Epitaph of a woman buried by her husband

Photogallery

Epitaph of a woman buried by her husband
Epitaph of a woman buried by her husband
Section XII. Family and society: other inscriptions

Marcus Aurelius Sostratianus Straton, who composed the epigraph and commissioned the tomb, commemorates his thirty-four year-old wife Fabia Laeta, praised as a “most holy woman”, who was buried in a cupula structilis, a tomb geometrically similar to a half-barrel positioned horizontally (cupa means barrel, and its diminutive form is cupula). Probably built using cement (opus caementicium), composed of mortar and fragments of tufa, it encloses the container for the ashes (or the inhumation) and is accompanied by the inscribed slab. Specimens of barrel tombs may be seen, still in their original location, in the necropolis of the Via Triumphalis in the Vatican and in the Isola Sacra necropolis in Ostia. The last line, written in the Greek language, after a “Greeting to you all”, offers a brief and bitter popular philosophical reflection: “(life is) this” (= the grave). It thus invites the passerby to consider the common destiny of every mortal human being, leaving implicit the exhortation to make the most of life as a happy and beneficial opportunity.