Una terza via: epigrafia e letteratura in parallelo (l'Alcesti di Euripide e i CLE)

In Euripides’ Alcestis there are several thoughts and phrases that we can find more or less frequently also in Latin inscriptions, mostly metric (and in other literary works), without a conceivable source in or reference to that tragedy. So we may assume that Euripides intentionally expressed common people’s feelings about the tragic experience of a married couple compelled to part by death using their own way of speaking. This remark (which may help to interpret such debated tragedy) provides us a ‘third way’ of studying the relationship between (poetic) literature and (metric) epigraphy: i.e. neither the latter draws from the former (first way), nor the former from the latter (second way); but both draw independently from a common substratum of ‘popular’ conceptions and expressions.