Last Words: Deathbeds, Dictation, and Dying “Alone”

Christopher Londa, Johns Hopkins University
This paper aims to make visible the hidden labor that underwrites a peculiar form of discourse: the “last words” of the deceased. It argues that the situational pragmatics of death—the deceased can no longer write or speak—offer a heuristic for detecting the invisible figures who recorded the lives, thoughts, and texts of the Roman elite. Drawing on scholarship emphasizing the hidden labor of enslaved and formerly enslaved secretaries and copyists (e.g. Moss 2023; Howley 2020;  Blake 2016), this paper identifies “the deathbed” as an especially charged site for contesting relational paradigms between subordinated knowledge workers and Roman aristocrats.

The paper grounds its investigation in the act of deathbed dictation. In life, Roman elites routinely composed texts and took notes by dictation when circumstances made this practice more convenient than autography (Dorandi 1993; Horsfall 1995; McDonnell 1996). Authors often reviewed and emended dictated texts to ensure that words written “in a foreign hand” corresponded to their intentions. The pragmatics of the deathbed disturb the fiction that the author is fully in control of this process. At the moment of the dominus‘s death, the power over his “last words” shifts into the hands of the invisible laborer holding the pen. The “death of the author” curtails final emendation, leaving the deceased’s last moments on earth to be authored and authorized by someone else.

To interrogate this relational inversion, the paper examines testimony about final  discursive acts attributed to a series of Roman luminaries, asking what role invisible secretaries and clerks played both in the scenes of death and in the production of cultural memory about the deceased. Select cases include Vergil dictating his own epitaph (Jerome Chronica 165h 21 ad Ol. 190.3: moriens ipse dictaverat), the dying Seneca the Younger summoning his writing staff  (Tacitus Annales 15.63: advocatis scriptoribus), Petronius composing a deathbed account of  Nero’s abuses (Tacitus Annales 16.19), and Pliny the Elder proclaiming “fortune favors the bold” (Pliny the Younger Epistulae 6.16.11) as he sails to his demise. The paper ultimately argues that  the very genre of verba novissima is predicated upon an unmarked cultural assumption that when famous men die, they have dutiful subordinates at their side to record their final moments and to act as caretakers of their memory. Positive exempla—e.g. Tiro tending to Cicero’s Nachlaß, the freedman Epicadus finishing Sulla’s autobiography (Suetonius DGR 12.2), and Horace’s personified book telling his story (Ep. 1.20)—uphold this idea. Yet, the invisibility that surrounds most of these knowledge workers also keeps hidden the degree to which the stories of the Roman elite at the end of life are beholden to the invisible figures who survive them to tell the tale.

The paper closes by framing its investigation of last words as an attempt to model a “situational philology” that moves from texts to the spaces, people, and materials surrounding them. This kind of philological practice better attunes us to sites where workers are “diaphanously invisible” (Neer 2019)—still hidden from the text but detectable through its  shape.

Bibliography

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Dorandi, Tiziano. 1993. “Zwischen Autographie und Diktat: Momente der Textualität in der  antiken Welt.” In Vermittlung und Tradierung von Wissen in der griechischen Kultur, edited by Wolfgang Kullmann and Jochen Althoff, 71–83. ScriptOralia. Reihe A.  Altertumswissenschaftliche Reihe Bd. 12. Tübingen: Narr.

Horsfall, Nicholas. 1995. “Rome Without Spectacles.” Greece & Rome 42 (1): 49–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500025225.

Howley, Joseph A. 2020. “In Ancient Rome.” In Further Reading, edited by Matthew Rubery  and Leah Price. First edition, 15–27. Oxford twenty-first century approaches to literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McDonnell, Myles. 1996. “Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome.” Classical Quarterly 46 (2): 469–91.

Moss, Candida R. 2023. “The Secretary: Enslaved Workers, Stenography, and the Production of  Early Christian Literature.” The Journal of Theological Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flad001.

Neer, Richard T. 2019. “Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens.” In Conditions of  Visibility, edited by Richard T. Neer. First edition, 7–42. Visual conversations in art and  archaeology. Oxford United Kingdom, New York NY: Oxford University Press.