Love and Salvation in the Roman Underground:
The Verse Epitaph of Bassa

Dennis E. Trout (University of Missouri, Columbia)

This paper will present and discuss the remarkable late-fourth-century marble sarcophagus of the young (and otherwise unknown) Bassa (Deichmann, Repertorium, 556; Ferrua, ICUR 5.14076).  The words and images of this (too little noticed) funerary monument, not only further demonstrate the increasingly acknowledged reciprocity of ancient literature and art (or in this case the interplay of the visual and textual fields of a monument) but, I will argue, also spectacularly illustrate the distinct complexities of identity formation in this age of accelerating cultural transformation.

The scattered fragments of Bassa's sculpted and inscribed sarcophagus were discovered and reassembled in the 1930s and 40s during excavations in the Catacomb of Praetextatus, a Christian cemetery near Rome's Via Appia.  Bassa's sarcophagus is of the Bethesda type but uniquely truncates this type's central emblematic scene, Christ healing the cripple at the pool of Bethesda, and replaces its two standard right-hand scenes (the calling of Zaccaeus and Christ's entry into Jerusalem) with a two-column verse epitaph.  The sarcophagus' figural program, thus, is limited to (beginning on the far left) a scene of a young Christ healing three blind men, a woman kneeling at Christ's feet, and (in the sarcophagus' center) a right-facing Christ, who would have been engaged in the type's eponymous narrative panel but instead here gestures toward Bassa's hexameter epitaph.

This epitaph is an acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out "Bassae suae / Gaudentius."  The first column (ten lines) triumphantly announces the "very beautiful" Bassa's escape from the "husk" of her flesh and her reception by the stars of the sky, her reward for a faithful life.  In the second column (also ten lines) Bassa, now shining forth from her new astral home, consoles Gaudentius:  "Sweet husband, closest bound to me for eternity, drive off your tears…. I have learned how to take hold of the pure upper air."  Her last words, in a damaged line, conclude with a promise of (post-morem) reunion:  "Sospes eris fateor v[….]scula Bassae."  The lacuna has been variously restored but most provocatively by Antonio Ferrua: "v[enies et ad o]scula Bassae."

This talk will proceed by interrogating the layered tensions that power this monument.  Most obvious, perhaps, is the abruptly interrupted figural narrative, which leaves the savior Christ facing not the aged cripple of Bethesda but the epitaph of the young Bassa, and encourages the viewer/reader to cross pollinate their tales.  No less captivating is the contrast between the stylized images of the figural portion, which recall New Testament episodes of healing, and the language of the epitaph, more "Platonizing" than Christocentric, preferring circumlocutions and sharing words and images found in other classical and late ancient poets.  Finally, the erotic tone that suffuses the second half of the epitaph not only bridges spiritual and conjugal love, elevating the latter as well as the former to the stars, but also, perhaps, encouraged Ferrua's tantalizing editorial intrusion.

Bassa's funerary monument richly illustrates the shifting boundaries of Roman identity in late-fourth-century Rome.

(codes:  EP; LP; RR)