Ricerc@Sapienza

The so-called ‘Casa del Moralista’ stands out from other houses in Pompeii on account of its summer triclinium’s parietal decoration; here, we find three metrical inscriptions which are unique in the Campanian city and rare in general. One elegiac couplet is found on each wall. These texts will be evaluated from a literary point of view, but also within their immediate environmental context, to understand whether their arrangement on the three walls of the room is random, or follows a logical order.

This paper discusses two verses of Ovid’s Tristia (1, 3, 25) and Epistulae ex Ponto (1, 2, 111), for which the manuscript tradition is discordant. These lines are quoted in three epigraphic documents: CLE 1339 = ICVR, I 3903, CLE 1979 = ICVR, VIII 23529 and CLE 1988 = CIL, VI 37965. How reliable are the quotations in the Latin inscriptions? Do they help to reassess the Ovidian text? The main purpose of this study is to answer such questions, with respect to these particular cases.

Même si la lecture traditionnelle de CIL IV 1595 (Pompei) peut avoir encore sa propre valeur suggestive et être toujours retenue comme valide, les auteurs proposent une nouvelle intégration crédible en elle-même, et suit le modèle ovidien. À la différence de la lecture traditionnelle, elle restituerait en outre une structure métrique qui, en vertu de sa répétitivité, ne serait pas difficile à reconnaître dans un texte peut-être pas improvisé, mais certainement occasionnel.

The authors propose a new reading of the inscription AE 1980, 69 (from Rome); this is compared with CLE 474-476 (from Rome) since they have some similarities with the text of AE.