Autobiographic Elements in Latin Inscriptions (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... AUTOBIOGRAPHIC ELEMENTS IN LATIN INSCRIPTIONS In the Roman literature a tendency to the personal narrative of events closely connected with the writer's own experience and personal comment on such events is predominant. So the Roman epic poetry deals largely with contemporary history or happenings not too remote; even in the Aeneid, where the scene is laid in the heroic past, the personages of Virgil's own day, as Marcellus, are introduced. This tendency is still more clearly seen in the literary types the Romans themselves originated. Satire is a characteristic Roman product: but satire is merely a criticism which the author's personality passes on its environment. And the Romans also created the literary form that aims at a complete disclosure of the writer's life and personality, the autobiography, with which the subject under discussion is immediately connected.1 It is not surprising then that the inscriptions also reveal in a marked degree the same personal tendency. Strangely enough, with one recent exception,1 this has scarcely been recognized: hence it does not seem tiseless here to indicate the extent to which the highest development of this feeling (which we may perhaps call the " autobiographic feeling ") enters into Latin inscriptions, and the various forms it assumes. We must first notice, however, that these inscriptions, as compared with the Roman literary autobiography, have two Note.--The references indicated by the superior figures numbered consecutively 1-131 are found in Appendix A. 16 limitations. First, though they present far more autobiographic expressions than those of other ancient languages, they are not the earliest of an autobiographic nature. In Greece we have a number of epigrams in the first person elating...