife to an Amazon and the subsequent expression of love for her dead body is thus reminiscent of this famous scene. The allusion may tell us something not just about Marcia herself, but also about her husband, as it suggests that he, the commemorator, compared himself to Achilles, falling in love with his deceased Amazon. The reference to this famous scene is a clear expression of (Greek) paideia.

At the same time, however, we should also consider the Amazon as part of a broader funerary tradition, which is exemplified by Roman sarcophagi of the second/third century ce. In Roman funerary art from this period, the Amazon is often used on grave monuments dedicated to young women and becomes a way to emphasize the tragic nature of an early death and the beauty of the depicted woman, often in combination with a reference to the beauty of Aphrodite: the epigram for Marcia Helike fits this pattern.Footnote ⁵² The Greek epigram, then, offers a Greek image that also clearly appealed to Roman taste.

Remarkably, most of the epigrams in our corpus that contain such mythological comparisons were made for women. The mythological women that function as exempla are the embodiments of quintessentially female virtues, such as philandria (‘love for one’s husband’), faithfulness, and beauty. By emphasizing these virtues, these epigrams are also expressions of the social norm that women should be devoted to their husbands and ideally should not have an active life outside of their household.Footnote ⁵³ This is a stark contrast with the way men were usually praised and remembered in the epigrams, namely through allusions to their active public life and their role in society.Footnote ⁵⁴

In a highly influential study, Greg Woolf has argued that in the Roman East references to Greek culture and myth served as a status claim for contemporary Greeks.Footnote ⁵⁵ It provided common ground with the Romans, who otherwise looked down upon contemporary Greeks but revered the Greek past. In consequence people living in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean became more Greek under the Romans than they had ever been before. That such self-positioning through Homeric language and mythological exempla occurred in our Greek epigrams is therefore not particularly surprising, for these texts served as excellent vehicles for such cultural claims. Still, the degree to which this was done remains remarkable, in the heart of the Roman empire, in quite elaborate and at times original imagery. These texts were not just Greek, they breathed Greekness all over. It is hard not to see this as a response to the context in which they were made.

4 The Roman context

Now that we have seen in what different ways the dedicators and deceased presented themselves as Greek and what factors contributed to the formation of Greek identity, we will come back to the Roman context in which these inscriptions were made and the background of the deceased. Even if individuals clearly and loudly expressed a Greek identity, it does not mean that their epigrams were exclusively ‘Greek’. The epigrams demonstrate awareness that they operated in a Roman, primarily Latin-speaking, community.

Some of the inscriptions are even partly in Latin. Several bilingual inscriptions with a Greek epigram have been found in Rome.Footnote ⁵⁶ Often a Greek poem is combined with a Latin prose text. We see in these inscriptions that generally Latin is used in a more descriptive sense, for example, to communicate the name of the deceased or of the commemorator(s) but that Greek is used in more literary expressions. Apparently, when people wanted to make claims about their education and cultural capital they switched to Greek, even if the rest of the inscription was written in Latin.Footnote ⁵⁷ This shows that the inscriptions did not just happen to be written within a Roman context, but were written with specifically a Roman audience in mind.

Even the monolingual epigrams, despite their heavy emphasis on Greekness, refer to the Roman context and background of the deceased. Many of the epigrams that we have discussed show that the deceased or their commemorators took active part in Roman society. For example, a high-ranking family including a Roman governor, whose wife’s mother came from Tarsos, certainly operated within a Roman political context.Footnote ⁵⁸ So, too, did two imperial freed people.Footnote ⁵⁹ And the freedman Dionysios, whom we discussed above in section 2, was praised for being able to write in both Greek and Latin.Footnote ⁶⁰

Before we study the more subtle references to Rome, we should discuss something else: the emphasis on the transitory nature of the settlement of the deceased. It is noteworthy that a number of epigrams use the image of what we propose to call ‘multiple migration’, linking migration in life with migration in death.Footnote ⁶¹ As we have seen, many of the dedicators and deceased probably came from the Greek East. It is noteworthy that in these epigrams, where a migration background is likely, dying is often presented as a subsequent type of movement, but this time towards the person’s final destination: the underworld. The person who travelled from Tarsos or Alexandria to Rome, subsequently moved from Rome to the underworld.

One epitaph denies emphatically that a young girl named Prote had died: ‘you have not died, Prote, but you moved to a better land’.Footnote ⁶² This poem mentions just one journey, the one to the underworld, but combined with the Greek name and use of Greek language it could possibly hint at a migrational background of the deceased or her family. The motive of multiple migration is more explicit in other examples, for instance in an epigram in hexameters dedicated by Euprosdektos to his mother, Donata, who came from Asia to Rome. As we can see, her death is also presented as her final journey to the underworld.

Donata has travelled from Asia to Rome, and now from Rome to the house of Hades. Striking (though not uncommon) are the images of light and darkness in this poem: in Rome she ‘saw’ the light of freedom, but now she has entered the underworld ‘in the dark night’. In other words, her time in Rome enlightened her life, but her death in a way sent her back into the darkness that she had known before becoming a freedwoman.Footnote ⁶⁵

Another fascinating example of the phenomenon of multiple migration is the epigram for Rufinus, which we have discussed above. Rufinus travelled to Egypt while he was still alive, but continues to travel after his death. The epigram describes how he saw the light again and sailed to Italy to be buried there. In the last few lines of the epigram we hear it was actually his wife who brought him there, but in the epigram the repatriation of the deceased is clearly presented as a journey that the deceased husband actively undertook by himself.Footnote ⁶⁶

Rome may have been just a station on the road to further post-mortem movement into Hades, yet it played a central role, if only because, for all their Greekness, the individuals of our epigrams chose to be buried there. For some this might have happened because of practical reasons, for example because they died while they were temporarily staying in Rome and repatriation was too expensive.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet there was also a conscious choice to be buried in Rome, for (as we have seen) relatives of migrants could also go to great lengths to transport their beloved deceased back home.Footnote ⁶⁸ Various people clearly saw Rome as their patris (‘fatherland’) and as the right place to be buried.Footnote ⁶⁹

In this context it is interesting that a number of epigrams refer quite explicitly to the physical place of the grave, which is of course Rome. A good example is the epigram dedicated by Aeneas to his sister Olympias and her husband Eitheos, which we have partly discussed above.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this epigram much emphasis is placed on the location of this grave monument. There are deictic references to the tomb at the very beginning of the poem (ἱερὸς οὗτος ὁ χῶρος, ‘holy is this place’) and in line 9 (τοῦτ’ […] πέδον, ‘this ground’). The close connection between the poem and the place of the grave is further reinforced by the last few lines, where it becomes clear that it is actually the altar, so the monument itself, that is speaking to the reader (ἀγγέλλω τάδε βωμός, ‘I, altar, am saying these things’). We can thus notice that a strong emphasis on Greek culture and Greekness goes hand in hand with a physical setting in Roman soil.