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AN(OTHER) EPITAPH FOR TRIMALCHIO: SAT. 30.2*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2014

Ulrike Roth
Ulrike Roth*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
u.roth@ed.ac.uk
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Extract

Trimalchio's fabulous epitaph, recited in full by Petronius’ colourful host towards the end of the Cena (Sat. 71.12), has long attracted abundant comment. Similarly, allusions to the underworld in much of the decoration leading to and in Trimalchio's dining room have been the object of intense scholarly discussion of the freedman's morbid characterization. In consequence, it is now accepted that epitaph and funereal allusions make for a deliberate mirage of the netherworld – so much so that ‘… Trimalchio's home is in some sense to be regarded as a house of the dead’. As John Bodel has shown, ‘Petronius signalled his intention to portray Trimalchio's home as an underworld earlier in the episode’. Examples for this include the procession from the baths to Trimalchio's house that preceded the banquet (Sat. 28.4–5) – ‘resembling nothing so much as a Roman cortege’, and the wall paintings in the porticus of Trimalchio's house which made Encolpius stop and pause, as Aeneas had done at the Temple of Apollo at Cumae (Sat. 29.1). The example of the pairing of the Cerberus-like watchdog encountered by Encolpius and friends during their escape (Sat. 72.7) and the painted dog in Trimalchio's vestibule that frightened Encolpius upon his arrival (Sat. 29.1) makes it moreover clear that Petronius engaged in some elaborate ring composition concerning Trimalchio's portrayal as a dead man walking. It is surprising, then, that Petronius should have failed to square the circle as regards Trimalchio's epitaph: Sat. 71.12 appears to lack an earlier match – and this despite the fact that a visitor to a Roman tomb might well expect to be informed about the name of the deceased, and perhaps a few other details, at the moment of entering the tomb.

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Shorter Notes
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , May 2014 , pp. 422 - 425
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

I

Trimalchio's fabulous epitaph, recited in full by Petronius’ colourful host towards the end of the Cena (Sat. 71.12), has long attracted abundant comment.Footnote 1 Similarly, allusions to the underworld in much of the decoration leading to and in Trimalchio's dining room have been the object of intense scholarly discussion of the freedman's morbid characterization.Footnote 2 In consequence, it is now accepted that epitaph and funereal allusions make for a deliberate mirage of the netherworld – so much so that ‘… Trimalchio's home is in some sense to be regarded as a house of the dead’.Footnote 3 As John Bodel has shown, ‘Petronius signalled his intention to portray Trimalchio's home as an underworld earlier in the episode’.Footnote 4 Examples for this include the procession from the baths to Trimalchio's house that preceded the banquet (Sat. 28.4–5) – ‘resembling nothing so much as a Roman cortege’,Footnote 5 and the wall paintings in the porticus of Trimalchio's house which made Encolpius stop and pause, as Aeneas had done at the Temple of Apollo at Cumae (Sat. 29.1). The example of the pairing of the Cerberus-like watchdog encountered by Encolpius and friends during their escape (Sat. 72.7) and the painted dog in Trimalchio's vestibule that frightened Encolpius upon his arrival (Sat. 29.1) makes it moreover clear that Petronius engaged in some elaborate ring composition concerning Trimalchio's portrayal as a dead man walking. It is surprising, then, that Petronius should have failed to square the circle as regards Trimalchio's epitaph: Sat. 71.12 appears to lack an earlier match – and this despite the fact that a visitor to a Roman tomb might well expect to be informed about the name of the deceased, and perhaps a few other details, at the moment of entering the tomb.

II

A peculiar assemblage at the entrance to Trimalchio's dining room features a triumphal rostrum, fasces, a lamp – and an inscription (Sat. 30.2): ‘C. Pompeio Trimalchioni, seviro Augustali, Cinnamus dispensator’ (‘To Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio, sevir Augustalis. (From) Cinnamus, his dispensator’).Footnote 6 With due reference to a number of real inscriptions from Pompeii, Amedeo Maiuri interpreted the inscription as a dedicatory text.Footnote 7 More recently, Jonathan Prag argued for an honorific reading of the text. In so doing, Prag specifically argued against a funerary reading: ‘it is in the context of honorific, rather than funerary practice that the inscription set up by Trimalchio's dispensator belongs’.Footnote 8

