Prayer to the Manes

A gravestone from Salona. Coelia Pieris set it up for her son and her husband together; the boy, Lucius Trebius Exoratus, was twelve.

Siqu(i)d Manes sapiunt — if the shades understand anything. A doubt inside the prayer itself, stated outright, on stone that was paid for. The formula was known and repeated: Roman epitaphs allowed both "if anything remains" and the flat "I was not, I was, I am not", and both stand in the same cemeteries. There was no obligatory doctrine of the afterlife here, and the mother, setting up the stone, allows for the possibility that it reaches no one.

In mollibus umbris — among the soft shades. The only concession to consolation in the whole inscription.

There is no Terra Mater here. The card's deities field names only the Manes, and rightly; but the identifier files the inscription under "terra-funerary", and matris … honos in the last line means not "honour of Mother Earth" but "honour from his mother" — the thing she has just paid for. All she asks is that her offering should please her son.