Vatican Museums

The inscription of this monumentum, built for Valeria Verecunda (aged 34) by her husband Publius Gellius Vitalio and extended to the whole family – even freedmen (liberti) and descendants – mentions three different people with different family names, whose family relationships are uncertain: Valeria Vitalis, Gellius Chresimus, Iulia Chreste. It would appear that Vitalis is a previous daughter of Verecunda, Chresimus the natural brother of Vitalio and Chreste the adoptive sister of the latter, but loved as a daughter. The building had steps (scalare) providing access to an upper floor with an area (cubiculum) intended for other depositions. Verecunda exercised, in the first of the fourteen urban regions of Rome (Porta Capena on the Appia) the profession of iatromea, a rare Latin transliteration of the Greek composite word iatró-maia, “doctor-midwife”, a figure midway between the female doctor and the more established obstetrix, “midwife”. The text concludes with a wish: vivas “(may she) live”.