In contrast to Trimalchio's commissioned epitaph,Footnote 9Sat. 30.2 lacks any reference to the death of the person concerned – such as the deceased person's presence in the tomb (e.g. ‘HIC SITVS EST’), his or her dead body or parts thereof (e.g. ‘OSSA’), the underworld (e.g. ‘DIS MANIBVS’), the lengths of their lives (e.g. ‘VIXIT ANNOS X’), or even any mention of having set up or paid for the tomb, tombstone or sarcophagus (e.g. ‘FECIT’), let alone the actual tomb or burial space (e.g. ‘IN FRONTE PEDES X’). It lacks moreover the eulogistic element so typical of much funerary epigraphy of the Republican and Imperial age – beyond a brief mention of Trimalchio's position as sevir Augustalis. But, in fact, none of these elements need be present in a funerary text. Thus, Gaius Veveius was commemorated by his daughter Veveia precisely without any reference to the death of her father – let alone an exercise in eulogy:Footnote 10

[V]EVEIA C F C VEVEIO

PATREI

If we are given more information than the name of the deceased, this consists often in not much more than the name of the commemorator, as in the case of Veveia, and the relationship between the commemorator and the person to be commemorated, that between daughter and father for Veveia. Beyond commemoration of family relations amongst the free(-born), slaves too were known to act as commemorators for kin, friends and even their superiors, as the following examples remind us:Footnote 11

Moreover, slaves are known to commemorate their masters, as the example of Honoratus, (former) actor of (his then deceased master) Blossius demonstrates.Footnote 12 Honoratus, of course, is a fairly late example; and whilst it seems to have been rare during the Principate for slaves to commemorate their masters, this none the less occurred both within and outside Italy, as Richard Saller and Brent Shaw demonstrated some twenty-five years ago in their study of epigraphically attested (extended) family relations.Footnote 13

There is no need to add further inscriptions here. What becomes clear from these few examples is Petronius’ very careful crafting of a funerary text which, at first sight, could be overlooked as such even by scholars otherwise keen to assert allusions to death and dying in the house of Trimalchio. Yet, the inscription would occasion no surprise in us if found on the Isola Sacra or in a columbarium at Rome.

If we moreover replaced our predilection for reading Petronius with a preparedness to see Trimalchio – or, here, his abode – the clear visual allusion that the assemblage consisting of doorposts, entrance, inscription, etc. makes to real tombs on the Gräberstrassen of Roman Italy would be immediately clear, and with this the funerary function of the text.Footnote 14

But Petronius challenges more than just our sense of sight: the choice of name of the commemorating dispensator, Cinnamus – the masculine form of cinnamum, cinnamon, recalls the spice that was used to sweeten the air during funerals. Like Carpus the carver, whose job was to carve meats, so Cinnamus is a Petronian ‘confusion’ of name with function, underscoring the sepulchral connotation.Footnote 15 The inscription on the doorpost to Trimalchio's dining room makes, then, for a good epitaph.

III

The identifcation of Sat. 30.2 as an epitaph does not exclude other readings of the text. Petronius’ choice of grammatical case for Trimalchio's name offers maximum scope for interpretation, which cannot be incidental: Trimalchio's name and title appear in the dative (C. Pompeio Trimalchioni seviro Augustali). The use of the dative for the name and title of the deceased is indeed common in funerary epigraphy; the dative is also used in dedicatory inscriptions, and appears moreover in honorary inscriptions (for which one would otherwise expect the use of the accusative): Sat. 30.2 could be an honorific inscription or a dedicatory text or an epitaph.Footnote 16 There are no good grounds to think that Petronius, having crafted our inscription so as to give it maximum interpretative scope, requires of his modern readers a definite classification.Footnote 17 But there is good reason to recognize the funerary aspect of the text in question and its interpretative consequences – namely an early identification of Trimalchio's abode as a tomb and Trimalchio as a dead man walking: together with the painted Cerberus' welcome and Encolpius’ Aeneas moment briefly mentioned above, the epitaph leaves no doubt as to the nature of the banquet to be consumed and of the characters to be met. Thus, the ring composition of the Cena, itself long recognized by modern scholarship, is not just played out on the level of generic allusions to the underworld, but very specifically on that of an individual's death – that of the princeps libertinorum.Footnote 18

