Claudia Piste Inscription: Meter

After the formulaic heading, the epitaph becomes a verse eulogy in dactylic hexameter (see description in Reading Latin Poetry). This meter was considered appropriate for “high” literature, such as epic poetry; thus in Rome it was associated with the aristocratic classes. Primus must have chosen the meter for its associations with both serious themes and social status. For a good example of how a Roman poet played with the heroic significance of dactylic hexameter, see the opening lines of Ovid's Amores 1.1 in Intermediate Latin Readings, particularly the discussion of the meter.

Inscriptional poems often combine verses of different lengths and do not always subscribe to the conventions of formal Latin poetry. Most of the lines of Primus's poem will scan as dactylic hexameter, but there are some exceptions:

Two additional metrical anomalies are very meaningful and allow us to hear the poet's grief:
1. Line 7 opens like a pentameter, with two and a half feet followed by a caesura; what follows is a full six feet of dactylic hexameter. In this way Primus dramatically emphasizes the words nec vitae nasci, pointing up the tragedy of losing his wife with no new life to compensate:
scansion of line 7

2. In line 11, the poet adds two feet in the middle of a pentameter line, enclosing his name and that of his wife between two caesurae, vividly calling attention to their union even after her death:
scansion of line 11

The detail below of the right side of the stone shows the difficulties that Primus's poem created for the stonecutter: his lengthy poetic expression apparently caused the stonecutter to decrease the height of the letters in order to fit the lines in the space. He also had to crowd together letters at the ends of lines, particularly in lines 7 and 11. This view also reveals what epigraphers call “interpuncts,” the dots or points frequently used to separate words in inscriptions, which here are also used to separate syllables within words longer than two syllables. The blank space below the text may have been a result of the decreased height of the letters toward the end of the poem or it may have been intentionally left open for the inscription of a brief epitaph for Primus upon his death.

detail Claudia Piste Inscription

Ann R. Raia and Judith Lynn Sebesta
Return to Claudia Piste Inscription
March 2006