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Led by Pliny the Younger Simulacrum, with the Unnamed Woman (Laudatio Turiae) Simulacrum and Sulpicia Simulacrum
Led by Pliny the Younger Simulacrum, with the Unnamed Woman (Laudatio Turiae) Simulacrum and Sulpicia Simulacrum
The question
The Roman family — the *familia*, which included slaves and freedmen as well as blood relatives — is one of the best-attested social institutions of antiquity, partly through literary sources but more decisively through the tens of thousands of surviving inscribed tombstones (the *tituli sepulcrales*). Tombstones give us names, ages, relationships, occupations, and sometimes biographical details that no other source preserves; they let us read the social-historical evidence of the entire Roman population (slaves, freedmen, freeborn humble) rather than only the senatorial class. This module reads Roman family life through three sources: Pliny the Younger Simulacrum's letters on his own family (his marriage to Calpurnia, the death of his wife's grandfather, the death of the young Minicia Marcella); the *Laudatio Turiae*, an extraordinary 180-line funeral inscription on which a Roman husband memorialises his wife's loyalty during the proscriptions of 43 BCE; and the elegiac poems of Sulpicia Simulacrum, the only Latin woman whose poetry survives under her own name. Each gives us a different angle on Roman family life.
Outcome
The student has read Pliny letters 5.16, 6.4, 6.7, 7.5; the *Laudatio Turiae* in modern translation (Wistrand 1976 or Hemelrijk's appendix in *Matrona Docta* 1999); and the six poems of Sulpicia Simulacrum (any translation of the Tibullan corpus; the Maltby commentary is excellent).
Practice scenarios
The three voices ask you to write a 700-word essay drawing on the *Laudatio Turiae* (read it whole — it is about ten pages of dense prose-and-occasional-verse inscription in modern translation), Pliny's letters on his marriage to Calpurnia (4.19, 6.4, 6.7, 7.5), and Sulpicia Simulacrum's six poems. Then address: what does each source let us see about marriage and intimate life in Roman aristocratic culture; how does the perspective shift between male commemoration of a dead wife (the *Laudatio*), husband-to-friend prose about a living wife (Pliny), and woman-to-lover poetry (Sulpicia Simulacrum); and what does the combination teach us about the limits of any one Latin source for getting at Roman lived experience?
Your goals