In sum, the epitaph imagined by the freedman at the end of the dinner party is matched by an(other) epitaph for Trimalchio located at the entrance to his dining room – indicating right from the start that the party's host is ‘experiencing a kind of living death’.Footnote 19 Whilst Trimalchio's freedman friend Habinnas is directed at the end of what must be the most opulent dinner party of Latin literature ‘to prepare his monument “so that by your beneficium I may be able to live after death”’,Footnote 20 Trimalchio's dispensator Cinnamus had already provided that service to his freedman master so that he might live on the stage we call the Cena Trimalchionis: to every man his own gravestone – cuique suom cippom – and to Trimalchio, two.Footnote 21

Footnotes

*

Thanks to Gavin Kelly and Costas Panayotakis for comments on this and other Trimalchian adventures; and to Michael Crawford for discussion of funerary epigraphy. All mistakes are mine.

References

1 For a recent summary of some main contributions (in English) see Hope, V., ‘At home with the dead. Roman funeral traditions and Trimalchio's tomb’, in Prag, J. and Repath, I. (edd.), Petronius: A Handbook (Oxford, 2009), 140–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also n. 9 below.

2 See especially Bodel, J., ‘Trimalchio's underworld’, in Tatum, J. (ed.), The Search for the Ancient Novel (Baltimore and London, 1994), 237–59Google Scholar (with earlier bibliography), now to be read in conjunction with Wesenberg, B., ‘Zur Wanddekoration im Hause des Trimalchio’, in Castagna, L. and Lefèvre, E. (edd.), Studien zu Petron und seiner Rezeption / Studi su Petronio e sulla sua fortuna (Berlin and New York, 2007), 267–83Google Scholar, at 270–2; and Arrowsmith, W., ‘Luxury and death in the Satyricon’, Arion 5 (1966), 304–31.Google Scholar

3 Bodel (n. 2), 239.

4 Ibid. 240.

5 Ibid. 243.

6 The precise layout, the location(s) and the rendering of the inscription at the entrance to Trimalchio's dining room are not critical for my argument. For discussion of the text's location see e.g. Bagnani, G., ‘The House of Trimalchio’, AJPh 75 (1954), 16–39Google Scholar, at 29–30, and Prag, J.R.W., ‘Cave navem: Petronius, Satyricon 30.1’, CQ 56 (2006), 538–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 539–40. For a suggested layout of the text see Bagnani (this note), 31 (but note his choice of ‘VIVIRO’ in place of ‘SEVIRO’).

7 Maiuri, A., La Cena di Trimalchione di Petronio Arbitro (Naples, 1945)Google Scholar, 157 (and 244). More recent studies have followed this approach without further analysis: see e.g. Cavalca, M.G., I grecismi nel Satyricon di Petronio (Bologna, 2001)Google Scholar, 64; Gamba, G.G., Petronio Arbitro e i cristiani. Ipotesi per una lettura contestuale del Satyricon (Rome, 1998), 143–4Google Scholar; Smith, M.S., Petronii Arbitri. Cena Trimalchionis (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar, 62.

8 Prag (n. 6), 544.

9 The text of the epitaph at Sat. 71.12 makes it clear that the remains of the deceased are in the tomb: C. Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus hic requiescit. Huic seviratus absenti decretus est. Cum posset in omnibus decuriis Romae esse, tamen noluit. Pius, fortis, fidelis, ex parvo crevit, sestertium reliquit trecenties, nec umquam philosophum audivit. Vale: et tu. The best typological discussion of this inscription – i.e. of a fictional example of an ‘autobiographical’ epitaph – is to my mind still Misch, G., A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2 vols. (Westport, CT, 1950), 1.208–30Google Scholar, esp. 223–5; for a socio-historical discussion of Trimalchio's commissioned epitaph see D'Arms, J.H., Commerce and Social Standing in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, MA and London, 1981), 108–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 CIL I2.2534 = X.6473 (Setia): ‘To Gaius Veveius, her father, [from] Veveia, daughter of Gaius’.

