Sunday, October 02, 2022

 

Epitaph of Amymone

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.11602, tr. Tim G. Parkin and Arthur J. Pomeroy, Roman Social History: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 92, number 3.28, with their note:
Here is buried Amymone, [wife] of Marcus, best and most beautiful, a worker-in-wool, devoted, modest, frugal, chaste, a stay-at-home [domiseda].1

1 The adjective domiseda (meant as a compliment, of course) occurs only in one other place in the entire body of Latin texts, and that is in another inscription — an epitaph to, presumably, the same woman (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.34045), and quite possibly a modern forgery: 'Here lies Amymone, wife of a barbarian, most beautiful, devoted, frugal, chaste, a worker-in-wool, a stay-at-home.'

Hic sita est Amymone Marci optima et pulcherrima,
   lanifica pia pudica frugi casta domiseda.
Franz Buecheler, Carmina Latina Epigraphica (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1895), p. 112, number 237, thought that Amymone was Marcus' daughter, not his wife:
See Richmond Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (1935; rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 295.



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