THEMES IN GREEK AND LATIN EPITAPHS

Richmond Lattimore '26, University of Illinois Press. 1942, 354 pp. 15.50.

THE FIELD OF GREEK AND LATIN sepulchral inscriptions is a large one, containing tens of thousands of epitaphs, to which much research has been devoted over many years. Professor Lattimore of Bryn Mawr has gathered together these epitaphs from their various sources and has discussed them in a long and scholarly book, with a further wealth of information packed away in footnotes.

Although the monograph is definitely directed at the specialist, the book is so handsomely printed and the themes so elaborately catalogued that the lay reader will find much of profit and curious interest in browsing among its pages.

These epitaphs are infrequently of literary value and the language is at times almost illiterate. The author, ignoring the form, concernshimself with the subject matter. The first half of the treatise deals with the interpretation of death,—ideas of immortality, the nature of the afterworld and the care of the tomb, the manner of death, and the figures of speech used to describe death. The second half examines the attitude toward death,—acquiescence or protest, lamentation or types of consolation, biographical details common in the inscriptions, and the elements (chiefly literary conceits) carried over from pagan Christian epitaphs.

In a final chapter the writer summarizes the relation 'of Greek and Latin epitaphs, with subtle distinctions of what elements are native to each. On the evidence of these inscriptions, furthermore, he concludes that the belief of the Greeks and Romans in immortality was not widespread, or clear, or very strong.

The book is convenient for study and reference in that it prints the text of the Greek and the Latin inscriptions, the former with the English translation, and appends an elaborate bibliography. The study makes a genuine contribution to classical scholarship.