Capitolo 58
A great variety of verses is used in the epitaphs but the dactylic
hexameter and the elegiacs are the favoriteses. The grandiose character of the
hexameter manufactures him an appropriate mean in that to express a serious
feeling, while the sudden interruption in the second toward of the elegiac
couplet suggests the emotion of the writer. The verses are built
with considerable respect for technique. There is now and then a forgery
quantity, an unpleasant sequence or an effect heavy but such stains
it is infrequent comparatively. There is a lot of that common place is banal,
and prosaic in these productions of the common people, but now and then
one comes on a sentence, a verse or a whole poem that show strength or
grace or pathos. An orator of the late period, not without vigor he/she writes
on his/her tombstone:[56] "I have lived blessed by the of the, from friends from
letters."
(Dis of beatus of Vixi, amicis, literis.)
A rather beautiful, although not unusual, feeling happens in an elegiac
couplet to a young girl,[57] in that the word amoena is the adjective,
wanting to say "pleasant to see", in the first one while in the second verse it is
the girl's name: "As a rose it is amoena when it blooms in the beginning in spring
time, so it was me Amoena to those that you/they saw me."
(Pink Ut amoena east homini quom first tempore little flower.
That self the viderunt, seic the I was of Amoena.)
There is a touch of pathos in the registration on which put a mother the
stone of his/her son:[58] "A mother that grieves has prepared this monument to a
I give birth that has not provoked never her some pain, unless he is anybody more", and
in this tribute of a husband:[59] "Out of mine slender means now that the
end has come, my wife, everybody that I could do, this gift, a small small
for deserts of thy, I have done." The epitaph of a small girl, called
Felicia or Kitty, have this feeling in graced verse:[60] "Slightly remains
on thee the earth, and on serious thy the fragrant balm grows, and
gnawed sweet you lace thy they buried bones." On the stone of a small girl that