11 All three inscriptions come from Rome: 1) CIL VI.6258: ‘Eutychus the cubicularius made this for his brother Aphrodisius the velarius’; 2) CIL VI.6326: ‘Optata the doorkeeper, the slave of Pa(n)sa. Her friends made this’; 3) CIL VI.8478: ‘To Hierocles, the slave of the Emperor, who was dispensator of public works. [From] Eros his slave’.

12 CIL VIII.25817 (Furnos/Africa Proconsularis) = AE 1978, 880: ‘MEMORIA | BLOSSI HONO|RATVS INGENVS ACTOR | PERFECIT’. For a recent discussion of this inscription in the context of the study of slavery see Schumacher, L., ‘On the status of private actores, dispensatores and vilici’, in Roth, U. (ed.), By the Sweat of Your Brow: Roman Slavery in its Socio-Economic Setting (London, 2010), 31–47Google Scholar, at 43.

13 Saller, R.P. and Shaw, B.D., ‘Tombstones and Roman family relations in the Principate: civilians, soldiers and slaves’, JRS 74 (1984), 124–56Google Scholar, esp. Tables 7, 8, 16, 17, 18 and 32.

14 For a comparison of Trimalchio's house and various scenes of the Cena with real tombs especially at Pompeii see Whitehead, J., ‘The “Cena Trimalchionis” and biographical narration’, in Holliday, P.J. (ed.), Narrative and Event in Ancient Art (Cambridge, 1993), 299–325Google Scholar. See also Prag (n. 6), 545–6, who, despite his reading of the inscription as an honorific text, offers a (near) match to the decoration of Trimalchio's abode in the tomb of C. Cartilius Poplicola from the Porta Marina of Ostia, adorned with fasces, rostrum and an inscription, and more generally concludes (541) that ‘J. Bodel's thesis, that the sequence of elements described prior to the dining room marked out to Petronius’ readers the connections with a descent into the underworld, is reinforced: the doorway to the dining room is decorated like the doorway to a tomb’. For Trimalchio's own connection of tomb and house see Sat. 71.7. The (inter)play between house and tomb is not unique to the Satyricon in Latin literature: see e.g. Stat. Silv. 5.1.237.

15 See Sat. 36.5–8 for the pun on the name of the carver Carpus. For an association of cinnamon with funerals in the ancient literary sources see Plin. HN 12.83, and Plut. Sull. 38; and for a brief modern discussion of the use of cinnamon (and other spices) in funerals see Noy, D., ‘Building a Roman funeral pyre’, Antichthon 34 (2000), 30–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 37–8. Naturally, Cinnamus was also the name of actual slaves, without this implying in real life a funerary or funereal connotation, for which see e.g. the epitaph of the dispensator Cinnamus from Rome: CIL VI.9337. The same applies to Carpus as a slave name, for which see e.g. the epitaph of Carpus (and his brother), the slave of a tax guild, again from Rome: CIL VI.8587. The fact that cinnamon was traded over vast distances, bought, sold and resold on the way, may in turn be an allusion to the slave status of Cinnamus: see Miller, J.I., The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 BC–AD 641 (Oxford, 1969), 153–72Google Scholar for discussion of the ‘cinnamon route’.

16 The gap between honorific and funerary texts became increasingly smaller under the Principate as a result of ‘a growing degree of crossover between honorific and funerary commemoration’ in private contexts in the early Empire: Prag (n. 6), 544.

17 For general discussion of multiple readings and viewpoints in and of the Satyricon see Slater, N.W., Reading Petronius (Baltimore and London, 1990)Google Scholar, and Rimell, V., Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for discussion of multiple (mis)readings in a specific analytical niche see P. Habermehl, ‘Petrus und Petronius. Ein Seitenblick auf neue christliche Lesarten der Satyrica’, in Castagna and Lefèvre (n. 2), 33–49.

18 So labelled by Veyne, P., ‘Vie de Trimalcion’, in id., La société romaine (Paris, 1991), 13–56Google Scholar, at 48 (originally published as ‘La vie de Trimalcion’, Annales ESC 16.2 [1961], 213–47Google Scholar), following an electoral programma from Pompeii: CIL IV.117.

19 Courtney, E., A Companion to Petronius (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar, 117.

20 Saller and Shaw (n. 13), 127.

21 Borrowed from CIL I2.2660 (Rome): CVIQ|VE SV[OM] | CIPO.