Allia Potestas
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Allia Potestas was a freedwoman from the Roman town of Perugia who lived sometime during the 1st–4th centuries AD.[1] She is known only through her epitaph, found on a marble tablet in Via Pinciana, Rome in 1912. The inscription, considered to be one of the most interesting of Latin epitaphs,[2] is unique because it contains both typical epitaphic information and more personal and sexual details.[1]
In 1912, workmen who were making a foundation for a garage on the Via Pinciana in Rome found at a point 2 meters below the street-level a marble slab bearing a long inscription. The slab is broken in two pieces, but is otherwise well preserved. It measures about 23 by 26 inches. There are five holes, two at the top and, three at the bottom, evidently for fastening it up.[3]
The 50-line epitaph is written in verse, mostly in dactylic hexameter.[2] The author appears to have been well-read, with some of the poem imitating Ovid's Tristia. However, the majority of the poem is original in formulation.[1]
This unusual inscription is not easy to classify, and its extravagant praise has been taken by some scholars for irony.[4] The poem, apparently written by her lover, can be divided into three sections. The first focuses on Allia's virtues, describing her as extremely hardworking – "always the first to rise and the last to sleep... with her woolwork never leaving her hands without reason". The second extols her beauty with semi-erotic descriptions of her body and notes that she lived harmoniously with two lovers. Finally, the author laments her death and promises that she "shall live as long as may be possible through [his] verses."[1]
The epitaph shows many of the stock characteristics of sepulchral inscriptions; it dwells on the unfairness of fate, the beauty and household virtues of the deceased, the grief of the bereaved, etc. The unusual thing here is the very obvious influence of Ovid.[3]
Significance
The epitaph is original and rather unusual among surviving epitaphs for several reasons.[1]
- The open treatment of polyandry – Allia lives harmoniously with "her two young lovers", "like the model of Pylades and Orestes."
- The erotic physical description – Allia "kept her limbs smooth" and "on her snow-white breasts, the shape of her nipples was small."
- The absence of typical formulated gravestone poetry.
Most surviving epitaphs portray their subjects in a more, from a Roman perspective, ideal light. Women in Rome were expected to be "devoted to housekeeping, child bearing, chastity, submissiveness, and the ideal of being all her life univira (one-man woman)".[5]
It was first published by G. Mancini, in the Notizie degli Scavi, 1912, 155 ff. The first important study of it was printed by M. L. De Gubernatis, in the Rivista di Filologia, 1913, 385. This gave an excellent facsimile, a punctuated text, and a commentary with a list of parallels. It was published again, with a commentary, by C. Pascal, in Atene e Roma, 1913, 257 ff. The most important of the later discussions is that by W. Kroll in Philologus, 1914, 274 ff.[3]
