{"id":477,"date":"2024-07-16T13:18:25","date_gmt":"2024-07-16T17:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/?page_id=477"},"modified":"2024-12-20T14:08:01","modified_gmt":"2024-12-20T19:08:01","slug":"last-words-deathbeds-dictation-and-dying-alone","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/news-and-events\/scs-panel-2025\/last-words-deathbeds-dictation-and-dying-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Words: Deathbeds, Dictation, and Dying \u201cAlone\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Londa, Johns Hopkins University<\/strong>
\nThis 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\u2014the deceased can no longer write or speak\u2014offer 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;\u00a0 Blake 2016), this paper identifies “the deathbed” as an especially charged site for contesting relational paradigms between subordinated knowledge workers and Roman aristocrats.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>‘s death<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

To interrogate this relational inversion, the paper examines testimony about final\u00a0 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 <\/em>165h 21 ad Ol<\/em>. 190.3: moriens ipse dictaverat<\/em>), the dying Seneca the Younger summoning his writing staff\u00a0 (Tacitus Annales <\/em>15.63: advocatis scriptoribus<\/em>), Petronius composing a deathbed account of\u00a0 Nero\u2019s abuses (Tacitus Annales <\/em>16.19), and Pliny the Elder proclaiming “fortune favors the bold” (Pliny the Younger Epistulae <\/em>6.16.11) as he sails to his demise. The paper ultimately argues that\u00a0 the very genre of verba novissima <\/em>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\u2014e.g. Tiro tending to Cicero’s Nachla\u00df<\/em>, the freedman Epicadus finishing Sulla’s autobiography (Suetonius DGR <\/em>12.2), and Horace’s personified book telling his story (Ep<\/em>. 1.20)\u2014uphold 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.<\/p>\n

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)\u2014still hidden from the text but detectable through its\u00a0 shape.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/p>\n

Blake, Sarah. 2016. “In Manus<\/em>: Pliny’s Letters and the Arts of Mastery.” In Roman Literary\u00a0 Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacle.<\/em>, edited by J. C.\u00a0 Edmondson and Alison Keith, 89\u2013107. Phoenix – Toronto – Supplementary volume\u00a0 Volume 55. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.<\/p>\n

Dorandi, Tiziano. 1993. “Zwischen Autographie und Diktat: Momente der Textualit\u00e4t in der\u00a0 antiken Welt.” In Vermittlung und Tradierung von Wissen in der griechischen Kultur<\/em>, edited by Wolfgang Kullmann and Jochen Althoff, 71\u201383. ScriptOralia. Reihe A.\u00a0 Altertumswissenschaftliche Reihe Bd. 12. T\u00fcbingen: Narr.<\/p>\n

Horsfall, Nicholas. 1995. “Rome Without Spectacles.” Greece & Rome <\/em>42 (1): 49\u201356. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/S0017383500025225.<\/p>\n

Howley, Joseph A. 2020. “In Ancient Rome.” In Further Reading<\/em>, edited by Matthew Rubery\u00a0 and Leah Price. First edition, 15\u201327. Oxford twenty-first century approaches to literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

McDonnell, Myles. 1996. “Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome.” Classical Quarterly <\/em>46 (2): 469\u201391.<\/p>\n

Moss, Candida R. 2023. “The Secretary: Enslaved Workers, Stenography, and the Production of\u00a0 Early Christian Literature.” The Journal of Theological Studies. <\/em>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/jts\/flad001.<\/p>\n

Neer, Richard T. 2019. “Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens.” In Conditions of\u00a0 Visibility<\/em>, edited by Richard T. Neer. First edition, 7\u201342. Visual conversations in art and\u00a0 archaeology. Oxford United Kingdom, New York NY: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2014the deceased can no longer write or speak\u2014offer a heuristic for detecting the invisible figures who recorded the lives, thoughts, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23724,"featured_media":0,"parent":142,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/no-sidebars.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":626,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/477\/revisions\/626"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/overlooked-network\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}