The Aantique Argumentation a persona in Inscriptions on Modern Gravestones

Abstract

Antique rhetoricians produced loci a persona directories, i.e. lists of circumstances (circumstantiae) or attributes (attributa) relating to the person being described. Some of them, such as Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, valued the importance of these loci as sedes argumentorum, i.e. sources that can be referred to for arguments. The categories identified by the antique scholars are largely consistent with those identified in the descriptions of the dead, and thus in the structure of gravestone inscriptions, by modern researchers studying this form of writing, including Thomas Correa, Jacobus Pontanus, Gaetano Felice Verani, to mention only a few. In his work entitled De poesi hodiernorum politicorum sive de argutis inscriptionibus libri II, Christian Weise argues that this coincidence is not accidental. This scholar points out clearly that rhetoric topics can be used for a persona epigraphic inscriptions. The assertions made by epigraph researchers are reflected in the preserved epigraphs. The writers made efforts to refer, as concisely as possible, to the largest possible number of loci a persona. An example shows that the tendency towards amplification through congeries was not linked with the size of the gravestone or the cost of making it, but was a result of the aesthetic preferences of the time.