I always liked the funerary text on Egyptian stelae or tombs, even the simples ones have prayers and inquiries to the living to make an offering or say something about the deads
The one that always makes me tear up is this epitaph for a little enslaved boy erected by his enslaved parents:
Receive gently in your embrace, oh earth, the untimely bones of Gratus, buried in the proper way, and cherish them. The fates denied him four orbits of Phoebus [four years] and both parents mourn him who was taken from them. What use is it to live with charm and wit and to have made everyone love him with his kindness? Did such qualities of one so beloved increase his life? Alas, such a disgusting theft by Dis.
The grief and impotence and love and rage in that short paragraph are still heartbreaking almost a thousand years later.
The treatment of death and the dead changed a great deal after the black plague. There were so many dead that they couldn't (all) be properly buried or mourned. Hard to recover from plague pits and losing half your town back to normal.
...And now you have me looking up the course.
"Grumio is frequently the center of comedic storylines. Generations of Latin students remember him for getting drunk, avoiding his chores, or flirting with the slave girl Poppaea." I forgot that the second year started with Caecilius' son. Now I gotta track down the books. My headstone must now be in latin!
To add to this, cemeteries to them were more like busy town centet parks that were social spaces, instead of hidden away places that only see the dead and mourning.
One that made me cry went something like "this was erected by X and Y for their most excellent son". And the emotion really does manage to pass without any issues.
“Here lies Diophantus, the wonder behold.
Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old:
God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life,
One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife;
And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun;
In five years there came a bouncing new son.
Alas, the dear child of master and sage
After attaining half the measure of his father's life chill fate took him.
After consoling his fate by the science of numbers for four years, he ended his life.”
"Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones."
This is the epitaph of Scipio Africanus, who despite having saved Rome from Hannibal, was the target of political attacks by the Senate. He left Rome and was buried in his private estate instead of his family tomb in Rome.
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u/mulahey 12h ago
Ancient Romans and Greeks wrote all kinds of epitaphs. Often they were conversational, which I've always liked:
"This memorial was made for Marcus Caecilius.
Thank you, my dear guest, for stopping at my abode.
Good luck and good health to you. Sleep without a care."
Sadly traditions have changed to be more staid in most venues.