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In Roman antiquity, an elogium (plural elogia or elogia) was an inscription of honour for the deceased, which was placed on tombs, ancestral images and statues. In terms of scope, they stand between the (short) tituli, the identifying inscriptions on wax images of deceased ancestors that were displayed in the halls of noble families, and the laudatio funebris, the funeral oration. Originally, the text was usually written in saturnalia, but later it could be in hexameters and distichs (see also epigram) or in prose.

In the imperial period, the elogium became a literary genre, texts were collected by Marcus Terentius Varro and Titus Pomponius Atticus, and writing elogia on famous deceased persons became a popular rhetorical exercise. The elogia on the statues of the Temple of Mars at the Forum of Augustus are said to have been composed by Augustus himself. It is also possible that the form of the elogium influenced the development of the epicedium, the Roman funeral poem.

Sources

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• (DE) Gottfried Schiemann, Elogium (1), in Der Neue Pauly, vol. 3, Stoccarda, Metzler, 1997, col. 999, ISBN 3-476-01473-8.
• Gero von Wilpert: Sachwörterbuch der Literatur. 8. Auflage. Kröner, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-520-84601-3, S. 207, 225.