Abstract: In the early sixth century, the widow Turtura was interred in Rome's Coemeterium Commodillae. She was buried in the cubiculum that housed the tombs of the martyrs Felix and Adauctus and was memorialized with a fresco depicting the two saints presenting her to an enthroned Maria Regina, who holds the Christ child in her lap. The fresco's lower register preserves Turtura's verse epitaph ( Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae ICUR 2.6018), wherein her son praises his mother's conduct as a widow in elegiac couplets that highlight her thirty-six years of chaste widowhood. This essay highlights the manner in which Turtura's memorial indexes late ancient Christianity's valuation of widowhood, which recalibrated classical ideals of the femina univira . It considers Pauline and patristic admonitions to chaste widowhood, as well as the representation of widowhood ( viduitas ) in Latin Christian epigraphy and art before exploring the implications of her son's proclamation that his mother may have been named Turtura but was "a true turtledove ( turtur )." To do so, it documents classical and contemporary beliefs about the "marital" fidelity of turtures to conclude that Turtura's funerary epigram and the image that surmounted it are eloquent witnesses to their age's often heated debates about gender, sex, marriage, and remarriage.
Dennis Trout (Sun,) studied this question.