Striving against oblivion: Tombs and cemeteries in the mid-Republic

Writing as dusk fell on the mid-Republic, Ennius (238–169 BCE) purportedly remarked, ‘Kings throughout their kingship are in quest of statues and sepulchres; they build up a name and strain with all their might and main’. A poet whose verse mediated between the Greek and Roman worlds, he knew the weight of his words, and they usefully highlight the political presence of a tomb. Not that this is under-recognized; Nicholas Purcell and John Patterson, to name just two scholars, describe the space around the city walls, a proastion of sorts, as a zone of elite competition. Still, with notable exceptions, scholarship on Republican funerary art and architecture often tends toward a diachronic treatment of individual monuments or groups of monuments, somewhat separate from other aspects of visual culture. This paper, by contrast, attempts a synchronic view of one of the best-known tombs of the Republic, the Tomb of the Scipios (a salute, of sorts, to its restoration and reopening to the public in 2011). And where the first iteration of the Roma medio repubblicana conference, in 1973, focused on sarcophagi and inscriptions within the tomb, it explores the idea, hypothetically, of inserting the monument – as a whole and within its urban context – into a different continuum, characterizing it as a quasi-transgressive move in the face of a consensus on the sponsorship of publicly funded buildings. Such an exploration might, perhaps, suggest additional layers of significance for cemeteries more broadly in Republican Rome.