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• Antulla’s tomb and Martial’s: poetic closure in book 1

  41–56

  Patricia Larash

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  51

  The final seven epigrams of Martial’s Book 1 form a subtle but important closural sequence (epigrams 1.112-1.118 inclusive). Despite their great variatio of topics, the seven epigrams are linked through concerns about the boundary between life and death, the integrity of a monument, and the theme of dignus legi, or what makes someone “worthy of being read.” Through a series of close readings, this article argues for the coherence of this sequence on formal, thematic, and verbal grounds. The sequence is centered on a pair of epigrams on the kepotaphion or tomb-garden of a young girl named Antulla (1.114 and 1.116). The function of this closural sequence is both formal, to bring closure to a disparate collection of epigrams, and thematic, to reprise themes from the mock-epitaph with which Martial opens book 1 (1.1).

• CIL III 9527 as Evidence of Spoken Latin in the Sixth-century Dalmatia

  99-106

  Dragana Kunčer

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  163

  The epitaph of Priest Iohannes (CIL III 9527, Salona, August 13, 599 or AD 603) is one of the few inscriptions from the sixth-century Salona, which can be dated with precision. It is also one of the rare inscriptions from Dalmatia of this period, which mention a person (proconsul Marcellinus) known from other sources (Registrum epistularum of Pope Gregory the Great). However, its linguistic importance seems to be summarized in the remark of its most recent editor Nancy Gauthier (2010) that the language of the epitaph reflects the features of Latin spoken in Dalmatia at the time (“la langue vivante”). The aim of this paper was to check the plausibility of this statement by comparing the Vulgar Latin features in the inscription with the results of research on Latin in late Dalmatia. Also, a new interpretation of the word obsis l. 13 is proposed.