Hellenistic and Roman Military Epitaphs on Stone and on Papyrus. Questions of Authorship and Literariness.

Chapter 10 studies Hellenistic and Roman military epitaphs, and addresses a number of interconnected issues: the unpopularity of epitaphs for individual soldiers in the Greek Anthology; the near absence of inscribed epitaphs in literary sources, despite the fact that they are often of good literary quality; and the question of their authorship. Apparently, there was no ‘Hellenistic Simonides’, author of warriors’ inscriptional epitaphs worthy to be gathered in a book. In the seventh book of the Greek Anthology there are many fictitious epitaphs for Homeric heroes or famous historical figures, but funerary epigrams celebrating the death in battle of individual, contemporary military men are only a dozen. This lack may be a choice of later compilers of florilegia, or may be due to the fact that epigrammatists who composed military epitaphs did not publish them as a collection. There is no evidence that any epigrammatist known from the Greek Anthology also acted as a professional writer of military epitaphs; we can just propose some hypothetical candidates for this role, such as Damagetus and Posidippus. Epitaphs for common soldiers were usually commissioned to professional poets, most of whom now remain anonymous (only occasionally we find signatures in epigraphic poems); the technitai found their inspiration in Homer and in the elegiac, lyric and tragic ‘classics’; anthologies like that of Meleager could also offer some models, although the main literary-epigraphic reference was still the Simonidean corpus. The lack of a specific, recognizable personal style makes it difficult to trace the same hand in contemporary epitaphs. It has been suggested that professional versifiers used ‘sample books’ for composing epitaphs, but the very existence and the nature of these anthologies is still to be proved. In some cases, the deceased, especially when he presents himself as a veteran belonging to the local élite, may have had his say on the contents and form of his future epitaph, or even might have been responsible for composing it.