Elogium (literary genre)

For the Star Trek episode, see Elogium (Star Trek: Voyager).

Rubbing of the Elogium on the tomb of Scipio Barbatus, Rome

An elogium (Latin, plural: elogia) was an inscription in honour of a deceased person, which was placed on tombs, ancestral images and statues during the Roman age.[1][2] The elogia are sometimes synonyms with the tituli, the identifying inscriptions on wax images of deceased ancestors that were displayed in the atrium of the domus of noble families, but they are shorter than the laudatio funebris, the funeral oration. Originally, the text was usually written in saturnians, but later it could be in hexameters, iambic hexameters, distichs[3] or in prose. Characteristic of the elogium is the nominative case used for the name of the deceased and not, as it was the case later in the funerary literature, the dative.

In the imperial period, the elogium became a literary genre: texts were collected by Marcus Terentius Varro and Titus Pomponius Atticus, and writing elogia on famous deceased persons became a popular rhetorical exercise.[4] The elogia on the statues of the Temple of Mars Ultor at the Forum of Augustus are said to have been written by Augustus himself.[5]

  1. ^ Pauly (1905), sub vocem Elogium I
  2. ^ The Life, Letters, and Sermons of Bishop Herbert de Losinga 1878 p 114 "An 'elogium' in Latin has several meanings , -a maxim or apothegm, an epitaph , an inscription on a statue, or on a votive tablet, a clause in a will, an indictment or specification of an offence "
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference trec was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Neumann (1994)
  5. ^ Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia 22,6,13.