Art of the Ancient World

Roman
(2nd – 3rd century A.D.)

Tabula (funerary tablet)
Marble
Gift of R. C. Ballard Thruston
1929.17.310

This epitaph comes from the large collection of Roman funerary monuments which were donated to the Speed Museum in 1929 by Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston. The artifacts came from ancient tombs which were discovered in Rome in the late 1890s. The tombs contained the remains of Rome’s lower classes, that is, slaves, freed men and women, and members of their families. This collection constitutes one of the largest groups of documented Roman funerary monuments in the US. The intact and fragmentary epitaphs, which number in the hundreds, are being added to the US Epigraphy Project, an online database of ancient inscriptions in American collections