Elogium
An Elogium (plural Elogia or Elogien ) is an honorary inscription for the deceased in Roman antiquity , which was placed on tombs, ancestral images and statues. In terms of size, they stand between the (short) tituli , the characteristic inscriptions on wax pictures of deceased ancestors, which were exhibited in the halls of the noble families, and the laudatio funebris , the funeral speech. Originally the text was mostly written in Saturnians , later it could be written in hexameters and distiches (see also epigrams ) or in prose.
During the imperial era, the élogium became a literary genre, texts were collected by Marcus Terentius Varro and Titus Pomponius Atticus , and the writing of élogia on famous deceased people became a popular rhetorical exercise. The Elogia on the statues of the Temple of Mars on the Forum Augustum are said to have been written by Augustus himself. The form of the ologium may also have influenced the development of the epicedium , the Roman funeral poem.
literature
- Uwe Neumann: Elogium I .. In: Gert Ueding (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of rhetoric . Vol. 2. De Gruyter, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-484-68102-0 , Sp. 1086-1088.
- Gottfried Schiemann : Elogium (1). In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 3, Metzler, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-476-01473-8 , column 999.
- Gero von Wilpert : Subject dictionary of literature. 8th edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-520-84601-3 , pp. 207, 225.
Individual evidence
- ^ Pliny the Elder Naturalis historia 22: 6,13.