Housing the Dead: the tomb as house in Roman Italy - Divinity School

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2 the tomb of Naevoleia Tyche and Munatius Faustus, Augustalis and paganus, honoured by the Council with a bisellium (Fig.1), seems to fit Trimalchio’s prescription, be sure to have ships in full sail on the … of my monument, and me sitting on a platform in full official dress with five gold rings dishing out cash to the people from a bag… (for the parallel, see Kockel 1983, 105f.). Again, what makes the tomb a house is not so much shape as the extension of the activities of lifetime, the commercial success, the popular benefactions, and the garden which ensured that the family could have regular festivals to celebrate around the tomb, the Parentalia, the Rosalia and Violaria that are specified in so many inscriptions. People, not walls, make a house as well as a city. The tomb-as-house metaphor continued to flourish throughout the empire, as the numerous passages cited by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae show (TLL IV, 1979 sv domus 1B2c), and into late antiquity. The Codex Theodosianus shows the deep concerns about the destruction of tombs of the successors of Constantine (who of course destroyed tombs to build his basilica for St Peter), and the language of houses strangely interweaves their protests. So Constantius II, from Milan in 356 or 357: Those who violate the habitations of the shades, the homes, so to speak, of the dead, appear to perpetrate a two-fold crime. For they both despoil the buried dead by the destruction of their tombs, and they contaminate the living by the use of this material in living. (CT 9.17.4) So not only are tombs like homes; they specifically risk contamination by confusion with the homes of the living. We learn that some men too eager for gain destroy tombs, and transfer the building material to their own homes (CT 9.17.3, Constantius, 356). The trouble of course is that tombs are so close to houses that the elements are in part interchangeable, a point reinforced by Julian: Some men even take away from the tombs ornaments for their dining rooms and porticoes (CT 9.17.5). The very fact that tombs were places for dining rendered them the more suitable for despoliation for the benefit of the houses of the living. Funerary epigraphy itself bears out the persistence in Latin epitaphs of the house/tomb analogy. Richmond Lattimore (1962, 165ff) gathered a selection of the passages, noting the frequency of the expression aeterna domus. The expression is ambiguous since sometimes it refers to the Greek concept of Hades as the eternal house of the dead, but often too the reference to the tomb is explicit:
haec domus aeterna est, hic sum situs, hic ero semper Here is my eternal home, here I lie, here shall I be for ever. (CE 434,15 Pisaurum). And again, the conscious interplay of the houses of the living and the dead is to the fore: aedes aedificat dives, sapiens monumentum; hospitium est illud corporis, hic domus est. The rich man builds a house, the wise man a monument; the first is a lodging for the body, the second a home. (CE 1488,1-2, Rome) By the familiar paradox, the domus is degraded to the status of a temporary lodging house, while the funerary monument becomes the true home, the domus. 3 As Lattimore interestingly comments, the tomb/house figure seems to be a great deal more common in Latin epitaphs than Greek; and indeed, the Greek passages are ‘late’, meaning from Greek areas under Roman rule, and ‘often look very much like translations’ (1962, 165). Several scholars have recently pursued the house/tomb analogy, including Hopkins (1983), Purcell (1987), Saller (1994) and Hope (1997). In particular, John Patterson’s interesting chapter on ‘Living and dying in the city of Rome’ looks in parallel at the houses and the tombs of rich and poor, and ends by concluding with the observation that the link goes back to the Villanovan hut-urns of the beginning of the first millennium (Patterson 2000, 280). A visit to a modern Italian cemetery like the Campo Verano in Rome, with their characteristic house-like family tombs, in stark contrast to the separate gravestones of the Acattolico cemetery reserved for non-catholic foreigners, but above all northern European and American Protestants, might lead one to think that here is one of those great cultural continuities. Is it somehow specifically Italian to link burial to house and family? But to leap from a Villanovan hut-urn to the Campo Verano seems to me altogether too risky a project. If there is some degree of persistence of the tomb/house analogy even through the ancient Roman period, the apparent continuity masks some fairly fundamental shifts. Where does the analogy actually get us, or where did it get them? Metaphors are slippery, shifting things, which refuse to be pinned down at the moment you most need to push them. The Romans evidently enjoyed playing with the analogy, and so do modern scholars talking about the Romans, but it is one thing to use the comparison as a rhetorical trope or figure, another as an argument or hypothesis. Significantly, the majority of scholars mentioned above draw attention to the housetomb link almost as an aside. Only Richard Saller, who has some investment in the potential of extracting information about the structure of the Roman family from tombs and their inscriptions, comes close to incorporating it is his argument (and even he is admirably cautious); as Valerie Hope
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Page 5 and 6: 5 internal architectural arrangemen
Page 7 and 8: 7 his wife in on the display (Sat.
Page 9 and 10: 9 Piano’s new Auditorium, now mea
Page 11 and 12: 11 external display of status. Inde
Page 13 and 14: The visit to the tomb, like the vie
Page 15 and 16: 15 (Fig.17), with its symmetrically
Page 17 and 18: 17 By my argument, then, these tomb
Page 19 and 20: 19 The early loss of his four year
Page 21 and 22: 21 After this extraordinary catalog
Page 23 and 24: 23 though I have tried to underline
Page 25 and 26: Housing the Dead: the tomb as house
Page 27 and 28: Fig. 3 Tombs at gate of Ostia with
Page 29 and 30: Fig. 8 Tomb of Volumnii, Perugia, v
Page 31 and 32: Fig. 14 Tomb of the Scipios, Rome,
Page 33 and 34: Fig. 19. Tomb of Flavius Philoxenus
Page 35 and 36: Fig. 24 Tomb of C Veranius Rufus Q.
Page 37 and 38: Fig. 28 Tomb of Valerius Herma, nec

Housing the Dead: the tomb as house in Roman Italy - Divinity School

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