Portrait of a noblewoman, 300-310 CE
The three daughters of Attusius Lucanus Talisius (Parentalia 8 [10]) and his unnamed wife are memorialized in the poetry of Decimus Magnus Ausonius (c. 310-393 CE), who married into this patrician Gallic family native to Burdigala (Bordeaux) in Roman Aquitania. There is no record of their mother’s name, nor does she appear in Ausonius' Parentalia, poems written to honor the dead in his extended family, perhaps because she died before Ausonius’ marriage to her daughter Sabina. The eldest of the three sisters may have been Attusia Lucana Talisia, as her name is the female equivalent of her father’s tria nomina (see Roman Nomenclature). Parentalia 21 below, addressed to her and her deceased husband, Minucius Regulus, tells us little about the couple except that she was the natural sister (germana) of his wife Sabina and that Ausonius was barely acquainted with them, perhaps because they lived and were buried in urbs Santonica (Saintes), some 60 miles north of Burdigala. Attusia Lucana Sabina, wife of the statesman, teacher and poet Ausonius, also received her father’s praenomen and nomen. She bore Ausonius three children, one of whom died in infancy (Parentalia 10 [12]); she died sometime before 350 CE, at 27 years of age. Sabina figures in six of Ausonius’ poems: five in the Epigrammata (see Ep.20 and 19, 27-29) and one in the Parentalia (see 9), written some four decades after her death. The third sister, also a natural sister (germana) of his wife Sabina, is named Namia Pudentilla (c. 320–c. 350 CE), perhaps after her mother, a practice that arose in the 1st century CE for naming elite children who followed the first-born. Ausonius was well acquainted with Pudentilla’s family, to whom three neniae (laments) are dedicated: her own (Parentalia 19 below), her older husband's, the 80 year old esteemed praeses (governor) of a British province, Flavius Sanctus (Parentalia 18 [20]), and her only son's, a young husband and father, Lucanus Talisius (Parentalia 20 [22]), both of whom she predeceased. The poems are written in elegiac meter.
Tuque Pudentillam verbis adfare supremis,
quae famae curam, quae probitatis habes.
Nobilis haec, frugi, proba, laeta, pudica, decora,
coniugium Sancti iugiter haec habuit.
5 Inviolata tuens castae praeconia vitae
rexit opes proprias, otia agente viro:
non ideo exprobrans aut fronte obducta marito,
quod gereret totam femina sola domum.
Heu nimium iuvenis, sed laeta superstite nato
10 atque viro, patiens fata suprema obiit:
unanimis nostrae et quondam germana Sabinae
et mihi inoffenso nomine dicta soror.
Notitia exilis nobis, Attusia, tecum
cumque tuo plane coniuge nulla fuit.
Verum tu nostrae soror es germana Sabinae,
adfinis quoque [tu], Regule, nomen habes.
5 Sortitos igitur tam cara vocabula nobis
stringamus maesti carminis obsequio.
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